Volume 10, Chapter 01 | November 2022

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Image by Kitty Harrison
Today we celebrate nine years of innovative, diverse, brave and wonderful writing.
Happy birthday to all writers, readers and friends of Visual Verse.
Visual Verse is nine years old today! Kristen and I, with designer Pete Lewis, launched the site on 1st November 2013 and since then (through country moves, career changes, successes, knock-backs, crises, euphoria, births, deaths, and trips to London, Newcastle, and Berlin) we have rolled with a team of guest editors and star volunteers to bring you our monthly anthology of art and words. We have not missed a single issue in nine years and have published over 10,000 pieces – an incredible achievement. Visual Verse is not for profit, run by volunteers and our contributors do it for love of the process; to inspire you, delight you and to keep the love going of wild adventures in writing. Over nine years, the worldwide Visual Verse community has grown from around 50 submissions a month to 200, with a newsletter subscription list that runs into thousands from every continent in the world.

Thank you, readers, writers, volunteers and all our supporters: HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

Not many of you might know this, but co-founder Kristen “Kitty” Harrison (https://twitter.com/CurvedHouse/) is herself an artist, as well as being a writer, publisher and producer at The Curved House (https://thecurvedhouse.com) , an independent publisher working at the intersection of books, art and education. I am thrilled to debut her work on Visual Verse this month, with a piece called ‘Letter Home’. Kristen recently relocated back from Berlin to be nearer to her family in Australia and that’s what has inspired this month’s birthday image. It’s the first time she’s sharing her art with us, and we love to see it.

I stepped back from regularly curating the site about a year ago, as it’s been a big year for me. Over the last two years I’ve been busy writing my second book, Aftermath and it was published in early 2022; just last month I was astonished to find it had won the UK’s Gordon Burn Prize (https://newwritingnorth.com/gordon-burn-prize/ ) . I am thrilled to return to curate our birthday issue and very proud to welcome back the profoundly important words of Sandeep Parmar (https://twitter.com/SandeepKParmar/) to lead. Sandeep first wrote for Visual Verse as lead in Vol.1 Issue 2 (December 2013): that early poem now appears in her latest collection F (https://www.shearsman.com/store/Sandeep-Parmar-Faust-p470007726) aust (https://www.shearsman.com/store/Sandeep-Parmar-Faust-p470007726) , published by Shearsman this month.

Sandeep is Professor of English Literature at Liverpool University. Her research is primarily in modernist women’s writing and contemporary poetry and race. Her groundbreaking article ‘Still Not a British Subject: Race and UK Poetry (https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/not-a-british-subject-race-and-poetry-in-the-uk/) ’ was published in The Los Angeles Review of Books, and other essays and reviews have appeared in the Guardian, The New Statesman, the Financial Times and the Times Literary Supplement. In 2017, she co-founded the Ledbury Poetry Critics (https://twitter.com/LedburyCritics/) scheme for poetry reviewers of colour. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Sandeep’s books include Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies: Myth of the Modern Woman, scholarly editions for Carcanet Press of the Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees and The Collected Poems of Nancy Cunard, and Threads with Bhanu Kapil and Nisha Ramayya, as well as three books
of her own poetry: The Marble Orchard, Eidolon, winner of the Ledbury Forte Prize for Best Second Collection, and Faust (Shearsman, 2022).

We are also really excited this month to collaborate with the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize (https://www.wasafiri.org/new-writing-prize/) , which I co-judged this year. The Prize, run by Wasafiri (https://www.wasafiri.org/) magazine, supports writers who have not yet published a book-length work, with no limits on age, gender, nationality, or background, and rewards work in three categories: Poetry, Fiction and Life Writing. The three winners join us this month…

Hasti Crowther (https://twitter.com/youarehasti/) is a poet and writer living in South East London. A member of the Southbank New Poets Collective and the Ledbury Poetry Critics, they are the recipient of the 2022 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize for Poetry, and have recently published poems in bathmagg, zindabad, and The Willowherb Review. They have also co-written short sci-fi film Digging (https://www.channel4.com/programmes/film4-foresight-shorts/on-demand/70987-001) , produced by Film4. Hasti has created shows for Montez Press Radio and also hosts monthly open mic and poetry night Fresh Lip.

