Image by Mary Cassatt
Welcome dear writers to the 1st of May,
Our image this month might be classic, but our writers are raw brilliance. That’s how we like it here at VV.
Painted by American artist Mary Cassatt in 1893, The Child’s Bath depicts an ordinary moment in domestic life. But its quietness is misleading. Through her work, Cassatt gave voice and presence to women, offering a female perspective that had long been dismissed as inferior. Described as the embodiment of the ‘New Woman’, Cassatt played a crucial role in advocating for equality, particularly in relation to education.
We’re always on the look out for the best, most radical and boundary breaking work. So we’re very proud to publish work by Inara Verzemnieks, the author of the astonishing and moving Among the Living and the Dead, published this month by Pushkin Press (https://www.pushkinpress.com/discover-the-breathtaking-among-the-living-and-the-dead) . Inara teaches creative non-fiction at the University of Iowa, and writes regularly for the New York Times and the Atlantic, among other publications. She has won a Pushcart Prize and a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa. Her piece got us in the guts, then twisted them.
Next we bring you essayist and poet Will Harris (https://willjharris.com/) . He is the author of a chapbook, All this is implied, and a groundbreaking essay, Mixed-Race Superman which will be published this month by the very new and exciting Peninsula Press.
Following this, we have a piece by Scherezade Siobhan. An award-winning writer and psychologist, she’s a community catalyst who founded and runs The Talking Compass (http://www.thetalkingcompass.com) — a therapeutic space dedicated to providing counseling services and decolonizing mental health care. She is the author of Bone Tongue (Thought Catalog Books, 2015), Father, Husband (Salopress, 2016) and The Bluest Kali (Lithic Press, 2018). She says she can be found squeeing about militant bunnies @zaharaesque on twitter/FB/IG as well as www.zaharaesque.com (http://www.zaharaesque.com/) . She invites you to send her chocolate and puppies via nihilistwaffles@gmail.com (mailto:nihilistwaffles@gmail.com) .
To crown it all, a new piece by Rakhshan Rizwan. Rakhshan was born in Lahore, Pakistan and moved to Germany where she studied Literature and New Media. She is currently a PhD candidate at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Her poems have appeared in Blue Lyra Review, The Missing Slate, Postcolonial Text and elsewhere. She is the winner of the Judith Khan Memorial Poetry Prize (2015). Her debut poetry collection, Paisley, has been shortlisted in the “Best Poetry Pamphlet” category at the 2018 Sabateur Awards.
So – happy reading, writing and submitting. May is the month to settle in to the new season and we can’t wait to read your words. The image is the starting point, the rest is up to you!
Love,
Kristen, Preti, Lucie and Rose
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