Results and Judge’s Report, The TRYangle Project Short Story Competition 2011

First Prize

‘Losing Benjy’ – Simon Van der Velde

Second Prize

‘The Waiting Room’ – David Wass

Third Prize

 ‘Hanging by a Thread’ – Claire Pankhurst

Highly Commended

‘Italia ‘90’ – Simon Van der Velde

‘Small Black Flowers’ – Dean Scurlock

Reading the entries for The Tryangle Project Short Story Competition 2011, I was impressed by the thoughtful treatment of the subject matter and I was deeply affected by some of the more heart-breaking stories.  With such a range of voices and settings explored, it was a difficult task to choose winning entries, but those I have chosen are all by skilled storytellers who create convincing points of view.  They draw their characters sincerely and with care, weave poignant insights into immediate narratives and include small telling details that bring their stories to life.

 The First Prize Winner, ‘Losing Benjy’, is narrated by Tommy, a boy whose family is destroyed by his mother’s abusive boyfriend.  The story uses imaginative imagery and fresh language that are nonetheless convincingly the words of a young boy.  All the characters are persuasively suggested through down-to-earth, realistic dialogue and interactions that are tender and brutal by turns.  The challenging theme is adeptly evoked with telling details and throughout, there is a sense of startling and ultimately terrifying insight.  It’s all too easy for the reader to connect to Tommy and to feel what he’s feeling right up to the painful ending.

In ‘The Waiting Room’, winner of the Second Prize, a young Zimbabwean woman named Rutendo seeks asylum after an act of aggression devastates her family.  Beautifully written, this story evokes Rutendo’s intense loneliness and explores the different ways in which violence affects our lives.  Using delicate imagery that offsets the subject-matter, the writer represents the brutality caused by oppressive political regimes, by the state acting against individuals and by nature itself, as well as by the way ordinary people treat each other every day.  Through Rutendo’s poignant memories of home and her harsh experience of exile, we feel her alienation and all that she has lost.

The Third Prize goes to a compelling story about a man whose controlling behaviour has made his wife a prisoner.  ‘Hanging by a Thread’ is pared-down and economical in style, creating a taut structure in which the sense of fear is never diminished.  The writer experiments boldly with point of view, using first person to tell the victim’s story and addressing the abuser in the second.  This technique gives the reader a forceful sense of encroaching violence.  The metaphor of a spider in a web expresses the claustrophobia of the woman’s life and enables the writer to craft a bitter-sweet image of escape at the end.

The two Highly Commended stories, ‘Italia ‘90’ and ‘Small Black Flowers’ are both told from the perspectives of children.  Both use small details of everyday life to show what is being lost and create affecting central metaphors through which the theme is explored.  The five senses are well used in order to evoke, moment by moment, the tragic plight of child victims of violence in the home.

 

The non-winning entries often began with a good idea, but were marred by either giving a stereotypical representation of the theme, not treating it seriously or completely misunderstanding it.  Some stories that had quite strong characters or compelling storylines were undermined by their use of wooden dialogue, clichéd language and ideas or stiff and formal diction that didn’t seem to fit with the story being told. 

Many writers explained the story, telling the plot without evoking it and creating no real scenes.  Those stories that were overloaded with opinions about domestic violence but did not show anything happening were the least compelling.  These stories would have been improved by using imaginative language, fresh images and telling moments of action.  Metaphoric elements could also have been used well to create layering and narrative richness.  Most importantly, those writers who did not win could improve their work by searching for compelling insights into their characters to create a sense of emotional connectedness between reader and protagonist.

 

Kate Horsley

Results of the Stepping Stones Nigeria Poetry Competition 2011

This competition on the theme of Childhood was judged by Susanna Roxman.

 

First Prize: ‘Little Girl's Antistrophe at 27 Rue de Fleures’ by Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé (Singapore)

Second Prize: ‘Everything is Indestructible’ by W.F.Lantry (U.S.A)

Third Prize: ‘There Will Come a Time My Love’ by Paige Bevans (Canada)

Highly commended poems

 

‘First Memories’ by Anne Ballard (U.K)

‘So you're getting married’ by Copland Smith (U.K)

Judge’s report

There were many good pieces to choose from; however, I felt that quite a few of them are not really finished. The poems are in most cases good (in so far as they are good) on the strength of details and perhaps individual lines, rather than as wholes. This does not hold true for the three winners, or the two Highly commended poems. These five texts are all of them thoroughly "worked out". But in most of the other poems, I can only admire certain images, lines, or stanzas.

