Volume 04, Chapter 12 | October 2017

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Image by Leio McLaren

Dear Readers,

October: the month of transition. Memories of summer will be lingering for some, while for others it is about to arrive. For us, October marks the twelfth and final issue in Volume 4 of Visual Verse, so we are both reflecting and looking forward at the same time. Thinking about this, we are pleased to bring you a brand new visual prompt from Leio McLaren, a photographer based in Sydney, Australia who has a beautiful way of capturing new horizons.

In response, we are thrilled to bring you the writing of Cynan Jones who was born in 1975 near Aberaeron, Wales where he now lives and works. He is the author of five short novels, The Long Dry (Parthian, 2006), Everything I Found on the Beach (Parthian, 2011), Bird, Blood, Snow (Seren, 2012), The Dig (Granta, 2014), and most recently Cove (Granta, 2016). He has been longlisted and shortlisted for numerous prizes and won a Society of Authors Betty Trask Award 2007, a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize 2014 and the Wales Book of the Year Fiction Prize 2015. He is shortlisted for the National Short Story Award, 2017 for his story, The Edge of the Shoal, which judges called a “lyrically, poetically written account, lit with poignancy.” You can
listen to it on the BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05gy8f1 ) . The winner will be announced on Tuesday 3^rd October. Goodluck Cynan!

Next up is newcomer Gonzalo C. Garcia who was born in Santiago and spent his first years in Chile’s Colchagua Valley region, before moving to Switzerland and eventually to the University of Kent, where he studied for a PhD under Scarlett Thomas. His debut novel We Are The End, comes out October 19^th from Galley Beggar Press, and is nominated for this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival’s First Book Award, which is up for public vote (https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/the-festival/first-book-award) here (https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/the-festival/first-book-award) , should you wish to cast yours. He currently teaches creative writing at the University of Warwick.

Sending you off is Dolores Walshe a poet, playwright and fiction writer who comes to us garlanded in awards. Most recently, Dolores won the highly competitive
Berlin Writing Prize (http://thereaderberlin.com/home/competition/) which is organised by our friends at The Reader Berlin in partnership with the Circus Hotel and SAND Journal (http://sandjournal.com/) . Part of the prize is a one month writing residency in Berlin in Jan/Feb 2018. This year she was also shortlisted for the RTE Francis MacManus Short Story Award 2017 which she has won second place in twice (2015, 2009), and shortlisted and commended in the Anthony Cronin International Poetry Award 2017. Her stories have been broadcast by RTE Radio One (that’s in Ireland for our international readers) – and the list goes on – you can read more about her and her brilliant work, here (https://www.munsterlit.ie/Southword/Issues/29/walshe_dolores.html) .

So – whether you feel like the tide is rising or you’re feeling washed up, we are here to inspire you. Writing is survival. The image is the starting point, dear writers – the text is up to you.

Preti and Kristen

—

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Volume 04, Chapter 11 | September 2017

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Image by Alberto Garduño

George Spender is currently guest editor for Visual Verse. George is the senior editor of Oberon Books (https://www.oberonbooks.com/) , an independent publisher in London specialising in theatre and performance.

Dear writers, readers and friends,

It’s been three months since I began my guest spot with Visual Verse, and I’m keen to end on a high. I’ve had enormous fun in commissioning some of my favourite writers, and want to thank everyone who’s taken part for going outside their comfort zones and scaring their brains into writing something.

This month’s image, El sarape rojo, is by Mexican artist Alberto Garduño, probably painted around 1918. There’s a cinematic quality and a dry, piercing mischief to this image that should inspire some great responses.

Leading the September issue, we have the inimitable David Quantick. David is an Emmy-winning television writer, author, radiobroadcaster and journalist who’s written for over fifty different publications, from the Daily Telegraph to The Dandy. He and I met at the launch of a collection of absurdist writing by the gone-but-not-forgotten-and-more-people-should-know-about-him playwright N.F. Simpson, and published the marvellous writing manual How To Write Everything. He should be supreme inspiration to writers everywhere that there’s no such thing as writer’s block. As well as his off the wall contributions to Smash Hits, he’s written some of the best television of the past few decades, including Veep, The Thick Of It, Brass Eye and Harry Hill’s TV Burp.