Sylee Gore (https://twitter.com/BerlinReified) is an Indian American writer based between Berlin and Oxford. She received the 2022 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize in Fiction (UK), the 2022 Bird in Your Hands Prize (US), and a 2021 VG Wort Neustart Kultur fellowship (DE). In 2022/23, she co-heads a literary partnership between Kelly Writers House, Philadelphia, and Rothermere American Institute, Oxford.

Nadine Monem (she/her) works in hybrid forms of non-fiction, memoir and theory. Her work has been supported by the Tin House Summer Workshop and the Catapult Books memoir workshop for writers of colour. She is the winner of the 2022 Wasafiri New Writing Prize for life writing, and runner-up for the 2022 Sewanee Review (https://thesewaneereview.com/) Nonfiction Contest. Nadine teaches writing and critical theory at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.

Hasti, Sylee and Nadine’s prize-winning pieces will be published in Wasafiri 113, published Spring 2023, and accompanied by an illustration by Aude Nasr (https://cargocollective.com/audenasr) .

As we head into our 10th year of publishing we hope you enjoy this month, and look back over our archive (https://visualverse.org/images/) to read the work of the last decade’s most exciting new and established voices practicing across continents and themes.

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

Preti Taneja
with Kristen, Lucie and Isabel

Special thanks and welcome to Zaynab Bobi (Nigeria), Ashish Kumar Singh (India) and Wes White (UK) who join the Visual Verse team this month as volunteer editorial assistants.

Follow us on Twitter
Visual Verse Preti Taneja Kristen Harri (https://twitter.com/pretitaneja/) son/The Curved House (https://twitter.com/curvedhouse/)
Sandeep Parmar (https://twitter.com/SandeepKParmar/)
Hasti Crowther (https://twitter.com/youarehasti/)
Sylee Gore (https://twitter.com/BerlinReified)
Nadine Monem (https://twitter.com/nadinemonem/)

Volume 09, Chapter 07 | May 2022

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Image by Miikka Luotio

Dear writers, readers and friends,

Today we take flight with a new issue of Visual Verse and we take flight to a new home for Visual Verse. After almost a decade in Berlin, The Curved House is moving to Melbourne, Australia. We will continue to run Visual Verse as a global publication, with half the editorial team in Australia and half in Europe, and we will continue to publish diverse and innovative writers from all around the world.

As a farewell to Berlin, I wanted to find a way to honour the city that gave our unique publication life. In 2013, a chance introduction to Berlin-based designer Pete Lewis (https://uk.linkedin.com/in/mr-pete-lewis-51468049) led to the first designs for the Visual Verse website. Shortly after, Preti Taneja (https://www.preti-taneja.co.uk/) visited Berlin and manifested a whole editorial vision for the publication. She became the founding Commissioning Editor and we launched on 1st November, 2013. A few years in, Berlin gave us another gift in the form of Lucie Stevens. Lucie is now back in Sydney but continues as co-editor. Visual Verse is the kind of dream project that Berlin is renowned for and the city has continued to nurture it, and us, for almost 9 years.

In the spirit of seed-sowing and collaboration, I have chosen an image depicting a special little Berlin scene, by Miikka Luotio. Alongside the image are three writers whose work has had an impact on me, or Visual Verse, helping to shape and evolve us.

We open with Paul Scraton (https://twitter.com/underagreysky) , a writer and editor based in Berlin. Shortly after moving to Friedrichshain, a district in the east of Berlin, I picked up a copy of Paul’s book The Idea of a River, published by Readux. This unassuming little gem is a lesson in linking ourselves and our environment. After reading it I set out to walk the river Spree, through Treptower park, with a consciousness I hadn’t tapped into for a long time. I saw Berlin differently and I’m very grateful to this little book for opening my eyes wider. Paul is the author of a number of other books including the novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019) and the recent novella of the forest, In the Pines (Influx Press, 2021). You can find him atwww.underagreysky.com (http://www.underagreysky.com/) .

Divya Ghelani (https://twitter.com/DivyaGhelani) came my way via Visual Verse patron Cathy Galvin who runs the UK’s leading literary salon, the Word Factory (https://thewordfactory.tv/) . Last year she co-curated the August issue (https://visualverse.org/images/veronica-lissandrini/) of Visual Verse, bringing fresh new voices to the fold, some of whom are Berlin-based. This was a moment when I was personally struggling to keep things moving amid the pressures of the pandemic and other commitments, and Divya came forth with her characteristic ease and grace to re-ignite things. Divya is a writer herself and holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and an MPhil in Literary Studies from the University of Hong Kong. She has published widely, and is now working on a novel. Divya hosts a yearly New Fiction By Women & Non-Binary BIPOC Author Reading Series for The Reader Berlin and co-hosts a short story club for the Word Factory.

