An organization is not the sum of its parts. It’s the sometimes magical, sometimes messy interactions of the people who make it up.

I joined the Versal team at the top of 2019, and as the newest member of the team, it took the near crumbling of all that we had hoped to achieve in 2020 for me to learn that. This year as we unraveled in our own individual and private ways, sometimes showing our wounds and sometimes not, I saw how the health of the team and the quality of our work would always be a reflection of our insides. Holding this reality alongside our commitment to our community publishing has begged some hard questions: What does this work mean to the world? What does it mean to us? Does any of it matter?

The last time the Versal team was all together in person was in February. Megan brought her newborn who had just turned 3 months old and Anna’s dog Olive had just passed away. We sat around Anna’s dining room table (with Jen on Skype from California), complained about the primaries (#teamElizabethWarren) and Margarita and I marvelled at Jen’s epic rant about Mark Zuckerburg. Once all that was out of system, we got busy discussing the exceptional writers on our shortlist in search of a winner.

Over mugs of hot tea and sweet & salty popcorn, we chose “For Work / For TV” by Fee Griffin as our winner and “Things I Have Forgotten Before” by Tanatsei Gambura as runner-up. Versal Editions had its first title. We were so pumped, we decided to call Fee right away huddling around a phone and grinning from ear to ear as Megan delivered the good news and Fee rewarded us with open jubilation.

But before we had a chance to announce our winners, the world as we knew it started to crumble around us.

COVID 19 was spreading, the Netherlands went on lockdown and we had to ask Fee and Tanatsei to sit on their good news. We wanted to give these wonderful writers the glory they deserved while also respecting and sitting inside the collective mourning of what was. So we hunkered down and waited for an opening in the articles, reports, videos, statistics, regulations, cancellations, conspiracies, sickness, death, and loneliness that we were all wading through. We postponed our April edition of VERSO / and crossed our fingers.

In April we made our announcement. Not because the world had corrected itself but because we owed it to our winner, our runner up, and ourselves to push through this moment. We set an ambitious and ultimately unrealistic goal to publish Versal Editions’ first book by July, cancelled the April and June editions of VERSO / then disappeared into our respective shelters and tried to cope.

*****

Two months later, I sent a message to our group chat and told the team I wouldn’t be attending our weekly meeting. George Floyd had just been murdered and Black trauma was trending. I was overwhelmed with grief and enraged at all the ways I had had to censor, edit, and silence myself into the small corners allowed for me in white literary spaces. I no longer felt sure I could be both wholly me and safe on the Versal team or in any all white space for that manner. I felt exposed and ever more suspicious of white allyship.

Weeks after that text message I agreed to join the team on a Zoom call to discuss the design of Fee’s book.

Most of us had our videos off, the call was heavy with tension and grief. The rest of the team had suffered through their own versions of 2020: hospital visits, family drama, lost work, and wildfires. We were a long way from the team we had been in February. We had all been changed.

Nothing has gone as planned. But at some point, the work becomes the light and what drives us forward is a knowing that it's the poets, writers, makers, and creators who will build the future we all deserve to live in. That’s what this work means. What this moment demands of Versal and therefore of the individuals who make it up is fortitude, radical imagination, and an orientation toward creating more possibilities for those of us who have had our hopes and dreams doused and have been unfairly burdened with the world's woes. With renewed resilience we are rising to the occasion.

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