Competition Results

Organiser’s Comments

There were over 220 entries received, nearly 90% of which arrived digitally. Regrettably, some entries had to be disqualified: either for want of an entry fee, inclusion of the author’s name on the script, or for having seen light of day elsewhere first. If one is to stand a chance of winning a competition, reading and adhering to the rules are a must.

Thanks must also go to members of the Circle who read through initial tranches of stories, selecting those which went to the final judging. Their efforts, reading between them the equivalent of Books 2, 3 and 4 of the Harry Potter series, are greatly appreciated. My thanks also to Spencer Leigh, who had the hardest job of all in deciding the winning stories. He has carried out his duties with professionalism and good humour, and has been a delight to work with. Please enjoy his words of wisdom, and his selection of the winning stories.

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Chief Judge’s Comments: Spencer Leigh

I was flattered at being asked to judge the short story entries for the Southport Writers Circle’s competition. I’ve never belonged to a writers’ club but in my mind, I suspected the entries would be romantic short stories influenced by Mills and Boon. How wrong could I be? A few of these stories could even have been graphic novels.

Although there weren’t many direct references to Covid, several stories related to people who were claustrophobically living together and getting on each other’s nerves. There was domestic violence and murder aplenty. In one story, a man buries a live dog to get back at his partner, an image that will stay with me for some time. As well as violent deaths, there were several stories involving elderly people dying of loneliness and/or dementia in care homes.

What did I look for in a story? Well, first of all, it had to keep me reading: I write newspaper obituaries and one of the key rules is “Don’t start with so-and-so being born in 1936.” Grab the readers with a notable event from their life and then maybe another one. The end results sometime appear disjointed, but the important thing is that the readers stuck with it.

I’ve written several biographies and the only one that starts with the subject being born is the one for Billy Kinsley of the Merseybeats and Liverpool Express. When we started the book, he said, “My birth certificate has the wrong date of birth on it.” That gripped my attention, and I opened the book with that sentence because the reader would want to know what’s going on. So be prepared to break the rules if it works better.

A key rule in writing is to engage the readers at the start and don’t let them go. My friend Hunter Davies is still writing books at age 85 and he tells me that his main principle is still the same. When he gets to the end of a chapter, he says, “Have I still got the reader with me?”

You need to be careful with titles as they can give away the plot. The Southport writer Ron Ellis wrote a crime novel Grave Mistake and so you know before his detective does that the wrong body has been buried. Beware of giving too much away.

Two thousand words doesn’t sound like much for a short story but it is eight minutes of speech. Just because 2,000 words is the maximum length, you don’t have to write that many. A story has its own length and you should finish it at that moment. Some of these stories were good ideas but would have been more effective condensed to 500 words.

You also have to know how to build up the drama. One of my favourite stories is by the Merseyside horror writer, Ramsey Campbell. His protagonist goes walking though St John’s Shopping Centre in Liverpool late at night. There is no one else round and he hears a rustling behind him. It builds up and builds up until he realises he is being pursued by a huge ball of rubbish. He goes one way and then the other and another ball of rubbish comes after him. It is horror fiction grounded in reality and it is hardly surprising that St John’s Shopping Centre is now closed at night.

Remember too the effectiveness of just one sentence. Ramsey wrote that story in the 1980s while in 1995, Bill Bryson wrote his travelogue of the UK, Notes From A Small Island. He started a chapter, “I took a train to Liverpool. They were having a festival of litter when I arrived.” That is drop-down-dead funny; it tells you all you want to know about public services in Liverpool at the time and it is done in 16 words.

Think of the start of Midnight Cowboy where people are bustling down a crowded New York street. They are too preoccupied to notice somebody has died on the pavement. You could write up that story in 50 words and that would be enough. Less can be more.

I’ve just read something where a character refers in passing to an auction where someone was selling an air guitar autographed by Brian May. The writer missed the story. There must be a dozen ways to develop that story, one of them certainly akin to The Emperor’s New Clothes.