It is unusual that we would commission a lead writer twice, but I could not do a Berlin issue without the inimitable Victoria Gosling (https://www.instagram.com/victoriagosling) . Victoria is the founder of The Reader Berlin (https://www.thereaderberlin.com/) and The Berlin Writing Prize (https://www.thereaderberlin.com/2022-berlin-writing-prize/) . She has been the backbone of our Berlin literary life and a great champion of writers, readers and book businesses in Berlin. Some of my favourite memories of Berlin have been facilitated by Victoria – one year she took over an entire old Fort and hosted a magical weekend literary festival. Beyond this generosity, she is a hugely talented writer. Her brilliant debut novel Before the Ruins was published in 2021 by Serpent’s Tail (UK) and Henry Holt (US) revealing a gift for storytelling and masterful character development. I’m indebted to Victoria for her friendship, gentle influence and unending support.

What these three writers have in common is a willingness to create opportunities for others while also remaining dedicated to their own craft. That’s a lot of work, and perhaps what’s most beautiful about Berlin is that it gives people the time and space to give and grow.

The Berlin magic is forever in our DNA.

So now it’s over to you, dear writers, to see where this image leads. Of course, there is no need for you to write about Berlin. The image is simply the starting point, the rest is up to you.

Enjoy and thank you for all of your support and continued participation in this magnificent project.

Kristen
and the VV team

Follow us on Twitter

@visual_verse (https://twitter.com/visual_verse)
@underagreysky (https://twitter.com/underagreysky)
@d (https://twitter.com/kenkeyandfish) ivyaghelani (https://twitter.com/DivyaGhelani)
@VictoriaGosling (https://twitter.com/VictoriaGosling)

Volume 06, Chapter 01 | November 2018

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Image by Hannah Coulson

Today, we turn 5.

Visual Verse was launched in 2013 by Kristen Harrison, Pete Lewis and Preti Taneja – three friends with modest plans. We hoped only to provide an online space where writers and artists could collaborate freely. Thanks to the passion and enthusiasm of writers around the world, Visual Verse has far exceeded all expectations.

Over the past 5 years we have published 60 issues in 5 volumes. We have received almost 8,000 submissions and published 5,500 pieces by 1716 individual writers. And, according to Google Analytics, we have been read by people in every part of the globe except the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. What are those Norwegians doing?

None of this would have been possible without you – our writers and artists – who have made this publication the beautiful, positive, diverse, boundary-pushing celebration of creative collaboration that it is.

And none of this would be possible without the support of those working behind the scenes. Thank you to our Deputy Editor Lucie Stevens whose tireless work keeps Visual Verse running month to month; thank you to our special guest curators and co-editors Eley Williams, Richard Georges, Carmen Marcus and So Mayer who have injected fresh creativity and brought amazing new writers; and finally, a huge thank you to our patrons Bernardine Evaristo, Cathy Galvin, Mark Garry, Andrew Motion, Marc Schlossman and Ali Smith for their ongoing support.

Today we have a very special surprise for you to celebrate our 5th birthday edition. Instead of publishing a new issue with one image and a selection of lead pieces, we are instead giving you – our amazing community of talented and dedicated writers – the opportunity to be one of our three lead writers this month.

All submissions received before 12pm GMT tomorrow (2nd November) will be longlisted for one of our lead spots. A shortlist of eight pieces will be chosen and from these, our judging panel will select the top three.

The Judges

Bernardine Evaristo
Award-winning writer of novels, verse and criticism and founder of the Brunel International African Poetry Prize.

Sam Jordison and Eloise Millar
From the superlative independent publisher, Galley Beggar Press.

Andrew Motion
Poet Laureate 2000-2010, Homewood Professor of the Arts at Johns’ Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA.

Philippa Sitters
Literary agent at leading agency DGA.

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

Your faithful founders: Kristen Harrison, Pete Lewis and Preti Taneja.

