Member’s Writing Comp – Autumn 2024

AUTUMN 2024 — COMPETITION WINNERS

Thank you to everyone who entered the Autumn 2024 Member’s Competition.

Congratulations to Mark Liston, Ellen Shelley and Kate McManus whose winning entries are highlighted below.

Mark Liston, 'Daphne was a Journalist!'

1st Prize — $100

Daphne was a Journalist (a Prose Poem)
after Wenqing Yan (@yuumeiart), ‘Tea and Lotus’

Smiling. She collects words and pictures from magazines and papers to digest the news by tearing them into random slices, like Breaking News Flashes scrolling the bottom of her TV screen. She works tirelessly, head down, eyes in full concentration, and places each slip of paper into ever mounting plastic sleeves; patting them down each time they fill. And she likes to sip tea from her own cup and brewed in a pot gifted her to cherish. And giggles, then laughs uncontrollably, when the little cat stuck to the bottom begins to emerge with every sip and tilt of the cup – the wonder of an emerging little friend from the depths: a daily enchantment.
Once a determined news hound in the News Department of a small but successful TV channel, late in the afternoon before the four o’clock tea-time, she tires of all the news and picture capturing and collaging: it is time for more laughter. As if at an afterwork bar sipping a gin and tonic and talking work, she watches at home someone drops a hat, or trips on a mat, and spills her drink, or a song is sung in the wrong key, her door-jam gets stuck, and a bird scoots between trees, or a bloke nearly chokes on his dessert, anything really… she laughs at it heartily.
She wears an adult pad to bed but trusts herself to let it be known when she needs the commode, with a laugh her finger pointing ‘down there’.
The other day she went to the hospital for scans. Her concave skull above the ear was sore, the tumour was cut out years before; but a hole at the hair line had opened. Blood drops had dried. She showed me and pointed with one word ‘Sore’.
She returns after a week. We play puzzle games. I drop a piece on the carpet. You could hear the raucous cackle right down the end corridor.
We build the jigsaw together. It is sunset.
She looks into my eyes and says my name, I know it is bedtime, the news can wait for another day. Her wheelchair makes a squeaking roll down the corridor, lights now on in some other rooms. She giggles and smiles, pointing to their TV screens.

Ellen Shelley, 'Performance'

2nd Prize — $75

Performance
after Madeleine Gary, Green Dot

I know it will be easy for him to forget me
track records come with a lifetime guarantee.

Messages will end like an acute abruption,
a cease-fire from the shelling inside.

But this, hardly more than a nuance, has camouflaged
my existence, as if a cleaner had been brought in

to change the set: Protagonist wiped, props and proofs
bleached like a scene from Pulp Fiction—

as if an accidental oversharing had blown my mind.
Situation secure and filed for your eyes only.

Not the same as if it never happened,
pain still glows under the right search light.

Reminders caught on camera, under nails, history
notes, photos, the beginning of a word; that song…

I’ll get home and lap up attention from cats
until their bowls are full—my finest hour;

a performance used to fool onlookers as if on a stage,
but zoom in close and see the make-up, has run down the page.

Kate McManus, 'In My Cups'

3rd Prize — $50

In My Cups
(After Wenqing Yan’s ‘Tea and Lotus’)

At the end of the afternoon on any given day you’ll find me at the bottom of my teapot.

Alchemised, not stewed.

It’s a modern receptacle with an infuser; tea leaves seep into the water, not your cup. How many thoughts per tea leaf ? how many emotions whining and swimming in hot water before transmuting into liquid medicine? The formula is incalculable, a mystery I’ve worked at all my life.

My red bush tea is caffeine free so I drink it profusely, feeling both virtuous and indulgent as it calcinates bones, tranquilises mind, reconnects fascia. Halfway through the first cup rambling thoughts emerge in need of corralling. By the second, I’m concocting succulent ideas, the third and subsequent cups are for tending old wounds in need of daily rinsing.

Madagascar, a name to conjure the cryptic past, labelled a dainty teapot I found among the clearance items in Myer. Its harlequin print of red and yellow diamonds, swims in a teal ocean surrounding the germinal island of lemurs and ancient humans. A five-pointed star of Venus pentagram covers the silver topped lid. I bought a matching cup but weakened and finally broken from overuse, it was replaced by a sturdy pink mug bearing a motionless cheetah.

While the teal ocean soothes, the red and yellow diamonds vex me; all I can see in those colours is a bleeding womb. At the bottom of the design small red tongues of fire haemorrhage into the blue, reinforcing my vision of menstruation. While waiting for the kettle to boil or tea to marinate, I recall my first periods, a time when only tea, pink rubber

hot-water bottles and Nanna’s loving words whispered into the brew, soothed the unspeakable flux. She was a devout Catholic, singing ecstatically at Benediction each Friday, while reading tea leaves and Tarot on Saturday. There was no contradiction for her:

‘It all flows from the One God-but don’t tell Monsignor!’

From the muddy dregs of a day’s worth of Bushell’s tea in a willow patterned China pot, a whole lotus light of wisdom emanated-if you had the gift.

She told me when I was little I would learn much and lose a lot-she had the gift.

At my age I bleed in a different way; death cleaning, downsizing, minimising all possessions to be liquidated into money, the magic beans of life. One of the last to go will be the Madagascar teapot, if it can survive the cracks and injuries of daily use.

Now that I’m Nanna I wonder about the medicinal potential of the vanilla Chai and T2 blends whizzing around the keep cups of my grandchildren as they rush through life. Will my darlings recall the tea parties of their infancy when we served lapsang souchong in empty cups to Barbie and B2? Or times of adolescent angst, metamorphosed by peppermint tea and strong hugs into the fragile gold of self-esteem?

Shush, it’s hidden in the leaves.

SHORTLISTED ENTRIES

A special mention also goes to the shortlisted entries:

Jan Dean, ‘Terrarium’
Irina Frolova, ‘Breakthrough or the Rebirth of a Plain Jane’
Kathryn Fry, ‘A Later Stage’
Ellen Shelley, ‘Painting by Numbers’
Julie Simpson, ‘Green Upon Green (Shape Poem Tree)’
Peter Wells, ‘People of the Hawkesbury’

MEMBER'S WRITING COMPETITION

Autumn 2024

Guidelines

Entries close Friday 24 May 2024, 5pm.
Submit your entries via the form below
The contest is for members only. Become a member
Maximum word count: 500 words (poems max 20 lines)
Max 2 submissions per member
Winners announced June

Prizes

First Prize: $100

Second Prize: $75

Third Prize: $50

Winning entries will be published on the Hunter Writers’ Centre website.

WRITING PROMPTS

Write a piece inspired by one of the quotes or images below

She realised that he would never be sorry because he had refused to see her for who she was-and who she definitely wasn’t.’

― Anthea Syrokou, True Colours

Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

— Neil Gaiman, Coraline

I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.

— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.

― John Green, