Image by Grant Wood
Guest Editor: Eley Williams
Dear writers, readers and friends,
This month we are preoccupied with the Trump-a-thon. Donald’s quest continues and we find ourselves wondering: how is it that one man’s strange ideas are able to form a whole belief system? How is it that such a strange system can intoxicate so many believers? And who, exactly, are these believers?
With this weighing on our minds, there was only one possible image for the February issue: Grant Wood’s ‘American Gothic’ (part of the Chicago Institute of Art (http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565) collection). This 1930s work of eerie wonder has become an icon of American art, not least because it is beautifully painted and fabulously creepy all at once. We bestow this image upon you, our writers, to bring forth your words.
This month we are thrilled to welcome a new guest editor, British writer Eley Williams (http://www.giantratofsumatra.com/) . Twice shortlisted for the White Review Short Story Prize, Eley also edits Jungftak, a journal for contemporary prose-poetry, works for independent publishers Copy Press, and was recently appointed co-editor for fiction at 3:AM magazine. She has sustained three dictionary-based injuries so far this year, but regrets nothing.
Eley will edit Visual Verse for the next few months and kicks off her commissions with a group of the UK’s most exciting poets, writers and artists:
John McCullough (http://twitter.com/JohnMcCullough_) , whose first collection of poems, The Frost Fairs, won the Polari First Book Prize in 2012. It was a Book of the Year for The Independent and The Poetry School, and a summer read for The Observer. His second collection, Spacecraft (http://www.johnmccullough.co.uk/index.php/Spacecraft) , will be published by Penned in the Margins in April 2016.
Scottish writer Helen McClory (http://twitter.com/HelenMcClory) had her first flash fiction collection, On the Edges of Vision, published by Queen’s Ferry Press in August 2015 and won the Saltire First Book of the Year (http://www.saltiresociety.org.uk/awards/literature/literary-awards/scottish-first-book-of-the-year/) . There is a moor and a cold sea in her heart.
Helen Ivory (http://twitter.com/nellivory) is a poet and visual artist. Her fourth Bloodaxe Books collection is the semi-autobiographical Waiting for Bluebeard (May 2013). She edits the webzine Ink Sweat and Tears and is tutor and Course Director for the new UEA/Writers Centre Norwich creative writing programme. Fool’s World (http://www.gatehousepress.com/2015/12/fools-world-a-tarot-helen-ivory-tom-de-freston/) , a collaborative Tarot with the artist Tom de Freston, is out now from Gatehouse Press and she is working on a book of collage poems for Knives Forks and Spoons Press.
Prudence Chamberlain (https://twitter.com/PrueChamberlain) is Poet in Residence at Surrey University. Her work has been published in 3:AM, Poems in Which, HYSTERIA, By&By Magazine and Jungftak, while her collection I sit on your face in parliament square is forthcoming with Knives, Forks and Spoons Press. She is currently working on a Disney collaboration, House of Mouse, with poet SJ Fowler, and writing a book on empathy for Copy Press (http://www.copypress.co.uk/index/) .
Wendy Choi was born and educated in Korea, currently reading English at University of Cambridge. She likes to pickpocket words and thoughts from texts around her and exploits the difficulty of writing in a second language.
So there it is. Read, look, ponder, write. Not necessarily in that order.
The image is the starting point, the rest is up to you.
Kristen Harrison and Preti Taneja
with Eley Williams
mailto:visualverse@thecurvedhouse.com
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