A few months ago I came across the expressionistic photographs of Joe Coleman, a wonderful Australian artist. A few weeks ago Will Martin and Kat Phan got in touch with me about their new journal, The Short Anthology, a collection of short stories based on Colemans pictures.
The first issue uses eight of Coleman’s photographs of the sea from which six writers, from around the World, wrote a short story. The result was a series of disparate stories ranging from dystopian African sci-fi to a story about immigration and loneliness set in Dover, England.
The project is a beautiful marriage of words and images, a commingling of visual and textual, an initiative that brings artists and writers together in a format that extenuates both disciplines. The writers in this issue include; Dilman Dila, who was shortlisted for the 2013 Commonwealth Short Story Prize and is based in Uganda, Jonathan Kearnes, who is based in London, Scott Morris, who was shortlisted for the 2013 White Review Short Story Prize and is Fiction Editor of The Literateur, Katherine Proctor, non-fiction editor of ‘Should Does’ from North Carolina, Michael Salu, former artistic director of Granta Publications and Matthew Sperling, a writer of poetry, fiction and criticism and a Leverhulme Trust research fellow at Reading University.
Each issue will follow the same format and if you’re interested in buying Issue One then you can order it from their website for the very reasonable price of £7 or €8.50. And if you want to see more of Joe Coleman’s pictures check out the post I wrote on him in January.