Volume 10, Chapter 12 | October 2023

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Image by Marc Schlossman

Dear writers, readers and friends,

We are here with the final issue of Visual Verse. The end of an era; the start of a new one. At this moment, Visual Verse has published 11,234 pieces of original writing from 3,330 writers all over the world. We are yet to learn of another publication that can boast such a prolific output and the myriad of styles, perspectives and ideas that Visual Verse enshrines. Indulge us while we say a few words from the heart, announce the legacy plans for Visual Verse and introduce our image and writers for this month.

From Preti Taneja:

Ten years ago I couldn’t get published. I had a novel draft and over 30 rejections for it. I went to Berlin to see my friend, Kristen. She sat me down over bagels and told me to stop feeling sorry for myself. The first thing I needed was an editor (she was right). The second thing was a project that would remind me why the process of making art is more important than the outcome, that there is joy in community, and that writing is nothing but attempts to say – and sometimes we need a prompt to achieve that. Of course, she was right. She had a project in its infancy with the designer, Pete Lewis, and it needed an editorial collaborator. That’s how Visual Verse was born. Kristen would select the images, I would commission the lead writers, Pete would design a beautiful website and together we would curate a free literary space that people could be inspired by, and surprise themselves with. Its generative constraints: the hour, the word count, would provide a gentle pressure. The image would
be the starting point…

In that first month, we received about 30 submissions. Every day I’d get up and check the inbox, read and publish. Since then, the community has grown to over 150 submissions a month. The team has grown, too, with a rotation of volunteers, assistant editors and guest curators who have stepped in to help out and bring their own eye to the site.

We are so grateful for the camaraderie and commitment you have all shown. Some of you post each month and we’ve got to see your work develop and become familiar with your style. There are names in the archive who were unpublished or relatively unknown when they first submitted but have gone on to become some of the most exciting and award-winning writers working today: Isabel Waidner, Ashley Hickson Lovence, Eley Williams, Nisha Ramayya, Glen James Brown, Will Harris, Megan Hunter, So Mayer, Adam Biles, Alex Pheby, Maame Blue; there are poets such as Sandeep Parmar and Richard Georges, Karthika Nair and Rachel Allen, Anthony Anaxagorou and Inua Ellams, Rishi Dastidar and respected names in international literature: Niven Govinden, Kate Briggs, Jennifer Croft, Nikesh Shukla, Ivan Vladislavić, Chika Unigwe and more. Long after we stop publishing, the list provides a testimony to early 21st Century writing and aesthetics, our concerns, hopes and responses to political moments from the
Johnson-Trump-Modi era, the Black Lives Matter movement and the avoidable tragedy of the Grenfell Fire to the stress of the global pandemic: it offers a treasure box to explore.

The images and writings within Visual Verse are testimony to a decade that has seen so much, and to the group of writers who have defined it. Many of the poems and short stories you’ll find collected in anthologies by writers on our site began life as VV experiments and have grown into bigger things. As my own life has changed with house moves, writing and publishing two books, beginning full-time teaching and more, the writers of Visual Verse have been constant friends. Reading the site each month never fails to refresh my creativity; it helps to remember that when we face the blank page we are all in the same moment of fear and potential as each other…

From Kristen Harrison:

“We are all in the same moment of fear and potential as each other…” – I love this sentiment from Preti. It epitomises the pain and beauty that artists share and the glue that has bound our unique community for ten years. I am blessed to have had this project take root the way it has and to have become connected to so many brilliant minds. My own art does not exist unless it is in conversation with others and the rare alchemy that brought myself, Preti and Pete together, to create conversations with you, is something that I will spend my life searching for again. The holy grail of creativity.

Visual Verse has survived the past few years thanks to the incredibly generous time and energy of our editors Isabel Brooks and Lucie Stevens, and editorial assistants Zaynab Bobi and Ashish Kumar Singh. These people, and those who volunteered before them (Tam Eastley, Jordan Fleming, Luke Smith, Nahda Tahsin, Wes White to name a few), have been the lifeblood of Visual Verse during a period of grueling external challenges. Their work enabled us to continue publishing an incomparable quantity of writing each month and I will be forever grateful to them.

