Results 2006 - Short Story Competition

Short Story Judge 2006:-

The winning entries to the City of Derby Writing Competition 2006 are now included on this website in our Archive.  You can read the works in question by clicking on the links below.  The results of this year's short story competition, together with our Judge's Report, are given below:-                                                     [ Link to Results 2006 - Poetry Competition]

Short Stories     

1st Prize              Wes Lee                  Crash Test Dummies

Wes Lee

Originally from the UK, Wes Lee currently lives in Wellington, New Zealand. A former printmaker, organic farmer, University Lecturer in Fine Arts, she now works in an art gallery and writes. She directed her black comedy, ‘Woman with a Weapon’ at the Maidment theatre in Auckland. She was recently an award winner in the Australasian writing competition - AUSWRITE, and shortlisted for the Short & Sweet International playwriting competition in Sydney (06). She was an award winner in the PEN/NZSA National Short Story Prize in 2002. Her writing has appeared in a number of online and print publications: VerbSap, Cadenza, Opium Magazine, Stamp, Trout, PopMatters, Snorkel, Pleasures & Dangers, Turbine, Blowback Magazine, Mannequin Envy, BuzzWords, Misanthropists Anonymous, HeavyGlow, The Ugly Tree, Takahe, The BluePrintReview Anthology. The Slingink Anthology. She has work forthcoming in a number of Anthologies in the US and UK.
 

2nd Prize            Alexandra Fox         In the Loudness of the Morning

Alexandra Fox

3rd Prize            Jo Cannon                Nasma's Malady

Unfortunately we don't have a photograph of Jo.  One thing we can say for sure is that she appears to be exceptionally modest about her own abilities!  She has given us the following details:  I am a GP in inner-city Sheffield. I have had some success in short story competitions over the last two years and stories have been accepted by 'The Reader', 'Cadenza', 'Tears in the Fence', and 'Libbon' magazines.

The following works are considered as Highly Commended short story submissions to the competition:-

Mariana Dietl                                      Grandfather's Goblin

Wes Lee                                             The Gardenia Girls

Carla McCannon                                  Learning to Fly

KP Parker                                           Mr Antonious and the Goat

Emma Rensler                                     Splitting

Basil Davies                                        Private Duffy

Judge's Report

 It turns out that there are few pleasanter ways of starting a summer than reading a good selection of well-written short stories. In my case, three hundred and thirty-five short stories, to be exact. The response to this first Derby short story competition was truly impressive, in the number of submissions, in their diversity and quality, and in the range of countries all over the world from which they were submitted. In my garden I would settle down with another ten or twenty stories, and was forever being brought up short by an imaginative situation, an engaging character, an unusual narrative perspective, or a well-turned phrase. The difficulty of the task of deciding gradually dawned on me: the pile of “maybes”, some of them very strong candidates, was big enough to make the business of choosing a winner from among them seem impossible.

            A story has to persuade, in a short space. It persuades by making characters and situations feel “coherent” or “authentic” (I’ll avoid saying “real”)  to the reader, and by having a distinctive tone of its own in the telling and phrasing. What strikes one reader as “coherent” or “authentic” may not interest another, and the narrative pitch of a story may excite one reader and leave the next cold, so it’s only fair to concede that another judge would presumably have made a different choice. At the same time, I think that by anyone’s standards the stories that finally took the prizes have something to say and their own way of saying it, and I’m delighted to think that the Derby competition, on its very first public outing, attracted work of such a standard.

            But before I say what seems to me so strong in the top three prizewinning stories, let me put in a few words about the half dozen we’ve chosen to commend. Because the truth is that the final selection was so difficult that organizer Rob Smallwood and myself agreed that we would at least honour with a salute in words some stories that didn’t quite take prizes.

            There’s Mariana Dietl’s ‘Grandfather’s Goblin’, for instance, a faux-naif tale of tremendous charm in which the narrator as a child seeks “el Enanito del Bosque”, “the Goblin of the Forest”, but always arrives at her grandfather’s just too late to catch him. Years pass, and in adult life she recognises the goblin, in California, only to be spirited by him to the grandfather’s death-bed. The blend of childlike fantasy and mature wisdom make this story extremely appealing.

            Continuing in alphabetical order, ‘The Gardenia Girls’ by Wes Lee gives us two provocative teenagers, old enough to be out in a car, young women conscious of their sexual power, applying bright lipstick and striking poses outside the home of a loner they love to torment. One day they’re invited in to Ray’s house—and Wes Lee deftly turns the tables on the girl narrator, and on the reader, by allowing Ray to be no psychopath but an ingenuous, clumsy innocent who entrances the other girl, Iris. Not a single word is out of place.

            Carla McCannon’s ‘Learning to Fly’ gives us the life of Bertha, who was visited as a child by a silver dove that “offered to take care of the years for her”. Seventy-five years have now passed, and with real skill the story sketches a whole life story down to the day when granddaughter Hannah persuades her to join her at the ice rink. In the last two pages, as the skating proves too much for Bertha’s heart, Carla McCannon gives us an extraordinarily beautiful account of death, as the silver dove returns.

