Volume 08, Chapter 06 | April 2021

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Image by Cris Martín

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Dear writers, readers and friends,

This month at The Curved House HQ (Visual Verse mothership) we have been busy creating a new series of children’s books. So, in this spirit, we offer something playful to inspire your writing: a children’s book illustration by Spanish artist Cris Martín. We’re thrilled to be publishing Cris’ debut children’s book, coming out in the UK and US in October, so in the meantime you can see more of her work on her website Gato Marino (https://gatomarino.com) .

Before we dive in to our lead writers, a quick update on some improvements we are making to Visual Verse. In the feedback form we circulated earlier this year, many of you requested improvements to the Archive (https://visualverse.org/images/) section of visualverse.org. Your wish is our command… You can now see the Author and Artist names organised within an alphabetical list (still by first name as we can’t change that) and you can search by title. We hope this helps you to discover and share more great writing from the Visual Verse community.

So without further ado…

On page 1 we present the brilliant Tam Eastley, whose piece is a cleverly constructed choose-your-own adventure! Which way will the story unfold for you? Tam is a writer and web developer based in Berlin. She likes writing about reality TV, tech, the post-apocalyptic world, and is currently editing her way through her first novel. She has been published in The Wild Word (https://thewildword.com) and here on Visual Verse (https://visualverse.org/writers/tam-eastley/) , and is the co-creator of ongoing, a prompt journal for music and prose. When she’s not writing, you can find her cross stitching or going for various hikes around Berlin.

On page 2, Visual Verse regular Misky Braendeholm (https://visualverse.org/writers/misky-braendeholm/) brings all the nostalgia of childhood. Misky is a retired British-American poet who has called the UK home for the past 32-years. When not at her desk writing, you’ll find Misky with a pair of secateurs in the garden, or in the kitchen testing recipes as a “home cook”. Her poetry is regularly published with Ten Penny Players (https://www.tenpennyplayers.org) , Waterways: Poetry in the Mainstream (https://tenpennyplayers.org/mags.html) , which is a non-profit publication that supports children with additional needs. Misky never buys clothing without pockets.

And on page 3, John Solloway (https://visualverse.org/writers/john-solloway/) delivers a gem of a piece in a single sentence. John studied graphic design at the London School of Printing and Graphic Arts before pursuing a career in practicing and sometimes teaching graphic design. He has always had a love of words and language. He is a member of a creative writing group in Kingston-upon-Thames, his home town.

So, dear writers, we challenge you to evoke your inner child this month. Let your imagination write for you.

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

Kristen, Preti, Lucie, Isabel and Luke

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Volume 06, Chapter 11 | September 2019

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Image by Joelle Chmiel

Dear writers, readers and friends,

Welcome to September, and as the seasons turn we offer you a fitting visual by Joelle Chmiel, who captures both a sense of stillness and of bustle at a transitional time of year.

This month’s issue is guest-curated by our own Luke Larkin, who also edits Unstamatic (https://www.unstamatic.info/) , an online magazine of small prose and poetry. The artist and lead writers for this month are all tapped from Unstamatic’s family of contributors.

Joelle Chmiel (https://www.artlimited.net/m79d5144a%20or%20https:/lensculture.com/joelle-chmiel) was born in 1982 in Zürich, Switzerland, where she graduated medical and dental school, before working as a physician in maxillofacial surgery and dentistry. Since 2018, she dedicates herself full-time to photography and was winner of the StreetProjections 2018 contest from PhotoWerkBerlin, and second-place winner of Monochrome Awards 2018.

Carol McMahon’s bittersweet poem kicks off this month’s writing. Carol is a teacher whose work has been published in various journals (The Wild Word (https://thewildword.com/poetry-carol-mcmahon/) , Painted Bride Quarterly (http://pbqmag.org/carol-mcmahon-profit-margin/) , Mom Egg Review, Stone Canoe, Poet Lore) and has a chapbook, On Any Given Day, published by FootHills Press (2006). McMahon received an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop and when she is not with 11-year-olds spends her time either running or rowing.