To that end, I have handed over our final issue to our current team of editors so that you can see their extraordinary talents for yourself. The image prompt is a detail from a documentary photograph by our long-time friend and patron, photographer Marc Schlossman (https://www.marcschlossman.com/) . It is abstract and challenging; chosen to push your writing boundaries one last time. As Ashish said, this image is as much about what is unseen as what is seen. I relish these kinds of images as they frustrate the heck out of you writers, and ultimately yield the best and most unexpected writing. The brilliant responses from our leads are proof.

We begin, on page 1, with our co-founder Preti Taneja (https://twitter.com/PretiTaneja) . Preti is a writer and activist. Her first novel We That Are Young (https://www.galleybeggar.co.uk/paperback-shop/we-that-are-young) (Galley Beggar Press/ AA Knopf), is a translation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, tracking the rise of fascism in contemporary India. It won the 2018 Desmond Elliott Prize and was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize and the Prix Jan Michalski. It is published in translation worldwide. Her second book is Aftermath (https://www.andotherstories.org/aftermath/) (Transit Books/And Other Stories), a creative non-fiction lament on trauma, terror, prison and grief, following the London Bridge terror attack in 2019. It was a Book of the Year in the New Yorker, the New Statesman and The White Review, and was shortlisted for the British Book of the Year. Aftermath is the winner of the 2022 Gordon Burn Prize awarded ‘for literature that is forward thinking
and fearless in its ambition and execution’.

Isabel Brooks (https://twitter.com/izzy_maude14) has just finished an MA in Creative Writing at UEA, and is half way through a novel. She read English at Cambridge and grew up in Suffolk. Her astute editorial judgement has been a huge asset to Visual Verse and it is a thrill to finally be able to showcase her brilliant writing.

Ashish Kumar Singh (https://twitter.com/Ashish_stJude) (he/him) is a queer Indian poet whose work has appeared in Passages North, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Grain, Chestnut Review, Fourteen Poems, Foglifter, Atlanta Review and elsewhere. Currently, he serves as an editorial assistant at Visual Verse and a poetry reader at ANMLY.

Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi (https://twitter.com/ZainabBobi) , a Nigerian-Hausa poet, artist, and photographer from Bobi, is currently an undergraduate at Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto. She is the author of the forthcoming chapbook Sixteen Songs of Loss (Sundress Publications Chapbook Competition, 2023).

Lucie Stevens (https://twitter.com/LucieStevens_) , who has been my right-arm woman since 2015, isn’t able to contribute this month as she has a big UN editing job consuming her, but I want to say a special thank you to this remarkable and talented woman. Her skill and mindset have kept the car on the road when the rain is pelting, visibility is low and the driver (me) is unfit to be behind the wheel… so to speak! Thank you, Lucie.

The Future of Visual Verse:

A collection of art and words such as ours cannot simply disappear. We are thrilled to announce that Visual Verse will be taken into the archive at Newcastle University’s Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts (http:// https://www.ncl.ac.uk/ncla/) (NCLA) in the UK, which Preti is Director of. We’re grateful to the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics for recognising the incredible resource the archive offers, and working with us to preserve it. Thanks to this support, the Visual Verse website will remain online at visualverse.org for the foreseeable future so you can continue to read, enjoy, teach with and be inspired by it. You can also continue to access (and link to) your work in the archive (https://visualverse.org/images) . There are no active plans to publish new issues of Visual Verse but that is not to say it won’t happen.

All copyright to your work remains with you. But if you do republish your VV-inspired pieces elsewhere, we hope you’ll give us a wave!

So, this is a thank you, dear readers. It has been a beautiful journey and we’re so proud to have shared it with you. We will write again at the end of the month, once publishing of the final 100 pieces is complete.