            The voice of a child is impeccably caught in K. P. Parker’s ‘Mr. Antonious and the goat’, which is set on Cyprus and gives the child new, unfamiliar experiences to fit in with wet, cold England, Christmas trees and Terry Wogan. Into the wide-eyed naivety of the narrative explodes the slaughter of a goat by neighbour Antonious, the blood “thick and sticky like chocolate sauce”. There’s neither sentimentality nor slickness in this pungently-written account of life’s unanticipated gifts.

            Emma Rensler’s ‘Splitting’ is a portrait from the inside of an occupational therapist in the throes of depression, breakdown, and a widening rift in her own personality. Slyly and efficiently written, the story admits us insidiously to the stages of disintegration: the neglect of work, the failures of concentration, the eagerness to escape reality. The narrative, briskly covering several months, ends by forcing the reader to wonder if the story has “happened” at all—or whether it’s all in the narrator’s mind.

            A final and special commendation goes to Basil Davies for ‘Private Duffy’, a very short but nevertheless very affecting story that was firmly on my shortlist long before I had any suspicion of the astonishing fact that the writer, as Rob Smallwood afterwards informed me, is just fifteen years old. It’s an evocative account of Duffy’s refusal to go over the top in the First World War, and the power of its economy would have been unarguable in any writer. In a fifteen-year-old it’s exceptional, and I look forward to hearing more of Basil Davies in the future.

            All of these stories showed strong imaginations at work, vigorous story-telling instincts, and individual ways with words. In the end, the three prizewinners seemed to me to have that certain something extra.

            ‘Nasma’s Malady’ is a powerful act of creative sympathy by Jo Cannon. Narrator Nasma is one of the displaced, one of those torn from their old lives and forced by events into a new existence where they wait “for life to regain meaning”. It is eight years since she and husband Hasim were taken away in separate cars. From a rewarding, well-to-do life she has been dropped half a world away into the desolate existence of an exile learning a language and a culture, working on a supermarket till, and becoming readier, as the months go by, to think her husband dead and find comfort in the arms of Amos, a refugee from the Congo. The story is magnificent in its pared-back narrative economy, and forfeits none of its compassion or understanding by choosing taciturnity. Without the smallest trace of the factitious or forced, it connects exactly with a great moral grief of our age and looks it in the eye.

            Jo Cannon takes third prize for ‘Nasma’s Malady’. Second prize goes to Alexandra Fox for ‘In the Loudness of the Morning’, a story brimful of the headiness of being alive, the shouting joy and poignancy of it all, and the ache that can go with looking back late in life. From the “pigtails flying, long wool dresses, white pinafores” of the opening paragraph, this story has its eye on bright detail: “Ma churning, paddling the butter into blocks, marking it with the oakleaf sign”, or Dadda’s “oak coffin carried on martin’s beer-dray”. Like Dylan Thomas in his short stories, Alexandra Fox celebrates life and death together, and the rites of passage, the discovery of woman by man (her narrator is male), the discovery of adult responsibility, the discovery of changes and imperfections and disappointments. The writing of this story is breathtaking in its opulence yet never feels forced or disproportionate. It is one of those rare achievements: a story that can celebrate without being sentimental or trite, and can tell a life in scenes that, however brief, are always individual and memorable.

            First prize in the Derby short story competition goes to Wes Lee, who turns out to be a British writer currently living in New Zealand. It also emerged, when Rob lifted the veil of anonymity, that no fewer than four stories by Wes Lee were on my long shortlist of “maybes”—one of the others, as we’ve already seen, earned a commendation. In the top prizewinning ‘Car Crash Dummies’, Wes weaves an intricate and in every way unusual fiction around a car crash survivor, Victor. “It had taken him a year of physical therapy to live what people call a normal life,” we’re told—and that phrasing, “what people call a normal life”, reminds us to question notions of normality as we read this oblique, wary account of a man whose new normality isn’t of the meat-and-two-veg variety. Victor moulds papier-mache heads, “like clowns in a row at a fair, pivoting slowly, their eyes sightless, their mouths red and open”. Sheena the hairdresser realises they’re exhibited but doesn’t quite get what they’re about. Talking to Gregg, his friend and flatmate and now a rival in art, Victor gets ahead of himself when describing Sheena, even claiming they’re engaged. Yes, we think: this is a man whose normality, whose hold on the modes of being that others accept and abide by, has been jolted, loosened, dislocated. But Wes Lee doesn’t spell it out, doesn’t overplay her hand: she lets her characters and their situations tell us all we need to know, and dares to end without what is “normally” thought an “ending”, by leaving us with Victor contemplating one of Gregg’s exhibited figures cased in a resin globe, a figure that takes Victor right back to that three-car pile-up: “You’re going to be ok son … the firemen had kept saying over and over like actors in a bad American disaster movie, the kind of clichés that rescue workers always say in those films. And it didn’t really matter what they were saying, they could have been making noises like Moomintrolls, or Clangers whistling and singing out from craters on the moon.” This is writing of high skill and insight, writing that knows a lot about life and about writing and knows that withholding is as vital as telling, writing that relishes control but loves to teeter on the brink of losing everything. In ‘Car Crash Dummies’, Wes Lee has written a truly outstanding first prize winner.

Michael Hulse  July 2006