After celebrating 12 issues of the much-loved print journal, we have begun reading for our very first book-length title as Versal Editions.

In some ways, this call for work is familiar ground—we’re still using the same submission system, we are still community-centered, we’re still an Amsterdam-based international publishing entity, we still gravitate toward the experimental—and in other ways, it’s new terrain, a different journey. Not only is this our first submission call for book length manuscripts as a small press vs a journal, it is also our first-ever contest. And in that respect, the current call comes with the experiential learning curves, questions and notes-to-self.

There are the technical questions, there are the operational questions. There are craft-related questions, genre-specific questions, budget-related questions, production-related questions, existential questions. Many existential questions. There are personal questions: as the time-zone outlier (US Pacific Time) on an otherwise Amsterdam-based editorial team, how do I stay engaged and connected day-to-day when being remote from my former home feels remote? There are notes-to-self or to others on the team about spacing, poetic inquiry and narrative voice, about contest advertisements, timelines and programmatic cadences.

“In the midst of the known, the unknowing and the waiting, it’s exciting and humbling to see work coming in for the inaugural Amsterdam Open Book Prize.”

From writers and artists that we know and love, from ones we have hoped to know better, and from those that are brand new to us. The considerations, risks, calls to action, escape routes, reckonings, collaborations, choices in language and form, the identities, genres and geographies each in turn map to our desire to expand a dialogue through intersections, curatorial formats and creative spaces.

We had hoped that the quality and range of work that fueled and sustained Versal through its lifecycle and that commands the VERSO / stage would find its way to Versal Editions. We are enjoying the realization of that hope. And we are especially grateful to those who trust us with their work—work that is inquisitive, resilient, formal, demanding, yielding and prescient—and for the support from our community far and wide. We are accepting manuscripts for another couple of weeks and, as the weather turns rainy here in the Bay Area and chillier under the low Dutch skies that I miss, it’s feels good to have a stack of reading to settle into, ways to connect to meaning, and to be in a new place, again.