I was wary of being a judge because I remember a children’s TV show with Steve Race in the 1950s. He gave out the winners of some new instrumental pieces and played their work. He was shocked a couple of days later to find that one of the entrants had submitted something by Mozart under their own name. What’s more, Mozart had only come second.

So, thanks to everybody for competing and giving me such a good time and such hard choices.

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1st Prize

The Battle For Jennings Grange by Dave McVey

This was an exchange of letters between the lord of the manor and the leader of some activists who felt that the building should be given to the homeless. The correspondence is deftly handled and one surprising punchline follows another.

It reminded me Mike Hart’s brilliant ‘Shelter Song’ from 1969. The Liverpool singer/songwriter wondered why the two cathedrals could not be given to the homeless.

2nd Prize

A Week Ago Last Tuesday by John Bunting

There were two things going on here – firstly, the protagonist’s friends who meet every week to talk about nothing at all and secondly, the surreal adventures that the protagonist had endured during the week. During a knee operation, the surgeon had added a new muscle-enhancer which created havoc and was so difficult to switch off. We laugh at its ridiculousness, but we know those two friends won’t even notice.

3rd Prize

The Gobbledygook by Richard Hooton

This felt like a contemporary update from George Orwell’s 1984, and is very effective. It shows how someone succumbs to office life and can no longer be rebellious or hold any original ideas.

Highly Commended

Silence Is Really Dark by John Glander

Systems like Alexa and Aurora have warm, welcoming human voices so that they can befriend us. This story is about a power cut. Maybe it would have been better if the disembodied voice had an argument with the subject and fell out. Aurora could ask for an appointment with a psychiatrist. There could be a book of Aurora stories.

Commended

Groundhog Day by Alan Heys

This is a childhood reminiscence of the Sunday morning conflicts between mother and father and how they always developed in the same way. In this case the title was misleading, perhaps deliberately so. The point of the original Groundhog Dog is that the previous day was repeated but with a difference which turned out to be significant.

Commended

David Beckham’s Boxer Shorts by John Bunting

Top marks for an intriguing title, although it is only a passing comment in the story. If ITV were still filming Rumpole, the ramifications of badly worded legislation could be worked into a very amusing storyline. It is a good example of how you can present serious ideas whilst still being funny.

Right, that’ll do – 1,200 words. I’ll submit it to that new short story exhibition. Damn, I’ve missed the entry date.

Organiser’s Report

Poets are able to take incredibly vast concepts like the nature of the universe, or the fine details of the smallest microcosm and express them in a  handful of choice words, evoking the full meaning and understanding to any who experience the lines they set out. It is a talent that is worth being jealous of.

This year, entrants gave us a bewildering array of subjects for their verses, from the coveting of a grandma’s ornaments, to the death of an empire, to bleak/golden/insightful/harsh reminiscences of experiences that this writer has never had. Each gave a facet of our little reality, expressed in stark/oblique/playful/simple stanzas, each one a unique perspective on many esoteria.

There was a good global coverage of entrants this year, with the usual concentration in the North of England, and a general representation from France, Spain, Germany, Italy and others. The US had a few poems in the mix and as well as one hopeful from Nigeria.

As per usual, the standard of entries was ridiculous and most of our shortlisters had trouble with the sift, exacerbated somewhat by the aforementioned topical range of poems. A brief insight into the marking process – we have a set range of criteria by which we gauge poems, involving metre, structure and so on. Quite a lot of the poems were very non-standard and somehow were still very good, making matters more difficult.

The final shortlist was eventually reached and sent to notable poet and artist, Ali Harwood to deliver his final judgement. I hope you will agree that the winners are deserving and intriguing in equal measure.

Chief Judge’s Report – Ali Harwood

We rush to them when emotions run high and when experience cuts deep. We make our own and take what others have given. Poems. They have a lot to answer for. And lots of answers for us. And even more questions…

Judging the dozens of shortlisted poems was an honour and a privilege and I enjoyed returning to all of them many times as they insisted on talking to me. The subjects written about were broad. There was much compassion and empathy in the entries plus more than a little beauty. Encounters with nature and each other were common, alongside the passing of time. Yes, there were also mentions of pandemics and politics: at their best, these were contained in the context of a broader humanity. In the end, what won through were truths that resonated and still do.

