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 10 | August 2018

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Image by Jon Tyson

Dear writers, readers and friends,

The August edition is alive, one day late this month due to travel commitments. We hope the extra day has simply given you time to build your enthusiasm.

For some reason all three of our lead writers have names beginning with ‘S’ this month. Maybe it’s because we’re based in the northern hemisphere and the summer is going to our heads. Or maybe it’s a nod to a strange and sublime image, meant to literally swirl your creativity into ever more intricate formations and bamboozle the words out of you. This captivating visual is courtesy of Jon Tyson whose fabulously gritty photographic work you will find here (https://unsplash.com/@jontyson) .

Our lead writer is Sam Guglani (https://twitter.com/@samirguglani) , a writer and Consultant Oncologist in Cheltenham who specialises in the management of lung and brain tumours. He has Masters degrees in Ethics (Keele, 2009) and Creative Writing (Oxford, 2014). He writes poetry, a column for The Lancet titled The Notes, and his novel Histories is published by riverrun (Quercus Books, 2017). He is Director of Medicine Unboxed, a project that engages health professionals and the public in conversation around medicine, illuminated by the arts, and his piece is intergalactically good.

Next up we have Samuel Fisher (https://twitter.com/@fishersamuk) , author of one of our debut novels of the year, The Chameleon. He also wears many hats – running Burley Fisher books in East London, where many, many writers find a warm welcome, support for their events and an excellent selection of books. And, he is also a publisher – of the recently minted Peninsula Press, bringing you thought-provoking essays in beautiful book form – a true example of the issues and objects of our times. His piece, to hint at its inspiration, is a thing of beauty.

Finally we are very excited to bring you a piece by Sarvat Hasin (https://twitter.com/@sarvathasin) . She was born in London and grew up in Karachi. She is the author of the novel This Wide Night (Penguin India, 2017) which was longlisted for the DSC prize for South Asian literature and the short story collection You Can’t Go Home Again (Penguin India, 2018). She is the fiction editor of the Stockholm Review.

So, dear writers, standards are high. Multitasking is the new job for life and we are here to remind you to write for love not glory – although we want that for you too.

And we are now looking forward to reading you! (Don’t forget the RULES: 50-500 words, written in response to the image in the space of an hour. Get it to us by 15 August, and we will publish the best 100 pieces.) The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Preti, Lucie and Kristen