That same night I met David, I also met Martha Sprackland (http://marthasprackland.co.uk/) , then assistant poetry editor for Faber & Faber. Twice a winner of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award, she was also the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors, and was longlisted for the inaugural Jerwood–Compton Poetry Fellowships in 2017. Her work has appeared in Poetry Review, LRB, Five Dials, New Humanist, Magma, Poetry London and many other places, and has been anthologised in the Salt Book of Younger Poets, Lung Jazz: Young British Poets for Oxfam, Best Friends Forever, Vanguard, Birdbook, and the Best British Poetry series. Her debut pamphlet, Glass As Broken Glass, was published by Rack Press in January 2017, and she is currently working on a full-length collection. A non-fiction book on sharks is forthcoming with Little Toller Books in 2018.

Finally, we have Dan O’Brien (http://danobrien.org/) , an internationally produced and published playwright and poet. He and I met after his extraordinary play ‘The Body of an American’ played at the Gate Theatre in Notting Hill. His many awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship in Drama and Performance Art, the inaugural Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History, the Horton Foote Prize for Best New American Play, the PEN Center USA Award for Drama, and, for poetry, the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. Originally from Scarsdale, New York, he lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter.

All that’s left to say is thank you, farewell, and remember – the image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

George
—

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Volume 04, Chapter 10 | August 2017

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Image by Kassiël Gerrits/CODA Museum

George Spender is currently guest editor for Visual Verse. George is the senior editor of Oberon Books (https://www.oberonbooks.com/) , an independent publisher in London specialising in theatre and performance. This issue is introduced by Visual Verse curator and co-founder, Kristen Harrison.

Dear writers, readers and friends,

This month, I (Kristen) have staged my own little Shakespearean coup. I have overthrown both our guest editor George and our supreme editor-in-chief, Preti Taneja (http://www.preti-taneja.co.uk/) , to commission our lead writer myself. Fear not, for my reasons are pure and good. Our very own Preti has been posited on page one as our lead writer for August at my behest, and after much persuading! August sees the publication of Preti’s first full-length novel, We That Are Young (https://www.galleybeggar.co.uk/paperback-shop/we-that-are-young) , a remarkable retelling of King Lear set against the rise of nationalism in contemporary India. Her publisher, Galley Beggar Press, call it “superb” while Andrew Motion has said the book is “Utterly engrossing, very smart, very moving… Subtle, ambitious and highly original”. Last month it was tipped by Justine Jordan, literary editor of the Guardian, as one of her Booker longlist predictions for 2017
(https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2017/jul/26/the-man-booker-prize-2017-longlist-who-should-be-on-it) . Preti has given a huge amount to Visual Verse since we launched, publishing literally thousands of submissions month-by-month, and developing a vibrant, talented community of writers. We would be nothing without her so to force her hand from editor to writer was a no-brainer. This is the only way for us, her Visual Verse family, to celebrate her debut. You can read the first chapter (https://www.galleybeggar.co.uk/extract-we-that-are-young-taneja) of We That Are Young on the lovely Galley Beggar website and you can also order one of 500 limited edition copies (https://www.galleybeggar.co.uk/shop-1/ehisxs910lbr9bpmdvl044yhkaofz7) , otherwise keep an eye out for it in all good bookshops from August 10.

So, here we unveil your glorious visual prompt by Dutch artist Kassiël Gerrits (https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kassi%C3%ABl_Gerrits) . It has two of my favourite aesthetic characteristics: the texture of a hand-printed work and perfect symmetry. Bliss. Preti kicks us off with a beautifully formed Three Lessons and she is followed by an exciting trio of writers commissioned by George.

On page 2 we present Livia Franchini (http://www.unitedagents.co.uk/livia-franchini) , a bilingual writer and literary translator from Tuscany, Italy. Her work has been featured, or is forthcoming, in Hotel, La Errante, The Quietus, 3AM: Magazine, LESTE and The White Review, among others. Her new English translation of Natalia Ginzburg’s The Road to the City is supported by the Italian Cultural Institute and is forthcoming with Twins Editions in 2017. Her Italian translations of Eileen Gunn and James Tiptree Jr. are forthcoming with Nero Edizioni in 2017. In 2016 she co-founded CORDA, a journal about friendship in the time of new borders. She is one of the writers-in-residence for the European project CELA, which will see her work translated into six different languages. Livia lives in London, and is currently working on her first novel. She is represented by Zoe Ross at United Agents. Find Livia on Twitter @livfranchini (https://twitter.com/@livfranchini) .

