Image: Kimberley Richardson

Dear writers,

This August we have come over all hobo-ish, captivated by an image of a wandering traveller and his guitar, taken by the talented young visual storyteller Kimberley Richardson (http://kimyrichardsm.tumblr.com/) . He looks alone but of course there is someone else there – the photographer. And you: observing both. Displayed on the Visual Verse website the image almost sinks into the background, emerging like a wave.

As for our lead writers, this month we are delighted to have a bona-fide ‘Not the Booker’ nominee in our lead spot – Paul McVeigh (http://paulmcveigh.blogspot.de/) , whose debut novel The Good Son has made the Guardian’s longlist (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/27/the-magnificent-70-guardian-not-the-booker-prize-longlist-announced) . You can vote for it till Sunday night, and clearly we think you should. Not only that, Paul is Director of London Short Story Festival and Associate Director at Word Factory, the UK’s leading short story salon. He was born in Belfast where he began his writing career in theatre. He moved to London where he wrote comedy shows, some of which appeared in London’s West End. Since turning to prose, his short fiction has been published in journals and anthologies, been commissioned by BBC Radio 4 and read on BBC Radio 5.

On Page 2, we present poet, writer and editor Helen Tookey (https://helentookey.wordpress.com/) . Her work has appeared in magazines and anthologies including Best British Poetry 2013 and 2014. Her first full-length collection Missel-Child was published by Carcanet in 2014 and shortlisted for the 2015 Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry prize for first collections. She teaches creative writing at Liverpool John Moores University; we suspect her wonderful piece might inspire many of you this month.

If you’re on twitter you might have seen the #readwomen hashtag – this was started by writer Joanna Walsh (http://badaude.typepad.com/about.html) whose books include Fractals (Blue Pavilion Press), Hotel (Bloomsbury) and Vertigo (Dorothy, A Publishing Project). Her writing has also been published by The Dalkey Archive (Best European Fiction 2015), Granta, Salt (Best British Short Stories, 2014 and 2015), The Stinging Fly, Gorse, and others. She reviews for The Guardian, The New Statesman, and The National. She is fiction editor at 3:AM Magazine, and runs @read_women (https://twitter.com/read_women) , described by the New York Times as “a rallying cry for equal treatment for women writers”. This is a sneaky preview of her writing – her new book ‘Vertigo’ will be out later this year and is gaining some brilliant and heavyweight buzz: Kirkus starred review for Vertigo.

Check out these three wonderful writers and be inspired by the vagabond spirit of Kimberley Richardson’s image – time to get to it: the image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Happy summer,
Kristen and Preti

Visit www.visualverse.org (https://www.visualverse.org/) to see, read and submit your writing to this month’s Visual Verse: Anthology of Art and Words.

Home