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

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Volume 06, Chapter 12 | October 2019

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Image by Valérie Mannaerts/M Museum Leuven/Alexandra Colmenares.

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Dear writers, readers and friends,

Never have our bodies, minds and countries felt so under pressure and fragmented. Yet strangely, art that serves to reflect on that can be strangely healing, and indeed, community building. At Visual Verse we are all about community. So this month we bring you our very special edition of ‘recommend a writer’, where we have asked some of our dear lead contributors to call on a fellow writer they think we should publish. Our co-founders, Preti and Kristen, have put two forward as well.

Our community of wordsmiths is enriched by the creators of our visual prompts. This issue of Visual Verse is published in collaboration with M-Museum Leuven (https://www.mleuven.be/nl/content/home) in Belgium, who are hosting the 51st conference of the International Visual Literacy Association later this month. They have provided the arresting image for October – a work by Valérie Mannaerts (https://www.maniera.be/creators/12/valerie-mannaerts) , photographed by Alexandra Colmenares.

Our writer responses kick off with Sabeena Akhtar (https://twitter.com/pocobookreader?lang=en) , who Preti believes is ‘a writer and activist of rare talent and commitment.’ Sabeena is the editor of the anthology, Cut From The Same Cloth (https://unbound.com/books/cut-from-the-same-cloth/) , forthcoming from Unbound, a contributor to the 404 Ink title, We Shall Fight Until We Win (https://www.404ink.com/store/we-shall-fight-until-we-win) and the Saqi Books title, Smashing It (https://saqibooks.com/books/the-westbourne-press/smashing-it/) . She is the Festival Coordinator of Bare Lit (http://barelitfestival.com/) , and a co-founder of the Primadonna (https://www.primadonnafestival.com/) festival and Bare Lit Kids. She is co-writing a forthcoming children’s book on Islamophobia published by Hachette, and working on her debut novel.

Our page 2 writer – poet Holly Singlehurst (https://twitter.com/HJSinglehurst?lang=en) – was recommended by critically acclaimed poet Rishi Dastidar, one of our longest and most regular contributors. Rishi says: ‘Holly is a poet you might not have heard of yet – but you will. She tells us what it is like to be alive in the world right now, in ways that startle and reveal’. Holly graduated from Birmingham University with a Master’s in Creative Writing in 2016. She was shortlisted for the 2017 Bridport Prize, and was commended in the 2016 National Poetry Competition for her poem ‘Hiroshima, 1961’. Her poetry has appeared on And Other Poems (https://andotherpoems.com/) and her short fiction has been published in Banshee Magazine.

Niven Govinden, author of the 2019 Gordon Burn Prize shortlisted This Brutal House, recommended ‘the genius Stuart Evers (https://twitter.com/StuartEvers?lang=en) ,’ whose debut, Ten Stories About Smoking, won the London Book Award in 2011, and his highly acclaimed novel, If This is Home (https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/stuart-evers/if-this-is-home/9781447207634) , followed in 2012. Your Father Sends His Love (https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/stuart-evers/your-father-sends-his-love/9781447280583) was shortlisted for the 2016 Edge Hill Short Story Prize and a new novel will be published in 2020. In 2017, Evers won the Eccles British Library Writer’s Award – one of Europe’s richest prizes for a work in progress.

Finally, Kristen spotted the ‘fiercely imaginative and quirky’ work of Eileen McNulty-Holmes (https://twitter.com/eileenamholmes?lang=en) at a recent visual writing workshop, and immediately wanted to published them at Visual Verse. Eileen is an award-winning writer, award-nominated editor, an aspiring witch and a (semi-) professional plant person. They have been writing for money, attention, and “exposure” for the past 10 years. Their work has appeared in the likes of Femsplain (https://femsplain.com/) , DADDY Magazine (http://daddy.land/) , For Every Year and IRIS, as well as in multidisciplinary shows at galleries including Lage Egal and Mindscape Universe. Their stories often take place at the fringes of reality, in enclosed spaces or in the midst of terrible life decisions.

So as you sharpen your pencils, why not follow our lead and recommend us to a writer/friend? The image is the starting point, the text is up to you…

Kristen, Preti, Lucie and Luke

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