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 08 | June 2018

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Image by Sharon McCutcheon

Dear writers, readers and friends,

Behold your June visual prompt, in all its shimmering glory. This one comes to us from photographer Sharon McCutcheon (https://unsplash.com/@sharonmccutcheon) via Unsplash. We are so impressed by the quality and commitment our writers bring to Visual Verse that, for this month, we are showcasing and celebrating you. We are publishing, in our lead spots, three regular contributors to the site: Liz Young, Michael Caines and Helen Laycock. Each of them has an extensive collection with us, and their work caught our eye. By inviting them to lead, we’ve discovered just how prolific you all are – self publishing, working for literary magazines, and submitting work to many different places while writing in different genres and winning prizes too. It’s incredible to publish your work each month and just goes to show, you never know who your neighbours are on the site, who is reading your work, and where that might take you next.

Before introducing our regulars, we are thrilled to announce our headliner Julia Webb, a Norwich-based poetry editor for “Lighthouse (http://www.gatehousepress.com/lighthouse/) “, a journal for new writing which we love (and which you should buy, read and submit to). Julia also works as a poetry mentor, creative writing tutor and she blogs about writing (http://visual-poetics.blogspot.com/) . In 2011 she won the Poetry Society’s Stanza competition. Her first collection “Bird Sisters” was published by Nine Arches Press in 2016. Her second collection “Threat” is due for publication by Nine Arches Press early in 2019. You can read more about Julia and her first collection on the Literary Consultancy’s Showcase (https://literaryconsultancy.co.uk/showcase/julia-webb/) or at Nine Arches Press (http://ninearchespress.blogspot.com/2016/05/featured-poems-julia-webb.html) or read some recent poems here (https://proletarianpoetry.com/tag/julia-webb/) and here
(https://atriumpoetry.com/tag/julia-webb/) .

So now to our wonderful regular contributors. We kick off with Liz Young (https://www.facebook.com/lizyoungwriter) on page 2, a self-publishing whizz who lives in Sussex where she writes anything from flash fiction to poetry to novels – wherever her imagination takes her. She was first persuaded to submit to Visual Verse by poet Vanessa Gebbie, whose poetry was featured in a local Arts Festival. Liz also uses another photographic prompt each week to write 100 words of flash fiction on her blog (http://lizy-writes.blogspot.co.uk/) . Her debut novel A Volcanic Race (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Volcanic-Race-novel-Living-Rock/dp/1979086575/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1517654749&sr=1-1&keywords=a+volcanic+race) is getting amazing reviews from readers who are eagerly awaiting the forthcoming sequel.

On page 3 is Michael Caines, who works at the Times Literary Supplement (https://www.the-tls.co.uk/) and is co-editor of the recently founded independent literary magazine, Brixton Review of Books (https://twitter.com/BrixtonBooks) . He is the author of Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century (https://global.oup.com/ukhe/product/shakespeare-and-the-eighteenth-century-9780199642373?cc=gb〈=en&) and a founder member of the Liars League (http://liarsleague.typepad.com/) .

Helen Laycock (https://www.facebook.com/helenlaycockauthor/) is our final lead this month, and one of our most dedicated regulars at Visual Verse. Her poetry has appeared in Popshot, The Caterpillar, Full Moon and Foxglove (Three Drops Press) and Poems for Grenfell (Onslaught). Since winning the David St. John Writing Award for Novice Poetry in 2006, her work has been acknowledged in many competitions. She has also had humorous poetry published on Jonathan Pinnock’s website Spilling Cocoa Over Martin Amis. Helen also writes flash fiction, short stories and plays. She has compiled three short story collections and eight works of children’s fiction which you can discover here (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Helen-Laycock/e/B006PGFVL6) .

So, let us see what you make of this image, one that is oozing with inspiration. The image is the starting point, the rest is up to you.

Kristen, Preti, Lucie and Rose

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