I was commissioned to write a piece for the latest installment of Visual Verse, an online anthology of text and image. The deal is that they send you an image and you spend one hour writing a text of some kind to go with it, in 50 to 500 words. I wasn’t sure whether I was allowed to look at the image before the hour started, so I didn’t. It was a good and enjoyable process writing this piece. I spent about half the time generating the words and the other half changing the punctuation and some words to get the rhythms right. One thing I’ve learned about my writing (in general, not specifically from this exercise) is that I like to try to push sentences into run-ons to see if I can get away with it, or what I can do with it. In this case, a very long run-on sentence that built towards the end got totally chopped up and reconfigured during that half-hour of buffing and waxing. Anyway, here’s “A Fresh Slice”:

“A Fresh Slice” — Visual Verse Volume 01 Chapter 08

There are 13 different responses to the image, which is by Jenni Fagan. You can read all of them here.