Next up we have Phil Porter (https://twitter.com/philipporter) , an award-winning playwright whose works include Blink (Soho Theatre), Vice Versa (Royal Shakespeare Company), The Man With The Hammer (Plymouth Theatre Royal) and The Christmas Truce (RSC). His play The Cracks In My Skin, for Manchester Royal Exchange, won the Bruntwood Award and Stealing Sweets And Punching People was produced by Theatre 503/Off-Broadway. In addition to his own works, Porter has edited and adapted a number of plays including Molière’s The Miser, Thomas Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters (RSC, with Sean Foley), Shakespeare’s The Tempest (RSC/Little Angel) and Janos Hay’s The Stonewatcher (National Theatre). Phil Tweets at @PhilipPorter (https://twitter.com/@PhilipPorter) .

And last but by no means least, Peter Doggett (http://www.peterdoggett.org/) , a magazine journalist and editor who spent two decades interviewing hundreds of musicians, authors and other public figures before becoming a full-time author ten years ago. In 2000, Penguin Books published his pioneering history of the collision between rock and country music, Are You Ready for the Country, which was later commemorated by a double-CD set issued by Warner Music. In his 2009 book, You Never Give Me Your Money, he traced the seeds of the Beatles’ split, and then followed the desperate and ultimately vain efforts of the four ex-members to deal with the fall-out, and escape its legacy. He is also the author of You Never Give Me Your Money and F**k: An Irreverent History of the F-Word, published under his mischievous pseudonym, Rufus Lodge, for the HarperCollins imprint, The Friday Project. Peter lives in London with the artist and illustrator (and professional counsellor), Rachel
Baylis. Find him on Twitter @Peter_Doggett (https://twitter.com/@Peter_Doggett) .

So writers, where will this bold and abstract prompt take you? You know the score, the image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Enjoy,
Kristen Harrison (Curator and Overthrower)
George Spender (Guest Editor)

—

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Volume 04, Chapter 09 | July 2017

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Image by Rupert Jessop

We are excited to welcome George Spender to the helm as guest editor of the next three issues of Visual Verse. George is the senior editor of Oberon Books (https://www.oberonbooks.com/) , an independent publisher in London specialising in theatre and performance.

Dear writers, readers and friends,

It’s July, and that means it’s rehearsal time for the biggest arts festival in the world. Thousands of writers, directors and performers are preparing to swarm to Scotland for the Edinburgh festival, hoping that their show will achieve critical acclaim, transfer to a major theatre, or if they’re really lucky, just about break even. Official figures for the 2016 festival list 50,266 performances of 3,269 shows taking place in 294 venues, so we are expecting big things in 2017. To mark the release of the festival programme in July, we have created a playwright special. We start with a visual prompt from photographer Rupert Jessop (http://www.rupertjessop.com/) whose fabulously whimsical scenes are full of drama and narrative. In response to the image we have four remarkable playwrights, taking us into a new genre of writing for Visual Verse.

Our lead writer is playwright and poet Glyn Maxwell (http://glynmaxwell.com/) . Glyn has long been regarded as one of Britain’s major poets, but is also an accomplished playwright, with several of his plays having been staged in the UK and USA, including Liberty, which premiered at Shakespeare’s Globe. His adaptations of Alice in Wonderland, The Beggar’s Opera, Cyrano De Bergerac and Wind in the Willows were staged at Chester’s new theatre Storyhouse. In 2012 Glyn published the acclaimed On Poetry, which considered the art through the eyes of four imaginary students. The imaginative, ‘sequel’ Drinks With Dead Poets: The Autumn Term, was published in 2016, with a paperback edition out later this year.

Our second playwright is Rita Kalnejais (https://www.oberonbooks.com/rita-kalnejais.html) . Originally from Australia, Rita worked as an actor before turning to writing. Rita was a resident playwright at Sydney Theatre Company in 2011/12. Her play for Soho theatre in London, First Love Is The Revolution premiered in 2015, and followed the story of a teenage urban fox falling in love with a teenage urban boy. The Evening Standard described it as ‘a cult hit in the making’. Her phenomenal play This Beautiful Future (http://www.theyardtheatre.co.uk/2017/04/writer-rita-kalnejais-on-this-beautiful-future/) , which premiered at the Yard Theatre in Hackney in 2017, is a love story set in World War Two. French farm girl Elodie and German soldier Otto are experiencing love for the first time, while outside, the world around them is exploding. Rita has a truly original mind, and her poetic dialogue crackles. Critic Andrew Haydon as the ‘best thing on in London at the moment bar none.’