Kristen and Preti
and the VV crew

Volume 07, Chapter 03 | January 2020

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Image by Charles Dana Gibson / British Library

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Dear writers, readers and friends,

Welcome to 2020. We made it! Today is simultaneously the end of an era and a new beginning and it feels like the perfect time to reflect on some of the amazing achievements of Visual Verse and of our writer community.

Visual Verse, first published in November 2013, is now in its seventh volume. We have published over 6700 pieces of original writing in 75 monthly issues. We have featured established writers like Ali Smith, Niven Govinden and Chika Unigwe; exciting contemporary voices including Amrou Al-Khadi, Irenosen Okojie, Paul Ewen, Eley Williams, Carmen Marcus and Enda Walsh and up-and-coming writers like Nisha Ramayya, Elieen McNulty Holmes, Ashley Hickson-Lovence and Sarvat Hasin whose work deserves to be read. We have also featured writers like Rishi Dastidar, Susanna Crossman and Angela Young, who are among a stable of Visual Verse contributors consistently producing work we hugely admire. Alongside our leads we have published you: more than 2500 individual writers from every corner of the globe. Thanks to you, Visual Verse is truly a living, breathing literary organism.

We are equally proud of our curatorial record, with 75 carefully selected image prompts from individual artists like Daniel Frost, Penny Byrne, Marc Schlossman, Hernan Bas and Hannah Coulson; world-class galleries and organisations like NASA, Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Bodleian Libraries and M Leuven and partners like Creative Review who published a selection of Visual Verse writers in print. Visual Verse continues to thrive thanks to the energy, creativity and generosity of our writers, readers, artists and partners. Thank you all for an incredible few years.

So let’s begin the year with a visual prompt so bold that it sets the tone for owning 2020. The image is by Charles Dana Gibson courtesy of the British Library archive.

To inspire you even more, we have three powerful lead writers all breaking new ground with their cross-genre work. We are inordinately proud and excited to start the year with a piece by Mary Jean Chan (http://www.maryjeanchan.com/) , a London-based poet, editor and critic from Hong Kong. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Oxford Brookes University and current guest co-editor of The Poetry Review for Spring 2020. In 2019, Mary Jean was named as one of Jackie Kay’s 10 Best BAME writers in the UK as a part of the British Council’s and the National Centre for Writing’s International Literature Showcase. She came Second in the 2017 National Poetry Competition and has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem twice. She received an Eric Gregory Award in 2019 and won the Poetry Society’s Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2018. Her debut collection, Flèche, is published by Faber & Faber and is currently shortlisted for the 2019 Costa Poetry Award. Fingers crossed she wins!

On page two, it’s an honour to publish Noo Saro-Wiwa (https://www.noosarowiwa.com) who was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, and raised in England. Her first book, Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria was named The Sunday Times Travel Book of the Year, 2012, and selected as BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week. It has been translated into French and Italian, and in 2016 it won the Albatros Literature Prize in Italy. Noo has also written book reviews, travel, opinion and analysis articles for The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, Prospect magazine, New York Times and City AM, among others.

And, we gave our final page to a writer we have published regularly over our 6 years and three months in the game! With only 48 hours notice, our page 3 lead is by Anglo-French fiction writer and essayist, Susanna Crossman (https://susanna-crossman.squarespace.com/) . She is the winner of the 2019 LoveReading Very Short Story Award and has recent/upcoming work in Neue Rundschau, (2019) S. Fischer (translated into German) alongside John Berger and Anne Carson, We’ll Never Have Paris, Repeater Books (2019), Trauma, Dodo Ink (2020), Berfrois, The Creative Review, 3:AM Journal, The Lonely Crowd, Litro and more… She was nominated for Best of The Net (2018) for her non-fiction essays, her fiction has been short-listed for awards such as the Bristol Prize and Glimmertrain. Susanna just completed her debut novel, Dark Island and is represented by Craig Literary, NY. When she’s not writing, she works internationally as a clinical arts-therapist and lecturer.

