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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