I also found rather too many prose-like poems, with few if any lyrical qualities -- texts which, I believe, would have worked better as prose. Sometimes the rhythm suffers in these cases.

Comments on the winning and highly commended poems:

1st Prize poem:

The poet takes the reader on a fantastic, original, totally confident ride through Gertrude Stein's childhood (and also her later life). The poem is modernist in style, as befits a homage to the High Priestess of literary modernism. The imagery is startling and feels fresh.

2nd Prize poem:

A really good poem in its slightly odd way. (This is meant as a compliment.) There is a feeling here that everything hangs together: childhood, adulthood, the past, the present, the seasons, animals, humans. The child is the wise person here, and the adults do well to listen to him. The father realizes this in the last stanza. A Romantic touch -- the child representing wisdom, as well as innocence.

3rd Prize poem:

Here a parent, or at least a kind adult, addresses, with tenderness and wisdom, a child. I like especially the emphasis on being oneself.

Highly commended poems

"First memories". Matter of fact but full of affection. No unnecessary asides or explanations.

"so you're getting married". Tenderness here, too; in this case, what seems to be a parent is addressing a now adult child, at the same time remembering him/her in childhood, many years previously. A strong sense of impending change, but also an equally powerful sense of continuity -- that nothing really changes. The seasons may come and go, but it's the same park as before, and the same love between parent and child. "In those days trees were especially tall." is a marvellous line. It doesn't seem to refer only to the obvious fact that the child has grown up, and is now therefore taller. Also some lost sense of wonder (as in Wordsworth) may be implied.

It's been a pleasure reading and judging this poetry competition.

 

Susanna Roxman

 

Little Girl’s Antistrophe at 27 Rue de Fleures

Just now, I unwrapped her box of letters. Gertrude was an iconoclast

to her gravitas. What she did not know she let travel, recurrence

of rhymes like falling leaves buffeting, autumn breeze from East Side.

Gertrude did not know home tonight or home in the summer.

By the Hudson. Did not know pudding from sauce from Helfgott’s letters.

 

Its mention of parlour poetry as dried hydrangea as pastoral,

as another Gothic point of view. As the bird feeder broke into two,

as freer roads after the scuttling, as prying apart the living architectonics.

Like her piano rolled down the stairs. Of play and vinaigrette

and too much cayenne. That the Tribune was the Tribune after all.

 

But also a need and problem within the chronic hours.

Gertrude did not know the object beyond the object.

Beyond the waterfowl, a duck of oval, of beak and weathervane wing,

of zipper heart, and an accordion tongue. Gertrude did not know

where to put the centre of things. Gertrude did not soak Henry’s cloak.

 

Nor Mildred’s, its hem another herringbone stitch another section

not whole enough or wholehearted or wholemeal enough.

The whole world was no longer a lazy afternoon or abiding love,

an old Gertrude looking at herself in the mirror of the ponding water.

Her head taking the shape of the barn, its shadow a black soot.

 

In midday sun, quiet afternoon cradling itself into the moonless night.

Gertrude was earnest in losing things — the beat-up rosebush

one more variation, foot divisions misaligned, word endings falling

over each other, frothy tumble. Gertrude’s diaeresis, Alice in a deep sleep,

the lean and fallow years from that trembling point onwards.

 

Gertrude’s dactylic dimeter drumming itself into the hexameter,

a twist as with the helix, as with rollercoaster feelings

when affectations run wild, when The Salon levitated

into The Cloud of Unknowing, its noetic white as wispy and dissolving.

Then a removal so she would always ask more questions.

 

As supple as her very last. Gertrude’s Sunday clatter in another suite

to rile Chaucer, even in death, even in love from a distance.

Even in wise restraint and a portrait left in the dark, its phonic echoes

a new refrain of face and facet. And fractured verseforms.

Gertrude’s sudden awakening to sovereignty’s shining eye.

 

Not decadence but wonderment. Not meaninglessness but a prayer,

a detachment and reasoned feeling. A small run of sounds and pictures.

Of a sapling writing out its unknown destination, its basis

and other evidence scaffolding, relaxed into a vine far down the road.

In the vineyard, a redder rose held out in the palm of her hand.

