Ripon Writers' Group

Due to circumstances beyond our control, Suzanne Stirke’s adjudication of the ‘Blast from the Past’ competition will now take place on Wednesday, 17th April.

Due to circumstances beyond our control, the talk on comedy writing by Swanwick Writers’ Summer School regular Phil Collins has had to be postponed.

That being so, the meeting on Wednesday, 20th March will now be for Members’ Manuscripts.

We hope to rebook Phil later this year or in 2025.

We welcomed Mary-Jane Holmes as our adjudicator this year. She had obviously put a great deal of thought into the task and did a very thorough job. Before announcing her decision, she read out each of the poems submitted and gave a detailed critique. A written version was also attached to each entry for the poet to peruse at leisure later on.

Charlotte Wilson (pictured above receiving the trophy from Mary-Jane) came first with ‘Pond Life’. Sheila Whitfield was in second place with ‘Inland Dreams’ and Kate Swann came third with ‘On the Scales for Grandad’.  Mary-Jane congratulated everyone who had entered the competition.  With a high standard overall, the great variety of themes and styles had made choosing the winners difficult.

After the adjudication, Mary-Jane answered questions about her own work and poetry in general.

From her bio: Mary-Jane Holmes wanders and writes in the wilds of Upper Teesdale. She has garnered many awards including winning the Bridport Poetry prize, the Writer’s Digest poetry competition, the Live Canon Poetry Pamphlet Prize, Bath Novella-in-Flash Prize, , Martin Starkie, Dromineer, Reflex Fiction and Mslexia Flash prize as well as the Bedford Poetry competition. She has  been shortlisted for the Beverley International Prize for Literature and longlisted for the UK National Poetry Prize twice. Mary-Jane’s poetry collection Heliotrope with Matches and Magnifying Glass is published by Pindrop Press. Her pamphlet Dihedral is published by Live Canon Press and her novella Don’t Tell the Bees, is published by AdHoc Fiction. Her Lockdown poem ‘Letter from Baldersdale’ joins 20 other poems in the National Poetry Archive on their 20^th anniversary. Her collection of Flash Fiction was published by V press in 2021 and was shortlisted for the Eyelands Literary prize in 2023.

Her work appears in a variety of publications including Aesthetica. Magma, Modern Poetry in Translation, Mslexia, The Lonely Crowd, Prole The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and in anthologies including Best Small Fictions 2014/16/18/20  and Best Microfictions 2020.

She has an MA (Distinction) in Creative Writing from Kellogg College, Oxford and has been awarded an Arts and Humanities Research Council studentship to complete a PhD in poetry and translation at Newcastle University. UK.

 New Collection of Short Fiction: Set a Crow to Catch a Crow

Many of our members have attended ‘Swanwick’ over the years and Maggie, who sings its praises at every opportunity, is going to run a course there again in 2024. Booking is now open and she would encourage anyone who hasn’t been before to give it a shot. There are opportunities on the website every year to win a free place and that too has been achieved in the past by several RWG members. Details can be found here: https://www.swanwickwritersschool.org.uk/

Well done, Susan, for writing the star letter in the latest issue of Writing Magazine! That’s no mean feat and the prize will come in very handy.

Our final event of 2023 featured a buffet, a literary quiz devised by Peter, a Secret Santa and a wide variety of Christmas readings. As well as examples of our own work,  there were chosen pieces by members’ favourite authors.

The star of the show was Sheila, a clear winner of this year’s President’s Cup, which Joe was very pleased to hand to her.

NB This was our last evening at the St Wilfrid’s Community Centre. From Wednesday 10th January 2024, our fortnightly meetings will be held in an upstairs room at the So! Bar at 6, Old Market Place. (Many will remember it as the former Black Bull public house.) Details will follow when this website is updated over the holidays.

If we don’t get takers for this event, it certainly won’t be for want of a good title. Sheila has excelled herself.