What more could you ask for? Now that the holiday season is coming to an end, it’s time to sharpen your pencils, dear writers… The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Happy New Year!

Preti, Kristen, Lucie and Luke

Connect with us
@visual_verse (https://twitter.com/visual_verse?lang=en)
@maryjean_chan (https://twitter.com/maryjean_chan)
@noosarowiwa (https://twitter.com/noosarowiwa)
@crossmansusanna (https://twitter.com/crossmansusanna)

Start Timer (https://vclock.com/timer/#countdown=01:00:00&enabled=0&seconds=3600&title=Visual+Verse%3A+One+image.+One+Hour.+50-500+Words.+)
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Volume 06, Chapter 01 | November 2018

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Image by Hannah Coulson

Today, we turn 5.

Visual Verse was launched in 2013 by Kristen Harrison, Pete Lewis and Preti Taneja – three friends with modest plans. We hoped only to provide an online space where writers and artists could collaborate freely. Thanks to the passion and enthusiasm of writers around the world, Visual Verse has far exceeded all expectations.

Over the past 5 years we have published 60 issues in 5 volumes. We have received almost 8,000 submissions and published 5,500 pieces by 1716 individual writers. And, according to Google Analytics, we have been read by people in every part of the globe except the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. What are those Norwegians doing?

None of this would have been possible without you – our writers and artists – who have made this publication the beautiful, positive, diverse, boundary-pushing celebration of creative collaboration that it is.

And none of this would be possible without the support of those working behind the scenes. Thank you to our Deputy Editor Lucie Stevens whose tireless work keeps Visual Verse running month to month; thank you to our special guest curators and co-editors Eley Williams, Richard Georges, Carmen Marcus and So Mayer who have injected fresh creativity and brought amazing new writers; and finally, a huge thank you to our patrons Bernardine Evaristo, Cathy Galvin, Mark Garry, Andrew Motion, Marc Schlossman and Ali Smith for their ongoing support.

Today we have a very special surprise for you to celebrate our 5th birthday edition. Instead of publishing a new issue with one image and a selection of lead pieces, we are instead giving you – our amazing community of talented and dedicated writers – the opportunity to be one of our three lead writers this month.

All submissions received before 12pm GMT tomorrow (2nd November) will be longlisted for one of our lead spots. A shortlist of eight pieces will be chosen and from these, our judging panel will select the top three.

The Judges

Bernardine Evaristo
Award-winning writer of novels, verse and criticism and founder of the Brunel International African Poetry Prize.

Sam Jordison and Eloise Millar
From the superlative independent publisher, Galley Beggar Press.

Andrew Motion
Poet Laureate 2000-2010, Homewood Professor of the Arts at Johns’ Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA.

Philippa Sitters
Literary agent at leading agency DGA.

The image is the starting point, the text is up to you. Go forth.

Your faithful founders: Kristen Harrison, Pete Lewis and Preti Taneja.

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Volume 03, Chapter 01 | November 2015

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Celebrating our 2nd birthday.
Image by Coralie Bickford-Smith

Dear Writers,

Welcome to our 2nd birthday edition, and the beginning of our third volume. How far we have come! In April 2013 we came up with a mad plan to celebrate the inter-collaborative process of writing and art. We wanted to create a contemporary digital platform for cross-pollinating visual arts and literature and we had two rules: 1) there would be set generative constraints, and 2) the site had to be elegant, reflecting traditional book design. Kristen is a publisher of beautiful books (http://www.thecurvedhouse.com/) , Preti is a writer (http://www.preti-taneja.co.uk) , Pete Lewis is a designer (http://www.mrpetelewis.com/) of the highest order… and so in November 2013, Visual Verse was born.

When we first launched we were publishing about 30 submissions a month. A watershed moment came in March 2014, when Denise Nestor (http://www.denisenestorillustration.com/) ’s pencil drawing of birds alongside Adam Marek’s The Factory Explosion (https://visualverse.org/submissions/factory-explosion/) in the lead caught your imaginations. Overnight submissions exploded and we had 80 wonderful pieces on the site. In October this year, for the first time, we published over 100 amazing pieces.

