The Second Prize-winner, ‘Memory’, by Paxton Avenue, explores a father-son relationship through the lens of reverie.  Building up layers of careful detail to create a darkly nostalgic mood, this story is readable and compelling.  The writer uses the five senses to lead us between the past and the present, shifting between seasons and years, between childish and adult impressions: ‘As a child, barely taller than the door handle, the boy woke into a high-mooned summer night’.  The story ends on a bitter-sweet moment, beautifully evoking the narrator’s sense of loss. The Third Prize goes to a piece of historical fiction by  Jim Kroepfl, ‘Spirit of the Pike’, which excels at natural description and skillfully conjures a far-off time and place. The main character, Kannihut, hunts a pike, his thoughts and movements echoing that of the elusive fish.  The story is built up moment by moment to create a vivid sense of Kannihut’s experience and the writing throughout is taut and captivating.

The three Highly Commended stories,  Julie Swan’s ‘Mind How You Go’, Joan Dowling’s ‘Cold Comfort’ and Andrew Campbell-Kearsey’s ‘Dying to Speak’ are all engaging tales that share a darkly ironic vision of life.  ‘Mind How You Go’ creates a futuristic world in which a tour-guide hosts a journey through the mind of a killer.  ‘Cold Comfort’ fuses the narrator’s wrenching grief to melancholy visions of her lost child returned to her, cleverly leaving the reader uncertain of whether or not this it a ghost story. ‘Dying to Speak’ is a darkly comic tale of illness, paranoia and eventual epiphany about the narrator’s tragic condition.

Look out for New Short Story competitions at Sentinel Literary Quarterly, including the African Prisons Project competition judged by Alison Lock and the Quarterly Short Story competition judged by me.

SENTINEL NIGERIA ALL-AFRICA SHORT STORY COMPETITION 2013

Closing Date: 28-Feb-2013

Theme: Open

Length: 1500 words maximum (Excluding title)

Prizes: N35,000 (1st), N20,000 (2nd), N10,000 (3rd), N4000 x 3 (High Commendation).

Fees: N450 / £2.50 per story

Publication: Yes. In Sentinel Nigeria Magazine

Judge: Judge Dibia

Enter online or by post here.

SENTINEL LITERARY QUARTERLY SHORT STORY COMPETITION

Judge: KATE HORSLEY

Closing March 31, 2013

Prizes: £150, £75, £50, and 3 x £10

Publication: In Sentinel Literary Quarterly Magazine.

Fees: £5 per story, £8/2, £10/3, £12/4

Enter Competition here

AFRICAN PRISONS PROJECT SHORT STORY COMPETITION 2013

Judge: ALISON LOCK
Closing Date: 20th March 2013
Prizes: £100, £50, £30, £10 x 2 + publication in Excel for Charity News Blog
Entry Fees: £5/1, £8/2, £10/3, £12/4 (Enter as many stories as you wish)

Enter online or by post

Two of my poems, ‘On Mending a Lost Letter’ and ‘Blue Plums’ have just appeared in Seventh Quarry Magazine and it was lovely to get my copy of it in the post and read some of the fantastic writing featured in there.  Here’s one of the poems of mine that was published in Issue 17, Winter 2013:

On Mending a Lost Letter

The paper’s yellowed, but the watermark’s

still plain, hand-made, sheer as a stocking.

Some perfume – Blue Waltz maybe – mingles

with ink that has turned grey from time.

He lines the pieces on linoleum,

tallies shred with shred, matches threadbare

ribbons of words, mends a g’s curve

an n’s bend, holds up the whole, reads her

round hand, lays his face against her

old address and hears the paper sing.

The boat dipped low.  The oar rolled against her fingertips, slid further away.  A wave slapped her face.  Wood groaned underneath.  She fell into the water, kicked against the boat, paddling the way Toby did when they were out on the beach.  But she couldn’t move well for the band round her chest.  She scrabbled.  Her breath hurt.  The boat slipped away.  Her head went down.  She bobbed up, mouth full, eyes burning.  The man stepped out of the boat.

She went under.  The water was so blue.  Sunshine, silver-white, above her.  The kind of day when women take their time.  The sun soft as a kiss.  Her chest on ice.  Swallowing salt.  Granny said don’t paddle past your knees – a trow will catch you!  May held her hand, screaming at the waves.

Her chest sings.  The sea is sapphires and silver.  A selkie swims up to her with green weed snarled in her hair.  Under the sea, girls become selkie wives, soft skin roughening to fins and scales.  They can never return to the human world, for their kind don’t know them again.  When the selkie comes close, she smiles and Oona knows everything will be alright, because it’s Ma and her arms are open wide.

I don’t know whether there’s some way of working all that into it (!) Maybe not…

Many thanks to Melissa Tricoire for this lovely review of John Brewer’s and my exhibition at the Double Negative Darkroom, Hackney!

Here’s an extract -

“Magic emanates from Brewer’s still lifes, creating a theatre of curiosities with human skulls, candles, medical instruments, tarot cards and other memento mori. The photographer’s series of acrylotype plates entitled Fragmented Dolls is remarkable for its artistry and kookiness. In these fascinating portraits, we see star dolls pre-dating the seventies made of porcelain or cheap plastic. But their rosebud cheeks, smiling faces and blinking eyes have long been lost – the toys of old now only present a decaying form covered with cracks and chips, bathing in spookiness and grotesqueness.

Vanitas also showcases pieces by writer and artist Kate Horsley, whose multi-media art mixes literature and photography. Her tintypes merge with altered books and her wooden peep boxes create a series of uncanny literary tableaux where the viewer is captivated by such fantastical creatures as a baby-headed spider, flying dolls and stuffed animals.” Read more…

8th December 2012  – 12th January 2013 at the Double Negative Darkroom

78a Glyn Road, Hackney, London E5 0JE; Launch event 8th December 2012

Growing out of the memento mori tradition of Renaissance Europe, vanitas is a genre of art that contemplates the transient nature of life.  Common symbols include skulls, rotten fruit, bubbles, smoke, watches, and hourglasses, all symbolizing the brevity of life and suddenness of death. In a series of unique photographic plates, historical photographic artist John Brewer juxtaposes the traditional still life compositions of the Dutch masters with haunting contemporary interpretations, challenging our perceptions of ancient and modern, the living and the dead. Writer and artist Kate Horsley merges tinted plates with the altered book and wooden peep-box, creating a series of secret tableaux, each one an intimate, private viewing.

I’m delighted to announce that my first novel, The Monster’s Wife, will be published by Barbican Press in June 2014 as both a paperback and an eBook.  Martin Goodman, editor at Barbican describes the tagline for their fiction as ‘Writing from the Discomfort Zone’ and The Monster’s Wife certainly fits that!

Following in the tradition of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Seaand Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly, The Monster’s Wife is a literary gothic that re-envisions Mary Shelley’s classic novelFrankenstein from the perspective of the girl Victor Frankenstein transformed into a Bride for his monster.  Oona Scollay is a sixteen-year-old scullery maid living on Hoy, a tiny island in Orkney in 1798.  When her best friend May disappears, Oona starts asking questions, but her search is thwarted by the conflicted loyalties within her close-knit community.  When she turns up shocking evidence, Oona becomes the next victim.  A prisoner in a dark room, living a hellish distortion of life, Oona must find a way to escape before her captor completes his plans for revenge.

I am currently working on a final edit and  the cover art is under discussion.  It all feels very exciting to think of the book emerging into print and I suddenly have a lot of new writing ideas…although I keep reminding myself I have to get this finished off first!

Today, Sam and I completed the first day of John‘s excellent course in wet plate collodion at his studio. His studio is filled with a cornucopia of curious objects, large format cameras  and Victorian lenses. During the course, we made images on tin, glass and plastic. Wet plate collodion is fantastic fun as well as being a beautiful artistic medium. I can really recommend the course to anyone interested in photography.

Here’s a video of John at work from fab alternative photography site, Film’s Not Dead.