Our first meeting in The Old Deanery was Anne Powell’s adjudication of our Mini-Saga competition, the brief for which was a story told in exactly 50 words (excluding the title). After a general introduction, in which Anne told us how much she’d enjoyed reading the twelve entries, she commented on each in turn. With such a high overall standard and wide variety of themes and styles, picking the winners had been very hard. The results in reverse order were:
Commended: Audrey for ‘Did She Fall or Was She Pushed’ and Joe for ‘How the Recent Floods near Glastonbury in Somerset Destroyed One Woman’s Livelihood.’
3rd: Caroline for ‘Can’t Stand Another Day’.
2nd: Julie for ‘Devious Strategy’.
1st: Cathy with ‘An Unwelcome Discovery’.
After the presentation of the Twinks Perugini Kenyon trophy, there was plenty of time for all the entries to be read out. A break for refreshments followed and then Anne treated us to her own take on Blanche Ingram, a character from Jane Eyre. We were all very impressed to hear that, when entered in a recent Bronte Society competition, Anne’s inspired writing had been commended by Margaret Drabble!
The Jack Moss trophy was won this year by Susan Perkins for Nice Cup of Tea? in which she explored the history of our national beverage and appealed for everyone to consider the conditions endured by many tea pickers. Ethically sourced tea is widely available these days from organisations such as the Rain Forest Alliance and under the Fair Trade label.
Adjudicator John Lee, who’d given us an amusing account of his career in education and marvelled at how a retired physicist had been chosen to judge the competition entries,went on to award second place to Phil Cook. Phil’s Down With Holidays, a very tongue in cheek rant about the horrors of planning, preparation and travel, not to mention the frustrations often encountered at holiday destinations, struck a chord with us all.
A more serious piece took third place. Out Of Africa was a memoir by Joe Peters that interwove his own experience of teaching Afrikaaner children in The Hague with the establishment of the apartheid regime and the imprisonment and unexpected but widely acclaimed release many years later of Nelson Mandela.
John said that he had enjoyed reading all fourteen very different entries for the competition and congratulated the Group on the high standard of writing overall.
Previously entitled A Hint of History, the competition was judged this time around by Dorothy Penso of York Writers. A regular attender at The Writers’ Summer School in Swanwick, Dorothy gave a fascinating talk in August of this year on Facts and Customs about Death and Funerals. These have changed a great deal since Victorian times and, as a volunteer at York Cemetery and keenly interested in family, social and local history, Dorothy is well placed to know all about them!
Faced with the high standard of entries and wide variety of subject matter, Dorothy admitted that she had had great difficulty in picking the winners. However, a decision had to be made and she awarded the Mary Rawnsley Trophy to Maggie Cobbett for her poignant story The Soldier at the Window, set in the occupied Netherlands towards the end of WW2. Eileen Walters came second with The Silversmith, a true account of the visit to Ripon Cathedral in the 1960s of the craftsman whose first commission had been the silver lectern on the pulpit. Distressed to find it apparently tossed aside during restoration work, he returned later to find it back in pride of place where it belonged. The third placed entry was The War Games by Alma Williams.
Faced with fourteen entries for the competition, Dr Roger Kendall certainly earned his adjudicator’s fee. Themes varied from the arrival of spring to the first solo flight of a baby dragon and styles included rhyming couplets, blank verse, free verse and even a prose poem.
Roger requested that each poem be read out in turn by its author or, in the case of an absent member, a proxy, and then gave individual critiques. The standard, he remarked, was very high overall.
First place went to Lindsay Trenholme for Sorry we can’t be with you, inspired by finding a discarded 50th birthday card in the tissue bin of a ladies’ lavatory.
In second place was The Maiden’s Blush by Phil Cook, the maiden in question being Switzerland’s famous Jungfrau.
In third place was Dawn Flight, Elizabeth Spearman’s closely observed description of a skein of wild geese.
Roger was thanked for his hard work and asked to read some of his own recent work. We look forward to hearing more of it at our next ‘Literary Allsorts’ evening on 9th July.
The competition, formerly known as Theatre in the Round was won by Andrew Burns, seen here exchanging a warm handshake with screenwriter Ann Gallivan. Wearing her adjudicator’s hat, Ann gave us her carefully considered thoughts on each of the fourteen entries. As a bonus, she shared with us some of the highlights of her long career in television, including her current work on BBC Scotland’s River City.
Andrew’s winning entry was a humorous story about an eccentric man whose life was completely taken over by the piece of modern sculpture he created for an art exhibition. Maggie Cobbett came second with a look back at the career of fan dancer Phyllis Dixey and Caroline Slator took third place. In Against the Odds, an autistic young man’s obsession with numbers and his job in the theatre come together with disastrous consequences.
We are looking forward to hearing the remaining entries with their very varied selection of subject matter, at our next Open MSS session.
The first meeting of 2013 saw the presentation of the Twinks Perugini Kenyon trophy to Kate Swann for her winning Mini-Saga. As Kate was not able to attend the adjudication in November, the trophy was presented by our Chair, Maggie Cobbett.
The rest of the well attended meeting was devoted to discussion of the 2013 programme, catching up on members’ news and the reading of a wide variety of manuscripts.
The competition, held in honour of the late Twinks Perugini Kenyon, a much missed former member of RWG, was judged this year by her daughter, Anne Perugini Powell. Due to circumstances beyond her control, Anne was unable to attend the meeting but very kindly sent the results along by post.
In first place, was Kate Swann’s Growing Up, Learning Fast, a touching tale of childhood neglect. In second place came Final text message sent from a mobile phone washed up on the beach of Isola del Giglio by Phil Cook. (The rules of the competition allow for a long title to compensate for the strictly observed word count – precisely 50 – in the actual saga.) Phil’s entry used ‘text speak’, taught to him by young relatives, to great effect. Jan Maltby’s The White Bikini, a fine example of husbandly hypocrisy and wifely revenge, came third.
As Kate was not present this evening to receive the trophy, it will be presented to her in January.
« Newer Entries | Older Entries »