1^st

The Awakening

by Pauline Hawkesworth

This is a hopeful and organic poem that unwinds and grows throughout its five stanzas. Intimately and delicately, it reveals a bee’s journey observed through glass. The metaphors expand in size and scope – from ‘pear-drop’ to ‘something the earth rolled’ – as the poet’s fancy takes flight towards potential fresh starts. A vast landscape is seen in the size of a bee with the symbiotic dance between the order of mountains and the chaos of ‘honeyed rain’.

Perhaps the embodied wedding rings the bee wears show its promise to the Earth and, in the poet’s observation, also the interdependent relationship between the natural world and us. The closing lines leave things open – we are provided with the space to imagine where this instinctive insect is bound next…

2^nd

Snarl up at the cemetery

by Christine Buxton

Death visits and unites us all and this poem shares some diverse responses to the loss of a loved one. Despite the jam of mourners, ‘none of the cars is beeping’. It is a poem that succeeds in showing not telling. Whilst using the broad brushstrokes of associating cars with their drivers, the people grieving do not become caricatures. The ‘one way system’ mentioned could be the inevitable timeline of each of our lives. The congestion takes place on Mother’s Day, when ‘grief takes you in not so unexpected ways’. And every day is in fact a mothers’ day, as from mothers we all are born. At the end, with Mum ‘still going strong’, we are reminded to keep calm and journey on.

3^rd

Daffodils

by Jacqueline Woods

What we have here is a poignant poem of pride and pain. An ageing mother recites Wordsworth impeccably in the depths of night whilst her child listens intently outside her bedroom door, reminded of lucid times past that now do not last.

The ‘respite and light’ in this performance could perhaps be for the minds of both generations present.

As the new day starts and the mother’s stem weakens again, we witness her diminished existence yet hope for the next flutter into clarity.

Daffodils points to the importance of appreciating moments of connection – however fleeting – as time tugs the sleeves of those we love and, indeed, also our own.

Catherine Fenerty Humour Prize

A Halloween Love Story

by Stephanie Ward

We are encouraged to gallop through this amusing poem with its lively and consistent rhythm and rhyming couplets. It made me smile throughout. As we in the real world clamber our way somewhat clumsily and inconsistently out of lockdown, it’s refreshing to read a love story about two lost souls who, after many blunders and misfires, somehow find each other in their own fairytale chaos.

Even though the witch’s ‘green skin faintly blushed’ and the ogre finds a trio of rodents in his pants, they eventually unite by the end of the night and have a fruitful relationship, producing enough troll children for a football team plus substitutes. Let’s just hope they all live happily ever after.  

Highly Commended

Pack It In

by Hazel Teare

A series of containers constructed to constrain their contents are explored here. However, these painful reminders of earlier times escape. In this compact poem, each word is thoughtfully curated for maximum impact. Assonance is to the fore with the ‘pain nailed down’ neatly packed with their vowel sounds in parallel. When the lid of the last box with the narrator ‘folded in’ is closed, I for one feel the need to rummage within again.

Commended

Second Husband

by Duncan Fraser

Is this a fable? Is it a warning? Or is it an inevitable premonition of a predator on a mission? An alluring woman full of cutting wit and magnetic malevolence seduces you and attracts you to her side. Just like the last discredited and discarded prize. Unsurprisingly, you will be next on the chopping block: told about, laughed at and despised.  

This is a promise.  

Organiser’s Report

2020 was a difficult year and it was brilliant to see so many ambitious authors throw themselves into their work and to submit many excellent pieces with themes ranging from the mundane (buying a teddy), to the epic (in the trenches during wartime) to outrightly bizarre (what if you lived on the wrong side of a mirror?).

