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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@crossmansusanna (https://twitter.com/crossmansusanna)

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Volume 05, Chapter 11 | September 2018

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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