Our third playwright is Texan-born, Chicago-based playwright Reginald Edmund (https://pwcenter.org/profile/reginald-edmund) . Reginald was the Artistic Director for the Silver House Theatre in Houston as well as the founder and producer for the Silver House Playwrights Festival and the Houston Urban Theatre Series. He is the founder of Black Lives, Black Words (http://www.blacklivesblackwords.org/) , a theatrical phenomenon that started out in a basement in Chicago, that now takes place all over the world. Reginald curates performances of short plays responding to the Black Lives Matter movement on both sides of the Atlantic, asking ‘Do Black Lives matter today?’ A collection of the plays was published in 2017. Themes of race, gender, and empowerment, as well as a wicked sense of humour, define Reginald’s work.

Our final playwright is Caitlin McEwan (https://twitter.com/caitlinmcew) . Originally from Edinburgh but now based in London, her play Monsters was awarded a special commendation in the Soho Young Writers Award 2016. Her play, Harry (http://www.underbellyedinburgh.co.uk/whats-on/harry) , a dark comedy about friendship, fandom, and Harry Styles, was performed in April 2017 at Theatre N16 in Balham and will play at Edinburgh’s Underbelly venue through August. Her play Thick Skin was selected for the 2017 National Student Drama Festival.

So writers, bring us the drama, in poetry, prose, dialogue or whatever style takes you. The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Enjoy,
George Spender

—

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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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Volume 04, Chapter 07 | May 2017

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Image by Alejandro Alvarez

Dear writers, readers and friends,

Behold the glorious hues of our May image. We have been craving colour: bold, bright, saturated colour. Perhaps it’s because the weather is having trouble making up its mind. Perhaps it’s a plea to the sun Gods to deliver us heat and optimism. Whatever it is, this image by Alejandro Alvarez has sated us, and has inspired three wonderful new pieces of writing.

We kick off the May issue with the award-winning poet and short story writer, Anthony Anaxagorou (https://twitter.com/anthony1983) , whose literary prowess extends to publishing and to poetry education. Anthony has published several volumes of poems and essays, a spoken word EP and a collection of short stories and we are thrilled to be among the many publications to have published his work. Anthony also founded Out-Spoken in 2012 and Out-Spoken Press in 2013 and was a judge for the BBC’s 2016 Young Writers Awards. Visit his (very stylish) website to find out more (http://anthonyanaxagorou.com/) .

Painter turned poet, Jera Sulamari, offers us this hommage to the artist Shaffic Aboud, who died in 2004. Jera is the daughter of Lebanese parents, who has recently arrived in London via Paris and is beginning to express the memories of home via spaces she visits in contemporary cities.

And finally, by some magical twist of fate, we are extremely lucky to have a brand new piece of writing by Chris Townsend (https://twitter.com/@marmeladrome) , essayist, columnist and editor who has been published in The Paris Review, LA Review of Books and Berfrois, among others. Chris completed a doctorate in English literature at Cambridge University before moving to Berlin, where he is now based. Find out more on his blog (https://christownsendwriting.wordpress.com/) .

So, dear writers, what words will you paint with this burst of blue? The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Enjoy,
Kristen and Preti

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Volume 04, Chapter 06 | April 2017

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Image by Oliver Burston (aka Spooky Pooka)
Overall winner of the 2017 Wellcome Image Awards.

Dear writers, readers and friends,

It is April, and it is around this time each year that the Visual Verse team come together to hatch new plans. We drink, we eat and we talk about how much your writing inspires us to keep going, and to do more. This year our chats are focussed on how we will create the first printed anthology of Visual Verse and what shape it will take. And, of course, how we will fund it properly to ensure it’s the best it can be. We hope to announce these plans before the summer so stay tuned.

In the meantime, we are thrilled to have our first collaboration with the Wellcome Trust, whose work we so admire. This month we present the winner of the annual Wellcome Image Awards as your writing prompt. These awards showcase science imaging in the form of photography, illustration, data visualization and any other visual media. The technologies and ideas used to visualize organisms, disease, bacteria and scientific data are becoming more sophisticated each day, and are having a huge impact on how we understand our world. And, in the case of the winning image, how we understand individual experience of illness. Illustrator Oliver Burston (aka Spooky Pooka) (http://www.spookypooka.com/) has won the award with this haunting image embodying the physical and emotional impact of Crohn’s disease, a condition he lives with. Visit the Wellcome Image website (http://www.wellcomeimageawards.org/) to find out more.

In response to this image, our first two pieces this month are rather special. They were written as a series by friends Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney, who co-run the website SomethingRhymed.com, which celebrates female literary friendship. They are also the authors of A Secret Sisterhood: The Hidden Friendships of Austen, Brontё, Eliot and Woolf, which will be published, with a foreword by Margaret Atwood, in June 2017. Emma’s novel Owl Song at Dawn was recently named BookHugger Book of the Year, Emily is a winner of the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize and they both teach at New York University, London. So much amazingness.

