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 05, Chapter 07 | May 2018

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Image by Mary Cassatt

Welcome dear writers to the 1st of May,

Our image this month might be classic, but our writers are raw brilliance. That’s how we like it here at VV.

Painted by American artist Mary Cassatt in 1893, The Child’s Bath depicts an ordinary moment in domestic life. But its quietness is misleading. Through her work, Cassatt gave voice and presence to women, offering a female perspective that had long been dismissed as inferior. Described as the embodiment of the ‘New Woman’, Cassatt played a crucial role in advocating for equality, particularly in relation to education.

We’re always on the look out for the best, most radical and boundary breaking work. So we’re very proud to publish work by Inara Verzemnieks, the author of the astonishing and moving Among the Living and the Dead, published this month by Pushkin Press (https://www.pushkinpress.com/discover-the-breathtaking-among-the-living-and-the-dead) . Inara teaches creative non-fiction at the University of Iowa, and writes regularly for the New York Times and the Atlantic, among other publications. She has won a Pushcart Prize and a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa. Her piece got us in the guts, then twisted them.

Next we bring you essayist and poet Will Harris (https://willjharris.com/) . He is the author of a chapbook, All this is implied, and a groundbreaking essay, Mixed-Race Superman which will be published this month by the very new and exciting Peninsula Press.

Following this, we have a piece by Scherezade Siobhan. An award-winning writer and psychologist, she’s a community catalyst who founded and runs The Talking Compass (http://www.thetalkingcompass.com) —  a therapeutic space dedicated to providing counseling services and decolonizing mental health care. She is the author of Bone Tongue (Thought Catalog Books, 2015), Father, Husband (Salopress, 2016) and The Bluest Kali (Lithic Press, 2018). She says she can be found squeeing about militant bunnies @zaharaesque on twitter/FB/IG as well as www.zaharaesque.com (http://www.zaharaesque.com/) . She invites you to send her chocolate and puppies  via  nihilistwaffles@gmail.com (mailto:nihilistwaffles@gmail.com) .

To crown it all, a new piece by Rakhshan Rizwan. Rakhshan was born in Lahore, Pakistan and moved to Germany where she studied Literature and New Media. She is currently a PhD candidate at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Her poems have appeared in Blue Lyra Review, The Missing Slate, Postcolonial Text and elsewhere. She is the winner of the Judith Khan Memorial Poetry Prize (2015). Her debut poetry collection, Paisley, has been shortlisted in the “Best Poetry Pamphlet” category at the 2018 Sabateur Awards.

So – happy reading, writing and submitting. May is the month to settle in to the new season and we can’t wait to read your words. The image is the starting point, the rest is up to you!

Love,
Kristen, Preti, Lucie and Rose

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