Image by Penny Byrne

Dear writers, readers and friends,

September! How we love this month. To celebrate the turning of the seasons, we’ve handed the curation of Visual Verse over to writer and performance poet Carmen Marcus. Together with Carmen, we are proud to bring you one of our finest images alongside one of the finest selections of form-breaking prose we’ve had the pleasure to publish.

Our featured image this month is by Australian artist Penny Byrne (https://pennybyrneartist.com/home) . This piece, called Fukushima Symphony, is the epitome of what we love about Byrne’s work: it’s aesthetically seductive (even a little quaint) while being politically charged and thought-provoking. We hope it inspires the best of your words.

Carmen Marcus (http://Carmenellen2013.wordpress.com) , our guest curator and lead writer, is from Saltburn in North Yorkshire. Her debut novel How Saints Die is published with Vintage in 2018. It won New Writing North’s Northern Promise Award and was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. She is an advocate for working class voices and set up the No Writer Left Behind (http://www.nowriterleftbehind.wordpress.com) website to share the journeys of under-represented writers. She has written and performed poetry for The Royal Festival Hall, Durham Book Festival and BBC Radio. She’s currently working on her second novel and her poetry project The Book of Godless Verse, funded by Arts Council England. She strives to live up to the words of her first critic and primary school teacher: ‘minus one house-point, weird’.

Carmen’s selection of writers begins with Kathy Hoyle (http://www.kathyhoyleblog.wordpress.com) , a recent Creative Writing graduate from The Open University. She writes short prose fiction, flash fiction and creative non-fiction. She has been both long- and short-listed in various competitions and her work has appeared in several online lit mags such as Ellipseszine and Spelkfiction. In 2017 she was highly commended for Spread The Word’s inaugural Life Writing prize for her piece ‘Scab’. She is currently working on a novel Kingfisher Blue, a coming of age story, set against the backdrop of the 1984 miner’s strike. She says she will work for chocolate…

Next is Iain Rowan (https://www.iainrowan.com) , a writer who lives in the north-east of England. In 2017 he was shortlisted for the Bath Novel Award, and in 2018 he won a Northern Writers’ Award. Iain is also Director of the Sunderland Festival of Creative Writing, which we urge you all to check out.

Our fourth piece comes from Lisette Auton, a disabled writer, activist, spoken word performer, theatre-maker and creative practitioner. She is a Creative Future Literary Award winner for poetry and her children’s novel has gained her a place on Penguin RHUK’s #WriteNowLive programme. Friend Lisette on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/lisette.grout) to find out about her wordy adventures, particularly since she specialises in working with people whose voices are not fully represented in the mainstream.

Douglas Bruton (http://douglasrdb.blogspot.com) throws words together. Sometimes they make sense and sometimes they even make stories. He sends those thrown-together words ‘out there’ and every now and then that makes sense, too. He has been published in many nice places, including Northwords Now, New Writing Scotland, The Delinquent, The Vestal Review, Interpreter’s House, Flash Magazine, The Irish Literary Review, Fiction Attic Press, and in an Edinburgh anthology by Freight Books and most recently by The Fiction Desk. His first novel for grown ups will be published in December 2018.

Astra Bloom (https://twitter.com/AstraBloom) writes poetry fiction and creative non fiction for all ages. She has been shortlisted by Bridport prize, she won Bare Fiction poetry prize, was runner up and Sussex winner in the Brighton Prize, was shortlisted by Live Canon Poetry and has been published by Magma poetry magazine and Under The Radar journal. She’s recently been commended by Brittle star and longlisted by Mslexia International Novel award for two novels. Astra has a short story forthcoming in A Wild and Precious Life, an anthology on the theme of recovery from mental and physical illness and addiction, which featured on the For Books Sake site as their Weekend read. She is one of the 16 new writers selected by Kit De Waal for the Common People anthology of working class writing and her novel has been selected by Penguin Random House for their Write Now Live initiative.

So dear readers, there we have it – a selection of some of the best voices in the game to inspire and delight you. Send us your 50 to 500 words, written in the space of an hour in response to the image. We publish one piece per writer and only around 100; submission deadline is 15^th September.

The image is the starting point, the text is up to you…

Carmen, Preti, Kristen and Lucie