Our third lead is by Amanthi Harris (http://www.amanthiharris.com) , a writer and artist who studied at Central St Martins and Bristol University. She won the Gatehouse Press New Fictions Prize 2016 with her novella Lantern Evening which is published by Gatehouse Press. Her short stories have been published by Serpent’s Tail and broadcast on BBC Radio 4 as Afternoon Readings. She is part of the V22 Artist Collective and works in 3D and drawing. She runs StoryHug (http://www.storyhug.com) an Arts Council England funded art and storytelling project.

And, to cast you off, we present new words by James Clammer (https://twitter.com/JamesClammer) , a writer based in Sussex, England. His novel for young adults, Why I Went Back, has been longlisted for the Branford Boase Award, and his short stories have been published by Galley Beggar Press. He writes, nightly, in a winterproofed shed at the foot of a cliff.

So there, dear writers, is your spring selection (for those in the northern hemisphere) or autumn inspiration (for those south of the equator). Before we let you go we also want to thank Lucie Stevens (http://www.luciestevens.com/) , our guest editor, who does such an immense job of helping us to bring your work to the site each month (while also writing her own novels). Thank you Lucie.

Enjoy, be inspired and don’t forget: the image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Love, Kristen and Preti

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Volume 04, Chapter 05 | March 2017

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Image by Tertia Van Rensburg

Dear Writers,

Well, it is spring in our parts of the world (Cambridge and Berlin). That means it’s March so we are bringing you the freshest shoots of the best new art, fiction and poetry to be picked from the bushes as they green. And in contrast, an image with an almost wintery aesthetic – well these are strange times of mixed seasons and feelings – and our job is only to inspire you.

Our image this month is most mysterious, even a little spooky. It is brought to you by a South African photographer, Tertia Van Rensburg, who is equally mysterious and yet has a most epic Pinterest collection here (https://de.pinterest.com/arttantaluz/) .

In response, we are very pleased to bring you a writer, and formerly guest-Editor, of our own Visual Verse, Eley Williams. As well as introducing you to her first book of short stories, Attrib. and Other Stories, which is out this month from Influx Press, she is co-editor of fiction at 3:AM magazine with prose in Ambit, Night & Day, Structo and The White Review. Her collection Attrib. (Influx 2017) was chosen by Ali Smith for the First Light ‘best of debut fiction’ slot at this year’s Cambridge Literary Festival, UK – come if you can, on Saturday 23 April at 1pm. Eley also has a small book of poetry ‘Frit’ forthcoming from Sad Press and her tweets are short works of literary loveliness all by themselves: @GiantRatSumatra (https://twitter.com/@GiantRatSumatra)

Next up is Charlie Fox, author of This Young Monster, from Fitzcarraldo Editions, which was published in February – just a week ago, in fact. It has been called, ‘A performance as original and audacious as any of the characters within – it crackles off the page, roaring and clawing its way into the world, powered by a brilliant vagabond electricity,’ by the wonderful Chloe Aridjis, author of Book of Clouds. Charlie was born in 1991, he lives in London and his work has appeared in many publications including frieze, Cabinet, Sight & Sound, ArtReview, The Wire and The White Review. Catch more from him @Ghostwoodfox (https://twitter.com/Ghostwoodfox)

And finally, we are absolutely thrilled to publish Mahtem Shiferraw on Visual Verse. She is a poet and visual artist from Ethiopia and Eritrea. Her poetry collection, Fuchsia, won the Sillerman Prize for African Poets, and her work has been published in various literary magazines. This is writing to make your skin shiver, it is so good.

Enjoy dear writers, and get ready for your own creative rush – then send us your 50-500 words, and we will get publishing soon.

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

Kristen and Preti

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Volume 04, Chapter 04 | February 2017

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Image by National Museum of Denmark

Dear writers, readers and friends,

With the world in a state of protest and flux, turning upside down and inside out, endurance and tenacity are needed. This month we have unearthed a remarkable image from the National Museum of Denmark (http://en.natmus.dk/) that reminds us that we can always surprise ourselves, if we try hard enough. We might feel we are being twisted into impossible positions, we might need to escape, but we can always achieve more than we think. Whatever your response to the current climate you can rely on us to give you an image and words that will inspire and challenge you. Look at this image, look again, then write.