 

By Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé

 

‘Little Girl’s Antistrophe at 27 Rue de Fleures’ is the 1^st Prize Winner in the Stepping Stones Nigeria Poetry Competition 2011

 

Everything is Indestructible

So spoke my six year old just yesterday.

I did not care to contradict his words.

His face was scratched when falling from a tree,

the neighbour's blossoming magnolia. He

shook off the pain, and saw migrating birds

above his head, flying as they had done

 

how many million years? Their southward run

unchanged, unchanging, as he'd lately learned.

And in his yard, a cherry's broken bough

hangs twisted by a storm. I can't allow

more time to let it fall. My wife's concerned

it's dangerous. And yet, what will become

 

of all that wood? Food for the lathe, and some

will find its way down to our forest where

rabbits and snakes will nest in its remains.

So often here, our losses become gains,

as she is always whispering in prayer:

those hands turn circles on her rosary

 

through endless curves within her ecstasy.

So maybe James is right, something persists

beyond what we can see: the river moves

its banks, but through this transformation proves,

even when changing course, it still exists:

I'll listen more to what he has to say.

 

By W.F. Lantry

 

‘Everything is Indestructible’ is the 2^nd Prize Winner in the Stepping Stones Nigeria Poetry Competition 2011

There Will Come a Time My Love

There will come a time my love, when you are

fully grown, you look back at your life

and your heart will swell with love and longing.

 

There will come a time my love

when the grades you got and goals you scored

will no longer seem so important.

 

There will come a time my love

when you will get over that broken heart,

you will see how precious real friendship really is.

 

There will come a time my love

when you will stop caring what others think of you,

and understand that being you is what matters most.

 

There will come a time my love when you wish you could go back

to run wild without a care, to swing so high you become part of the clouds

and to climb to the top of the tallest tree without fear of falling.

 

There will come a time my love

when you will feel so heavy inside

and you wonder how things could ever go back to normal again.

 

But my love, there will also come a time

when you are so proud of yourself

that for just a moment you believe you can do anything in the world.

 

A time when you are so happy just to be. A time

you are filled with more love than you ever thought possible,

and feel a sense of purpose that you never before had.

 

There will come a time my love that God will give you

the greatest gift in the world - a gift that will seem so tiny,

that you will wonder how it can produce so much joy.

 

There will come a time my love that everything

you used to worry about will suddenly seem so unimportant.

 

But until that time comes my love, you will always have me.   

 

By Paige Bevans

 

‘There will come a time’ is the 3^rd Prize Winner in the Stepping Stones Nigeria Poetry Competition 2011

So you’re getting married

Today, I did a circuit of the squirrel park;

it’s twenty years since you named it that.

So you’re getting married soon, and I go for a walk

and I’m on this memorial bench where we once sat

and you had a serious, five-year-old talk

about everything, and then fed acorns to a tree-rat.

 

I have a photograph of you under a tree.

The tree looks massive, and you look very small.

Every time I look at it, it captures me.

In those days trees were especially tall.

 

One day you’ll take your baby to feed squirrels,

and under those tall trees you’ll feel the passage of time

as a handful of baby’s fingers grip just one of yours

just like when yours held on to one of mine.

 

By Copland Smith

 

‘So you’re getting married’ is a Highly Commended poem in the Stepping Stones Nigeria Poetry Competition 2011.

First Memories

He is in all of them.

I remember him standing, unsteady,

distressed I was ill,

peering into the lap where I lay

cradled and crying.

His effort to help, showing me picture cards

that I disregarded.

 

I learned to count from the lesson

that his fourth birthday did not, for some reason,

make me three, not for another two months

and I would never catch up with him.

 

Next year he rode off on his tricycle,

outpacing our grandmother,

crossed alone at the traffic lights:

said he just waited till everything stopped,

then knew it was my turn.

 

He built a cart, pulled me around in it

till it overturned,

then was blamed for my tears.

I didn’t mind

once my bruise yellowed.

 

That last long summer

we splashed in the shallows together

naked as frogs, brown as the small fish

that nibbled our toes.

I think for a while he was God to me,

filled my sky.

 

I didn’t cry when he left.

Nobody told me

he would only return for short visits:

nor warned that all seasons

from now on would be colder.

 

by Anne Ballard

 

‘First Memories’ is a Highly Commended poem in the Stepping Stones Nigeria Poetry Competition 2011.