There were a handful that managed to fall afoul of the rules of the competition, the most common infraction being putting their name on every page, closely followed by not putting a title on it and, amazingly, in some cases simply sending in a story without any author details or an entry fee! The majority did it right though and you all gave us plenty to chew over.

Big thanks go out to this year’s shortlisting team, who had a tough job all round. In some cases, some stories did not make the final cut because of little things, like unoriginal titles or unneeded detail. It was often a hairsbreadth separating the ones that made it through, so anyone who did not make it should not be discouraged from putting their work out there in the future.

Entries came from all over the world, with the usual concentration in North West UK, but also Spain, France, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and various locales in America making an appearance.

In the end though, there can only be a few winners and our chief judge this year, Professor Emerita of Short Fiction, Ailsa Cox, has been extremely valued in her final say.

Judge’s Report – Professor Ailsa Cox

There was a wide variety of stories entered, and I was impressed by the quality of the writing, and the care that had been taken in polishing the style; and by the writers’ willingness to experiment with different kinds of stories and structures, including genre writing. What made the winning stories stand out, for me, was vividness, clarity and originality. By originality, I don’t mean plots or themes that no one else had thought of, but a way of using the form to make us see the content in a new way.

If I had to sum that up in one word, I’d say ‘simplicity’. The best stories kept language, style and structure simple. Others might start well, but were quickly bogged down in too much information, slowing down the pace with explanations of complicated relationships or previous event. Lengthy  exposition, either using description or passages of dialogue, is not the short-story writer’s friend.

It was interesting to see writers turning to horror and the supernatural, great territory for the short story. The writers of ‘In Every Angel’ and ‘The Silent Pool’ root their stories in a banal, everyday world, slowly unleashing the generic elements. There were other stories that were potentially powerful, but signalled their spookinesses from the very beginning, which made them feel predictable despite touches of originality. Another word of advice on beginnings – beware metaphors or turns of phrase in the very first line that you might be very pleased with, but might not work for the reader. Keep the opening line clear and direct, without unnecessary distractions.

Of course none of my advice is infallible. There are no absolute rules; ‘Untroubled Waters’, for instance, contradicts the advice you will sometimes find in books on creative writing that tells you to focus on just one character.  It also breaks the rules by not including a single line of dialogue.

I was expecting to read stories set during the pandemic, or to reflect current circumstances in some way, and was surprised that this didn’t seem to be the case. We’re muddling through a confusing and shapeless narrative right now, and perhaps it will be months, or years, before we’re able to contain those experiences within our fiction without being overwhelmed by them. In the meantime, congratulations to the winners, and to all those who show so much dedication to their writing.

1st – ‘In Every Angel’

by Michael Ranes

 A wonderfully controlled story, that is deeply chilling, a true, and very original, horror story. By making you imagine the ultimate horror, the writer makes you pity, and possibly even empathise, with the abuser turned victim.

2nd – ‘How to Fake a Heart Attack’

by Richard Hooton

A lively and ingenious story, highly original in its structuring of a narrative through thirteen easy phases. The writer has a rare gift for subversive comedy.

3rd – ‘Untroubled Waters’

by Juliet Hill

Water is the main character in this story about a flood in an apartment block in an unspecified European city.  But there are other characters too, from Carmen and her little dog to Rasputin the avocado seller and the Jehovah’s Witnesses round the corner, all of them neighbours who are simultaneously close by and distant from each other.

Highly Commended

 ‘The Artist’s New Beginnings’

by Sue Gerrard

While the identity of the protagonist comes as no surprise, the story is beautifully imagined and structured, and the point of view sustained with subtlety and restraint.

Commended

‘The Silent Pool’

by Ruth Loten

A tale of an abusive relationship slips into the supernatural, building on the imagery of silence and suppression through an uncanny landscape.

Commended

 ‘The Anatomy of a Ticking Clock’

by Ciara Mullaney

With its startling beginning, this story is rather like Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ in that it’s based in a world in which everything is normal except for one very peculiar thing that has happened to the protagonist.