Our lead piece this month comes from the extraordinary writer and activist Hannah Silva (http://hannahsilva.co.uk/) , a poet, playwright and performer known for her innovative explorations of form, language and voice. Her debut poetry collection Forms of Protest (Penned in the Margins) was Highly Commended in the Forward Prizes. She won the Tinniswood Award for Best Radio Drama Script with her verse play ‘Marathon Tales’ (BBC Radio 3) and has been shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry.

We always love celebrating our regular contributors’ successes and our second lead this month comes from Sohini Basak. She has poems and short stories in journals including Visual Verse, 3:AM Magazine, Out of Print, Missing Slate, Ambit, Helter Skelter, Ofi Press, Paris Lit Up, as well as in print anthologies of Emma Press and Poetrywala. The big news is that her debut poetry collection We Live in the Newness of Small Differences has won the inaugural Beverly Series manuscript prize and will be out from Eyewear Publishing in early 2018. She has also recently received a Toto Funds the Arts award for her poetry. She currently lives and works in Delhi.

And for balance we are pleased to bring you the words of Haider Shahbaz, a Pakistani writer and translator. His work has appeared in Brooklyn Rail, Los Angeles Review of Books, Jadaliyya, and elsewhere. He is currently the Charles Pick Fellow in Writing at University of East Anglia.

So there you have it – a fine selection to start this short month, and now you know the drill. The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Let us shout loudly with our words, and turn this world the right way around.

Preti and Kristen

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Volume 04, Chapter 03 | January 2017

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Image by Manon Bellet

Dear writers, readers and friends,

Welcome to 2017. This past year has been another wonderful one for Visual Verse. Thanks to you, our writers, we’ve grown in submissions and followers and the inbox is bursting every week. It is such a pleasure to see you continue to return each month and deliver new words. And it is such a pleasure to have a platform from which we can shine a spotlight on fantastic writers, published and unpublished. In 2016 we’ve been proud to feature a Goldsmith’s Prize winner, a Booker longlistee, debut writers and those who have collections forthcoming next year. Some of you have taken work inspired by Visual Verse to the next level – it’s found its way into poetry collections and into live performances as well as onto your own websites. We are thrilled by all of this and can’t wait to see what next year will bring.

One thing you may not realise, too, is how much your writing inspires the artists we feature here on Visual Verse. It is a unique experience for them to see how so many people, with wildly diverse perspectives and styles, respond to their work. This dialogue between artist and writer is the seed from which Visual Verse was grown and it is one of the things that makes us most proud.

So without further ado, we are delighted to bestow upon you our first visual prompt for 2017. This magnificent image comes from Manon Bellet (http://www.manonbellet.com/) , a French artist currently based in New Orleans, US. Bellet’s work looks at the intersections of nature conservation and art preservation, an unconventional pairing, and tries to challenge our perceptions of our environment. This image is from her series Sous Surface and is one of those images that presents something different each time you view it. What will you make of this one?

Our lead writers for January 2017 are a celebration of our connections beyond the geographical. We begin with the elegiac, romantic Emmanuelle Pagano translated from the French by Jennifer Higgins and Sophie Lewis. Pagano’s fragmentary musings on love and desire, Trysting (http://www.andotherstories.org/author/emmanuelle-pagano/) was published in 2016 by & Other Stories. She lives and works on the Ardèche plateau. She has written more than a dozen works of fiction, has won the EU Prize for Literature and her books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. She regularly collaborates with artists working in other disciplines such as dance, cinema, photography, illustration, fine art and music. A perfect start to our year. Translator Sophie Lewis (https://twitter.com/sophietimes) is a freelance editor and translator from French and Portuguese. Among the writers she has translated into English are Stendhal, Jules Verne, Violette Leduc, Emmanuelle Pagano, Marcel
Aymé, Andrée Maalouf, João Gilberto Noll, Pierre Gripari and Emilie de Turckheim. Jennifer Higgins (https://twitter.com/JennyTranslates) is an editor and translator from French and Italian. She has translated several works of fiction, including Emmanuelle Pagano’s Trysting, and has written a book about English translations of French poetry.

Our second lead is poet Rachel Plummer (http://www.rachelplummer.co.uk) who lives in Edinburgh with her partner and two young children. She has had poems in magazines including Mslexia, The Stinging Fly and Agenda. She is a recipient of the Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award for poetry. She has had poems placed in numerous competitions, including the Flambard Prize, Penfro, and the Troubadour Prize.