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Volume 05, Chapter 02 | December 2017

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Image by Samuel Zeller

Dear writers, readers and friends,

Welcome to our final issue for 2017. This month we are bringing it all back to where Visual Verse began: Berlin. It was here, in this magical city, where Visual Verse was born in 2013. A spark of an idea from Kristen was fuelled by a beautiful design by Pete Lewis (also a Berlin resident at the time) and is now a raging fireball of amazingness thanks to the editorial leadership of Preti Taneja, her guest editors Eley Williams and George Spender and our deputy editor Lucie Stevens.

As Visual Verse has evolved, so too has Berlin’s writing talent, and this December we bring the best of this talent to you. We showcase Berlin’s diversity: from rollerskating, hotpant-wearing, rrrriot girl art to gothic cyborg tales, imagination and worldclass talent really are in abundance here. This month’s image is a photograph taken in a Berlin shop window and comes to us from Samuel Zeller (https://www.samuelzeller.ch/) . As is customary with our images, we will not reveal further details or give any context, but one thing is for sure about this one: no one will be indifferent to it. Love it or hate it, we know this image will evoke strong reactions.

Our lead piece by Jane Flett (http://janeflett.com/) is a mighty start to our December issue. Jane is a resident of Berlin where she makes up stories, plays cello, and rollerskates down Tempelhof runway in hotpants. She’s been published in over 70 literary journals and translated into Polish, Croatian and Japanese. Jane features in the 2012 Best British Poetry anthology and was voted Berlin’s best English-language writer in 2015 by Indieberlin. Should you wish to tap Jane’s writerly wisdom she sometimes runs courses in creative writing with The Reader Berlin (http://thereaderberlin.com/) but be warned: they sell out fast.

Rollerskating writers? Well, our next piece is from Sharon Mertins (http://nomadicgraphomania.com) , who says she spends her time in Berlin floating around in her thoughts, playing with fire and linking strands of thought together to turn them into elaborate tales. Her work has been published in Leopardskin and Limes, The Wild Word, Jersey Devil Press and Café Irreal.

And on page 3 we have our very own Lucie Stevens (http://www.luciestevens.com/) who is not only deputy editor extraordinaire of Visual Verse but also a writer, editor and maker of small projects. Lucie was awarded an ASA Emerging Writer’s Mentorship and a NSW Writers’ Centre Varuna Fellowship for her first novel, and her work has been performed by the Australian National Youth Theatre Company. When she’s not writing stories about children in formidable circumstances, Lucie helps make books about space with Curved House Kids.

Up next is Dan Ayres (https://www.clippings.me/danayres) , another Berlin-based writer, this time with a penchant for writing fantasy and short stories about the freaky side of technology. He has been published in Open Pen and The Wild Word and he was longlisted for the annual competition at The Reader Berlin. When dancing, he is devoid of bones.

We are utterly delighted to bring you the work of Isha Ro on page 5, a Jamaican writer living in Berlin. Isha writes creepy stories and funny stories and both of these involve an inordinate amount of murder. You can read more of her work at The Prosateur (http://www.theprosateur.com) .

And finally we complete this issue with fresh new words by Olivia Parkes (http://www.oliviaparkes.com) , a British-American painter and writer currently based in Berlin. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Zyzzyva, The New Haven Review, Gone Lawn, Blue Five Notebook, and American Chordata, among others.

For those of you in Berlin, or looking to visit or move here, keep an eye on The Reader Berlin (http://thereaderberlin.com/) for English-language writing events and courses and also check out SAND Journal (http://sandjournal.com/) , Fiction Canteen (http://www.transfiction.eu/the-fiction-canteen/) , The Wild Word (https://thewildword.com/) and Dead Ladies Show (https://www.facebook.com/thedeadladiesshow/) . These are a few of our favourite Berlin things.

So writers, you know the score: the image is the starting point, the text is up to you. Go forth.

Kristen and Preti

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Volume 03, Chapter 01 | November 2015

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Celebrating our 2nd birthday.
Image by Coralie Bickford-Smith

Dear Writers,

Welcome to our 2nd birthday edition, and the beginning of our third volume. How far we have come! In April 2013 we came up with a mad plan to celebrate the inter-collaborative process of writing and art. We wanted to create a contemporary digital platform for cross-pollinating visual arts and literature and we had two rules: 1) there would be set generative constraints, and 2) the site had to be elegant, reflecting traditional book design. Kristen is a publisher of beautiful books (http://www.thecurvedhouse.com/) , Preti is a writer (http://www.preti-taneja.co.uk) , Pete Lewis is a designer (http://www.mrpetelewis.com/) of the highest order… and so in November 2013, Visual Verse was born.