Page two hosts Jen Schneider, who is an educator, attorney, and writer. Her work appears in The Coil, The Write Launch, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Popular Culture Studies Journal, Unstamatic, otoliths, Zingara Poetry Review, 42 Stories Anthology (forthcoming), Voices on the Move (forthcoming), One Sentence Stories, and other literary and scholarly journals.

Michelle Brooks’ poetry appears on page three. Michelle has published a collection of poetry, Make Yourself Small, (Backwaters Press), and a novella, Dead Girl, Live Boy, (Storylandia Press). Her poetry collection, Pretty in A Hard Way, will be published by Finishing Line Press in September 2019. Her work has appeared in the Iowa Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. A native Texan, she has spent much of her adult life in Detroit, her favorite city.

And rounding us out, Scott Russell Duncan, a.k.a. Scott Duncan-Fernandez. Scott recently completed The Ramona Diary of SRD, a memoir of growing up Native/Chicano-Anglo and a fantastical tour reclaiming the myths of Spanish California. Scott’s fiction involves the mythic, the surreal, the abstract, in other words, the weird. Scott received his MFA from Mills College in Oakland, California where he now lives and writes. He is an assistant editor at Somos en escrito. In 2016 he won San Francisco Litquake’s Short Story Contest. His piece “Mexican American Psycho is in Your Dreams” won first place in the 2019 Solstice Literary Magazine Annual Literary Contest. See more about his work and publications on Scott’s website (http://scottrussellduncan.com) .

So, take a peek through these windows and tell us what you find. You know the rules: 50-500 words, one hour. Subs close on 15 September. The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Luke, Kristen, Lucie and Preti

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@visual_verse (https://thecurvedhouse.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=34f4a503c2c926849e17dcf6f&id=02acdc9fd3&e=c32c18dbf0)
@unstamaticmag (https://twitter.com/unstamaticmag)

PS. When you’ve finished your Visual Verse submission for this month, head over to Unstamatic to read more great writing, enjoy more great art and submit your work. https://www.unstamatic.info/

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Volume 05, Chapter 05 | March 2018

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Image by Curated by Fiona Kearney, Lewis Glucksman Gallery

Dear writers, readers and friends,

What a wicked sense of humour those Irish have. Fiona Kearney, Director of Lewis Glucksman Gallery in Cork and our guest-curator this month, has bestowed upon us this surreal gift. These macabre little gnashers were exhibited at the Glucksman in a show called Grin and Bear It: Cruel Humour in Art and Life and presented as a re-creation of elements of Wake Games that used to be played with the corpse in Ireland.

The only match for this image is the playwright Enda Walsh whose work is fierce, deep, dark and very funny. His razor-sharp dialogue has a way of bewildering you with its absurdity while moving you with its humanity. It is a dream come true to publish him here after stalking all of his plays. The latest, an adaptation of Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers (https://www.giaf.ie/tours/grief-is-the-thing-with-feathers) , opens in Galway this month and stars Irish hottie Cillian Murphy who is arguably at his best when in an Enda Walsh play. It is produced by Complicité, doesn’t get better than that.

Emer Martin (https://www.instagram.com/emerobergo/?hl=en) sends us her words from a cottage in the west of Ireland. She grew up in the UK with Irish parents and read English Literature and Italian at Manchester University before working in national news journalism. In 2016, Emer left London and her job to ‘rewild’ and write. She’s now writing her first novel, The Road To The River.

Next up, we are thrilled to publish Isabel Waidner, the author of Gaudy Bauble (https://dostoyevskywannabe.com/original/gaudy_bauble) (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2017), which is shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize in the UK. Isabel is also the editor of Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature (https://www.dostoyevskywannabe.com/experiments/liberating_the_canon) (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2018), which includes work by Visual Verse contributors. Definitely worth a read.

Finally, wondrous new words by Kusi Okamura, founder and editor of The Wild Word (http://www.thewildword.com) magazine. All she’ll tell us is this: she lives in Berlin with her family. But you know, there’s so much more… start by checking out the Wild Word and their recently published fiction and poetry anthologies (https://thewildword.com/buy-our-anthologies/) .
So there it is, writers. Don’t forget the new rules: submit before 15th February. Also please only submit your piece once, and be patient. Any pieces that are submitted multiple times will not be considered for publication.