For our third lead we bring you the robust writings of Agri Ismaïl, who is based in Sweden and Iraq. His work has appeared in The White Review, Guernica, Litro and 3:AM Magazine amongst other places, traversing and transcending all kinds of borders.

And last but not least, our up and coming spot goes to Cage Williams, a poet, writer and musician based in London. He studied literature at Goldsmiths College and he writes on subjects ranging from jazz and the New York School poets to Shakespeare. Find more writing by Cage Williams here (http://literateur.com/four-poems-by-cage-williams/) .

So we go on… boats against the current… pulling into the future. Let us create another year’s worth of beautiful art and words. The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Preti and Kristen

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Volume 04, Chapter 02 | December 2016

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Image by Julien Menier

Dear writers, readers and friends,

What a month it has been for this precious world. It is easy to feel helpless, but we have work to do. As writers and publishers it is our job to create the stories that will help to make sense of it all. It is our job to create the poetry that gives us meaning when meaning isn’t clear.

This month’s image came to us almost by accident and feels perfect for this confusing time. It seems to say: what is real, and what is not? Is it a fictional scene from a mystical film, or is it a very real moment between man and nature? The image is by Belgian photographer, Julien Menier (aka Lost Wanderer (http://julienmenier.photoshelter.com/index) ), who roams the world with little more than a bicycle, camera and tent, making photos that only a solitary wanderer can make. His work is full of empathy and that, dear friends, is just what we need right now.

Our headliner this month is Paris-based Adam Biles (https://twitter.com/adambiles) , author of Feeding Time (Galley Beggar Press) which was published in October this year. We’ve read this book and we can report that it’s a hilarious romp through… an old people’s home. A rare view into a space fiction doesn’t usually go. Here the inmates live in the past and the staff is trying to escape in any way they can. And with its Boys Own Adventure style, time slips and graphic (novel) insertions, there isn’t much else like this in bookshops now. Reviews have been outrageous and ecstatic, with the Guardian noting its ‘core of sadness’ and ‘glorious comic verve’, and praising Adam as a ‘megawatt talent.’ ‘Hurrah,’ as Dot, the lead character of Feeding Time might say.

We’re continuing the theme of empathy and social justice with work from Louisa Adjoa Parker (https://twitter.com/LouisaAdjoa) , a British writer of Ghanaian and English heritage who has lived in the rural West Country since she was thirteen. Louisa started writing to talk about the racism and domestic violence she experienced as a child and young woman. Her first poetry collection, Salt-sweat and Tears was published by Cinnamon Press in 2007. Cinnamon also published her poetry pamphlet Blinking in the Light in 2015. Louisa’s work has appeared in a range of publications, including The Forward Prize collection 2008, Envoi, Wasafiri and many more. She has also written articles for Gal-dem magazine. Louisa has been shortlisted by the Bridport Prize and Live Canon Competition, highly commended by the Forward Prize, and longlisted by the Mslexia Novel Competition. She is currently working on a first short story collection, novel and second full-length poetry collection, with
mentors Jan Fortune and Jacob Ross.

Our next piece comes from Khairani Barokka (http://khairanibarokka.com/) a writer, poet, artist, and PhD researcher in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths University, London. Before this, she was a New York University Tisch Departmental Fellow and Indonesia’s first Writer-In-Residence at Vermont Studio Center. Okka is the writer/performer/producer of Eve and Mary Are Having Coffee, Indonesia’s only Edinburgh Fringe representative in 2014; co-editor of HEAT: A Southeast Asian Urban Anthology (Buku Fixi, 2016); co-editor of Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches, 2017); writer-illustrator of Indigenous Species (Tilted Axis, 2016); and author of debut poetry collection Rope (Nine Arches, 2017). In 2014, UNFPA recognised her as an Indonesian Young Leader Driving Social Change for arts practice and research.

And our final gift of the season is by Amrou Al-Kadhi (http://www.amroualkadhi.com) , a writer, performer and a filmmaker. Amrou set up the musical comedy drag troupe Denim (http://www.denim-uk.com) whilst a student at Cambridge, which is now in its 6th year and touring around the country. This included a set with Florence and the Machine at Glastonbury the year that she headlined. Amrou is also a queer filmmaker, interested in using and subverting traditional film tropes to tell queer narratives in a way that is accessible. His first short Nightstand was executive produced by Stephen Fry and distributed by Peccadillo Pictures, and he currently has two features in development. Amrou is the co-writer and star of a comedy series about a second generation Egyptian drag queen in London, Nefertiti, currently in development with Big Talk Productions. Amrou is represented as a writer/performer/filmmaker by United Agents.