When we first launched we were publishing about 30 submissions a month. A watershed moment came in March 2014, when Denise Nestor (http://www.denisenestorillustration.com/) ’s pencil drawing of birds alongside Adam Marek’s The Factory Explosion (https://visualverse.org/submissions/factory-explosion/) in the lead caught your imaginations. Overnight submissions exploded and we had 80 wonderful pieces on the site. In October this year, for the first time, we published over 100 amazing pieces.

Every day that we publish you, we feel delighted and honoured. As the site grows we are refreshed by your commitment, your imagination and your energy. A look at our writers reveals familiar names such as Stella Duffy, Adam Foulds and Nikesh Shukla; and names who we published as they were becoming ‘names’: Eley Williams, Nisha Ramayya, Sandeep Parmar, Sophie Mayer, Declan Ryan, Hedley Twiddle – the list goes on. We have contributors from across Africa, the USA, UK, Indonesia and more… Visual Verse is now a chorus of global voices.

We couldn’t have got this far without our patrons: writers Andrew Motion, Ali Smith, Cathy Galvin and Bernardine Evaristo, and photographers Mark Garry and Marc Schlossman. Thanks go to them.

Now, to meet the party and begin our third year. As a nod to our love of, and respect for, beautiful book design we feature an image by one of the UK’s leading designers, Coralie-Bickford Smith (http://cb-smith.com/) . Coralie is responsible for many of the stunning Penguin series that grace our shelves including the Great Foods series, the clothbound classics and the exquisite F. Scott Fitzgerald series. This month, Penguin imprint Particular Books have published The Fox and the Star – written, illustrated and designed by Coralie herself. This magical book embodies all that Visual Verse stands for – that moment went words and images wrap themselves around eachother so perfectly that you could never imagine them being apart.

We are absolutely thrilled to be celebrating and leading this month with a piece by Ivan Vladislavić. Born in Pretoria, South Africa in 1957, he now lives in Johannesburg. His acclaimed fiction includes Double Negative, The Restless Supermarket and 101 Detectives. His work has won many awards, including Yale University’s prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize in 2015, for which writers receive an unrestricted grant of $150,000 to support their writing. His classic novel The Folly (http://www.andotherstories.org/book/the-folly/) , a sophisticated yet funny book about the power of suggestion and castles in the sky, is published by And Other Stories on 11 sNovember 2015. You read it here first!

Our second lead is the poet Helen Mort, whose first collection ‘Division Street’ was published in 2013 and won the Fenton Aldeburgh prize. She is a Douglas Caster Cultural Fellow at The University of Leeds.
And to celebrate properly, we have commissioned three pieces from longstanding contributors to the site, whose work we admire every month. Rishi Dastidar is a member of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen. A runner-up in the 2011 Cardiff International Poetry Competition and the 2014 Troubadour International Poetry Competition, his work has featured in the 2012 anthologies Adventures in Form (Penned in the Margins) and Lung Jazz (Cinnamon Press / Eyewear Publishing), and most recently in 2014’s Ten: The New Wave (Bloodaxe). He tweets @BetaRish.

Myrto Petsota was born in Athens, Europe. Places of residence during her formative years include countries that no longer exist, countries that are about to disappear and others that are yet to be, namely Czechoslovakia, Italy, Greece and Scotland. She now writes from Paris, where she also teaches, practices literary criticism and exile. She is immensely fond of the quarterly French literary review L’Atelier du Roman, where she publishes some of her critical pieces of writing.

And last but not least, Hazel Mason, who describes herself thus: ‘Proud to have been a sister in the NHS, now a happy opsimath in Norwich who has stumbled on the panacea of poetry, postal critiquing and vibrant literary group discussion, wallowing in words.’ She tweets @hazelmason10.

So dear writers, we hope you’ll be inspired to keep submitting, keep tweeting us, keep reading each other and talking about what you like about each others’ work. And we hope to see you all at our second birthday party, in conjunction with The Word Factory and the VS Pritchett short story prize, at Waterstone’s Picadilly on Saturday 28^th November, 6-8pm. Book here: http://www.thewordfactory.tv/site/events/ – we hope to see you there!

In the meantime, amidst all the celebrations, don’t forget what it’s really all about… the image is the starting point: the text is up to you.

Happy 2^nd Birthday Visual Verse!

Preti and Kristen

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