Every day that we publish you, we feel delighted and honoured. As the site grows we are refreshed by your commitment, your imagination and your energy. A look at our writers reveals familiar names such as Stella Duffy, Adam Foulds and Nikesh Shukla; and names who we published as they were becoming ‘names’: Eley Williams, Nisha Ramayya, Sandeep Parmar, Sophie Mayer, Declan Ryan, Hedley Twiddle – the list goes on. We have contributors from across Africa, the USA, UK, Indonesia and more… Visual Verse is now a chorus of global voices.

We couldn’t have got this far without our patrons: writers Andrew Motion, Ali Smith, Cathy Galvin and Bernardine Evaristo, and photographers Mark Garry and Marc Schlossman. Thanks go to them.

Now, to meet the party and begin our third year. As a nod to our love of, and respect for, beautiful book design we feature an image by one of the UK’s leading designers, Coralie-Bickford Smith (http://cb-smith.com/) . Coralie is responsible for many of the stunning Penguin series that grace our shelves including the Great Foods series, the clothbound classics and the exquisite F. Scott Fitzgerald series. This month, Penguin imprint Particular Books have published The Fox and the Star – written, illustrated and designed by Coralie herself. This magical book embodies all that Visual Verse stands for – that moment went words and images wrap themselves around eachother so perfectly that you could never imagine them being apart.

We are absolutely thrilled to be celebrating and leading this month with a piece by Ivan Vladislavić. Born in Pretoria, South Africa in 1957, he now lives in Johannesburg. His acclaimed fiction includes Double Negative, The Restless Supermarket and 101 Detectives. His work has won many awards, including Yale University’s prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize in 2015, for which writers receive an unrestricted grant of $150,000 to support their writing. His classic novel The Folly (http://www.andotherstories.org/book/the-folly/) , a sophisticated yet funny book about the power of suggestion and castles in the sky, is published by And Other Stories on 11 sNovember 2015. You read it here first!

Our second lead is the poet Helen Mort, whose first collection ‘Division Street’ was published in 2013 and won the Fenton Aldeburgh prize. She is a Douglas Caster Cultural Fellow at The University of Leeds.
And to celebrate properly, we have commissioned three pieces from longstanding contributors to the site, whose work we admire every month. Rishi Dastidar is a member of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen. A runner-up in the 2011 Cardiff International Poetry Competition and the 2014 Troubadour International Poetry Competition, his work has featured in the 2012 anthologies Adventures in Form (Penned in the Margins) and Lung Jazz (Cinnamon Press / Eyewear Publishing), and most recently in 2014’s Ten: The New Wave (Bloodaxe). He tweets @BetaRish.

Myrto Petsota was born in Athens, Europe. Places of residence during her formative years include countries that no longer exist, countries that are about to disappear and others that are yet to be, namely Czechoslovakia, Italy, Greece and Scotland. She now writes from Paris, where she also teaches, practices literary criticism and exile. She is immensely fond of the quarterly French literary review L’Atelier du Roman, where she publishes some of her critical pieces of writing.

And last but not least, Hazel Mason, who describes herself thus: ‘Proud to have been a sister in the NHS, now a happy opsimath in Norwich who has stumbled on the panacea of poetry, postal critiquing and vibrant literary group discussion, wallowing in words.’ She tweets @hazelmason10.

So dear writers, we hope you’ll be inspired to keep submitting, keep tweeting us, keep reading each other and talking about what you like about each others’ work. And we hope to see you all at our second birthday party, in conjunction with The Word Factory and the VS Pritchett short story prize, at Waterstone’s Picadilly on Saturday 28^th November, 6-8pm. Book here: http://www.thewordfactory.tv/site/events/ – we hope to see you there!

In the meantime, amidst all the celebrations, don’t forget what it’s really all about… the image is the starting point: the text is up to you.

Happy 2^nd Birthday Visual Verse!

Preti and Kristen

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