Volume 04, Chapter 05 | March 2017

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Image by Tertia Van Rensburg

Dear Writers,

Well, it is spring in our parts of the world (Cambridge and Berlin). That means it’s March so we are bringing you the freshest shoots of the best new art, fiction and poetry to be picked from the bushes as they green. And in contrast, an image with an almost wintery aesthetic – well these are strange times of mixed seasons and feelings – and our job is only to inspire you.

Our image this month is most mysterious, even a little spooky. It is brought to you by a South African photographer, Tertia Van Rensburg, who is equally mysterious and yet has a most epic Pinterest collection here (https://de.pinterest.com/arttantaluz/) .

In response, we are very pleased to bring you a writer, and formerly guest-Editor, of our own Visual Verse, Eley Williams. As well as introducing you to her first book of short stories, Attrib. and Other Stories, which is out this month from Influx Press, she is co-editor of fiction at 3:AM magazine with prose in Ambit, Night & Day, Structo and The White Review. Her collection Attrib. (Influx 2017) was chosen by Ali Smith for the First Light ‘best of debut fiction’ slot at this year’s Cambridge Literary Festival, UK – come if you can, on Saturday 23 April at 1pm. Eley also has a small book of poetry ‘Frit’ forthcoming from Sad Press and her tweets are short works of literary loveliness all by themselves: @GiantRatSumatra (https://twitter.com/@GiantRatSumatra)

Next up is Charlie Fox, author of This Young Monster, from Fitzcarraldo Editions, which was published in February – just a week ago, in fact. It has been called, ‘A performance as original and audacious as any of the characters within – it crackles off the page, roaring and clawing its way into the world, powered by a brilliant vagabond electricity,’ by the wonderful Chloe Aridjis, author of Book of Clouds. Charlie was born in 1991, he lives in London and his work has appeared in many publications including frieze, Cabinet, Sight & Sound, ArtReview, The Wire and The White Review. Catch more from him @Ghostwoodfox (https://twitter.com/Ghostwoodfox)

And finally, we are absolutely thrilled to publish Mahtem Shiferraw on Visual Verse. She is a poet and visual artist from Ethiopia and Eritrea. Her poetry collection, Fuchsia, won the Sillerman Prize for African Poets, and her work has been published in various literary magazines. This is writing to make your skin shiver, it is so good.

Enjoy dear writers, and get ready for your own creative rush – then send us your 50-500 words, and we will get publishing soon.

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

Kristen and Preti

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Volume 04, Chapter 03 | January 2017

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Image by Manon Bellet

Dear writers, readers and friends,

Welcome to 2017. This past year has been another wonderful one for Visual Verse. Thanks to you, our writers, we’ve grown in submissions and followers and the inbox is bursting every week. It is such a pleasure to see you continue to return each month and deliver new words. And it is such a pleasure to have a platform from which we can shine a spotlight on fantastic writers, published and unpublished. In 2016 we’ve been proud to feature a Goldsmith’s Prize winner, a Booker longlistee, debut writers and those who have collections forthcoming next year. Some of you have taken work inspired by Visual Verse to the next level – it’s found its way into poetry collections and into live performances as well as onto your own websites. We are thrilled by all of this and can’t wait to see what next year will bring.

One thing you may not realise, too, is how much your writing inspires the artists we feature here on Visual Verse. It is a unique experience for them to see how so many people, with wildly diverse perspectives and styles, respond to their work. This dialogue between artist and writer is the seed from which Visual Verse was grown and it is one of the things that makes us most proud.

So without further ado, we are delighted to bestow upon you our first visual prompt for 2017. This magnificent image comes from Manon Bellet (http://www.manonbellet.com/) , a French artist currently based in New Orleans, US. Bellet’s work looks at the intersections of nature conservation and art preservation, an unconventional pairing, and tries to challenge our perceptions of our environment. This image is from her series Sous Surface and is one of those images that presents something different each time you view it. What will you make of this one?

Our lead writers for January 2017 are a celebration of our connections beyond the geographical. We begin with the elegiac, romantic Emmanuelle Pagano translated from the French by Jennifer Higgins and Sophie Lewis. Pagano’s fragmentary musings on love and desire, Trysting (http://www.andotherstories.org/author/emmanuelle-pagano/) was published in 2016 by & Other Stories. She lives and works on the Ardèche plateau. She has written more than a dozen works of fiction, has won the EU Prize for Literature and her books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. She regularly collaborates with artists working in other disciplines such as dance, cinema, photography, illustration, fine art and music. A perfect start to our year. Translator Sophie Lewis (https://twitter.com/sophietimes) is a freelance editor and translator from French and Portuguese. Among the writers she has translated into English are Stendhal, Jules Verne, Violette Leduc, Emmanuelle Pagano, Marcel
Aymé, Andrée Maalouf, João Gilberto Noll, Pierre Gripari and Emilie de Turckheim. Jennifer Higgins (https://twitter.com/JennyTranslates) is an editor and translator from French and Italian. She has translated several works of fiction, including Emmanuelle Pagano’s Trysting, and has written a book about English translations of French poetry.

Our second lead is poet Rachel Plummer (http://www.rachelplummer.co.uk) who lives in Edinburgh with her partner and two young children. She has had poems in magazines including Mslexia, The Stinging Fly and Agenda. She is a recipient of the Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award for poetry. She has had poems placed in numerous competitions, including the Flambard Prize, Penfro, and the Troubadour Prize.

For our third lead we bring you the robust writings of Agri Ismaïl, who is based in Sweden and Iraq. His work has appeared in The White Review, Guernica, Litro and 3:AM Magazine amongst other places, traversing and transcending all kinds of borders.

And last but not least, our up and coming spot goes to Cage Williams, a poet, writer and musician based in London. He studied literature at Goldsmiths College and he writes on subjects ranging from jazz and the New York School poets to Shakespeare. Find more writing by Cage Williams here (http://literateur.com/four-poems-by-cage-williams/) .

So we go on… boats against the current… pulling into the future. Let us create another year’s worth of beautiful art and words. The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Preti and Kristen

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