Image: Sigrid Calon
Guest Editor: Kate Nic Dhomhnaill
Dear writers, readers and friends,
June’s Visual Verse celebrates digital storytelling. How does living in our oh so digital world affect or influence the ancient ritual of telling stories? Our image this month is a departure and will certainly challenge writers to test their visual literacy skills in interpreting this image. After reading our fantastically imaginative responses from our lead writers, we are so excited to see what you all come up with.
Our image this month comes from Dutch artist Sigrid Calon (http://www.sigridcalon.nl) , who builds her artistic language out of pure and geometric pattern. She is motivated by the desire to make new connections and to look differently at what we take for granted. Endlessly curious, her work reveals a wide-ranging curiosity and continuing research into questions of identity. Currently, Calon has turned to publishing, with To The Extend Of / | & -, which has brought her to Art Book fairs in London, Basel, Milan and Berlin to institutions such as MoMA and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Our lead writer this month is Kit Lovelace (http://www.romanticmisadventure.com/) , a writer and journalist from London. He is the author of Romantic Misadventure – an interactive Choose Your Own Adventure story about what a terrible hash he consistently makes of his actual, real-life love life. He also runs a live storytelling night, the similarly titled Romantic Misadventures, where people are invited and encouraged to discuss their love lives.
Our next writer this month is Alan Trotter. Alan comes from Aberdeen and is the winner of the Sceptre Prize for emerging writers. He has been published by McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and New Writing Scotland, and recently completed the first draft of Muscle, a novel. Hiswebsite (http://greaterthanorequalto.net) is far more interesting than you might expect.
Next up is Mary O’Donoghue. Mary’s short stories have been widely published in the USA and Ireland: Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Irish Times, Stinging Fly, Dublin Review, and elsewhere. She recently completed her first short story collection. One of its stories was long-listed for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award. She is currently writing her second novel. Her first novel, Before the House Burns, appeared from Lilliput Press in 2010. She serves as Fiction Editor at the journal AGNI.
Our fourth writer is Angela Readman. Angela’s stories have won The National Flash Fiction Competition, and The Costa Short Story Award. Her story collection Don’t Try This at Home was recently published by And other Stories and was long listed in the Frank O’ Connor Award, and short listed in The Saboteur Awards.
So, dear writers, whatever will you make of our image this month? What will it inspire in you and in your writing?
Kate Nic Dhomhnaill (Guest Editor)
with Preti Taneja and Kristen Harrison
https://www.visualverse.org