As always, enjoy the challenge. The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Kristen, Preti and Lucie

Find us on Twitter

@visual_verse (https://twitter.com/@visual_verse)
@obergo (https://twitter.com/@obergo)
@isabelwaidner (http://twitter.com/@isabelwaidner)
@thewildwordmag (http://twitter.com/@isabelwaidner)

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Volume 04, Chapter 08 | June 2017

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Image courtesy of the Bodleian Libraries

Dear writers, readers and friends,

This month we seen US Comedian Kathy Griffin fired from jobs and berated across the news and social media for an image of her with a beheaded Donald Trump. It was meant to be funny and perhaps if it were less bloody she could have got away with it. But it was particularly gruesome. Kathy’s saga is an example of how no two people ever perceive a single image in the same way. Kathy’s frame of perception, her life experiences, mean she sees it as funny. For others it is a symbol of hate, inciting a murder. For those who dislike blood and guts it’s just a bit gross. While our life experiences inform how we see, we writers can step away from our life experience and see through the eyes of characters and narraters to bring alternate views, perhaps even broadening our own minds in the process. So, who is seeing who in this month’s image? This intriguing Mermaid from the collection of the Bodleian Libraries (http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/) , Oxford University, is something you can
inspect from behind glass or, perhaps, turn the gaze back upon yourself, or us.

Our lead writer for June is a talent whose work we so admire, not just for his writing but also his instinct to bring art into every living moment, inviting participation and observation. Nigerian-born Inua Ellams (http://www.inuaellams.com/) is a cross art form practitioner, a poet, playwright & performer, graphic artist & designer and founder of the Midnight Run (http://www.themnr.com/) — an international, arts-filled, night-time, playful, urban, walking experience. He is a Complete Works poet alumni and a designer at White Space Creative Agency. Across his work, Identity, Displacement & Destiny are reoccurring themes in which he also tries to mix the old with the new: traditional African storytelling with contemporary poetry, pencil with pixel, texture with vector images. His poetry is published by Flipped Eye, Akashic, Nine Arches and several plays by Oberon.

Kathleen Heil (http://kathleenheil.net) graces us on page 2 with a beautifully controlled and moving piece. Kathleen is a writer, dancer, and translator. Her poems, stories, essays and translations most recently appear in The New Yorker, Five Points, FENCE, The Brooklyn Rail, Beloit Poetry Journal, Two Lines, SAND, and other journals. As a dancer, Heil has worked with various artists in the U.S. and Europe and performed her own choreography in New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Madrid, and elsewhere. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Sturgis Foundation, among others, she lives in Berlin. For those in Berlin, Kathleen has two workshops coming up – one on Rhythm and Phrasing (https://www.facebook.com/events/166433013891430/) and one on Style and Translation (https://www.facebook.com/events/247453242401643/) .

On page 3 we feature new writing from Erin O’Loughlin, a writer, translator and accidental wanderer. Originally from Australia, she has lived all over the world including Japan, South Africa and Italy. When she’s not busy living all her reincarnations at once (at least, that’s what it feels like some days) she is the associate editor for The Wild Word (http://thewildword.com/) magazine.

We have spent many afternoons reading The (http://thewildword.com/) Wild Word (http://thewildword.com/) where we found Deirdre Mulrooney (https://deirdre-mulrooney.squarespace.com/) , an emerging Irish artist living and working in Berlin. Raised working class in a small nation dominated by Catholicism and men, she now lives as a teacher, a mother and an artist discovering the joy of playing with taboos and visions of female identity that would, until all too recently, have seen her locked away. Her current work is a fantastical and brazenly irreverent take on femininity, sexuality, religion and power. See it in all its glory in her forthcoming exhibition, Bloody Milk River at Gallerie Baeren (https://deirdre-mulrooney.squarespace.com/new-cover-page/) in Neukölln, Berlin, from June 23rd.

Well? Who’s seeing who this month? The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Enjoy,
Kristen and Preti

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