Image by Daniel Frost
Dear writers, readers and friends,
Here ye: we are shakin’ things up and making some changes to how we accept and publish submissions. These changes are intended to improve the process for you, our beloved writers, and help us to manage the growth of Visual Verse (something that continues to amaze us).
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New Submission Guidelines:
Henceforth we will release a new image on the 1st of each calendar month (as we do now) and accept submissions up until the 15th of the month. We will publish up to 100 submissions over the course of the month, no more. The other rules remain the same: 50-500 words, written within an hour, in response to the image. The writing must be new and original. Read more about our publishing policy (https://visualverse.org/about-visual-verse/) on the website.
We are excited to see how these changes pan out over the coming months. Both the deadline and the cap on submissions mean that we can focus on publishing the best of what comes in and ensure that these pieces are showcased on the site while the issue is still live. Please let us know if you have any feedback, either now or in the future when the new rules are underway. Email us at visualverse@thecurvedhouse.com (mailto:mailto: visualverse@thecurvedhouse.com) anytime.
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And now, without further ado, we present this wonderful, whimsical painting by Daniel Frost, an artist and illustrator whose work we have admired for so many years. Do your eyes a favour and follow his Instagram: @danielfrostillustration (https://www.instagram.com/danielfrostillustration) .
Our lead response comes from Megan Hunter, a hugely talented writer who is fast building an impressive body of work. Megan was born in Manchester in 1984, and studied English Literature at Sussex and Cambridge. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and she was a finalist for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award. Her first book, The End We Start From, was published in 2017 in the UK, US, and Canada, and has been translated into seven languages. It was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the 2017 Books Are My Bag Readers Awards and is longlisted for the Aspen Words Prize.
Megan has a long-standing relationship with Visual Verse. She says:
I started writing pieces for Visual Verse a few years ago, before I’d had anything published. I was working in an office and the visual prompts were an ideal creative stimulus during my lunch hour! I found the process of responding to an image, particularly within a one hour time frame, gave a freedom to my work that was so important when figuring out what I wanted to write, and is still so useful now. I think Visual Verse was probably the first time I’d ever seen my name ‘in print’ online, and it’s a real honour to now be writing the lead piece.
We’re pretty chuffed about that.
On page 2 we feature Maisie Chan, a published writer from Birmingham who now lives in Glasgow. She was recently commissioned to write stories for the Human Values Foundation and has also been published in the Penguin decibel Anthology The Map of Me. Maisie won the BBC Writersroom Competition BBC Bites and was a finalist in the 2015 Creative Futures Literary Awards. During 2016-2017, she was chosen for the Megaphone – an Arts Council/Publisher’s Association project to mentor and develop BAME writers writing their first novel for children or teens. Maisie has taught creative writing to children and adults and was an Arvon tutor in 2009. She is working on her first novel for teens about a fifteen-year-old British Chinese girl whose grandfather has early-onset Alzheimers.
Our next writer, Melissa Fu, grew up in Northern New Mexico and currently lives in Cambridgeshire, UK. Her work appears in many journals including The Lonely Crowd, International Literature Showcase, Skin Deep, and The Nottingham Review. In 2017, she was the regional winner of Words and Women’s Prose Competition and one of four Apprentices with the London-based Word Factory.
And on page 4 we have Yen Ooi, one of our favourite publishing people and a regular Visual Verse contributor. Dirty diapers, science fiction, and CreateThinkDo (http://createthinkdo.com/) is about all Yen has time for nowadays, but she did manage to pen this little piece and connect our February issue to another dimension…
There it is, writers. Submit before 15th February and as always, enjoy the challenge. The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.
Kristen, Preti and Lucie
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