So dear writers, that is it for another temporal year. We wish you all seasons greetings, and looking forward to lots of early presents for you and us, an inbox full of your brilliant words. What more could we want?

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

Love,
Kristen and Preti

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Volume 04, Chapter 01 | November 2016

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Image by Hernan Bas

Dear writers, readers and friends,

Happy Birthday! Visual Verse is three years old this month and we are thrilled to continue to grow this very special publication. We now have well over 1000 writers and readers getting this newsletter each month and we receive up to 150 submissions with each new issue. Over the last three years we have published writers from around the world – New Zealand to Scotland and Argentina to Japan. Some have been nominees (and even winners) of Bookers, Goldsmiths and Polari prizes. Some have gone on to publish debut novels and short story collections. We have championed big names and up-and-coming ones, from small presses and none – and every month we find our inbox stuffed full of the best, the freshest, the most exciting and radical writing from around the world. Today we celebrate Visual Verse as a platform for new writing, no matter where it comes from, and we celebrate you. Our writers who have made Visual Verse what it is.

A birthday for Visual Verse means the start of a brand new volume. Volume 04, Chapter 01 features Miami-born artist Hernan Bas (http://www.lehmannmaupin.com/artists/hernan-bas) , the candle on our cake. His work is often inspired by stories, full of literary intrigue and tinged with nihilistic romanticism and old world imagery; he says his influences include Oscar Wilde and Joris-Karl Huysman. He has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions around the world, including at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and at the 53rd Venice Biennale. His work is part of the permanent collections of New York’s Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art among others.

Hernan’s works are stories that unfold and Visual Verse is nothing if not an act of translation: the world and all its art transformed into words. This month we decided to go even more meta and lead with some fantastic writers who are also actual translators. For where would literature be without these multilingual multi-talents?

The icing our cake is a lead piece by Maureen Freely, the author of three works of non fiction and seven novels, including, most recently, Sailing through Byzantium, an elegy to the art of thinking in many languages. She is also the translator of five books by the Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, and a number of memoirs, biographies, rising stars and 20th century classics. Her translation with Alexander Dawe of The Time Regulation Institute by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, was awarded the Modern Languages Association Lois Roth Award for a Translation of a Literary Work in 2014. She has been a regular contributor to the Guardian, the Observer, the Independent and the Sunday Times for three decades, writing on feminism, family and social policy, Turkish culture and politics, and contemporary writing. As President of English PEN, she champions free expression worldwide. As the former chair of the Translators Association, she also works with campaigns aiming to promote world
literature in English translation. It’s wonderful to celebrate Visual Verse with her.

Our cake’s first layer comes from Cecilia Rossi, originally from Buenos Aires, who holds an MA in Creative Writing from Cardiff University and a PhD in Literary Translation from the University of East Anglia, where she now works as a Lecturer in Literature and Translation and convenes the MA in Literary Translation. Her original poetry has appeared in several journals including Poetry Wales and New Welsh Review. In 2010, her translations of Alejandra Pizarnik’s Selected Poems were published by Waterloo Press. In 2013 she won a British Academy Small Grant to undertake research into the Pizarnik Papers at Princeton University Library. Her latest translations of Pizarnik’s prose texts and excerpts from her journals appeared in Music and Literature No. 6.

The ganache is by Saskia Vogel (http://www.saskiavogel.com) , who has written on the themes of gender, power, and sexuality for publications such as Granta, The White Review, The Offing, Sight & Sound, and The Quietus. Her translations include work by leading female authors, such as Katrine Marcal, Karolina Ramqvist and the modernist eroticist Rut Hillarp.

And the final layer is by Jeffrey M. Angles, who has spent his life traveling back and forth between Japan, where he lived for many years, and the US, where he is a professor of Japanese literature and translation at Western Michigan University. He is the award-winning translator of dozens of Japan’s most important modern Japanese authors and poets. He believes strongly in the role of translators as social activists, and much of his career has focused on the translation of socially engaged, feminist, or queer writers into English. He writes poetry in both English and Japanese, and his collection of Japanese-language poetry Watashi no hizuke henkō sen (My International Date Line) was published by Shichōsha in 2016.

As an extra slice, if you want to hear more about the art of translating fiction, tune in to BBC Radio 3 on 24th November at 10pm when Preti will be picking some of the latest brilliant new books recently translated into English, and discussing them live.

Enjoy the flavours, dear writers, then get inspired, and send us presents we can share.

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

Kristen and Preti

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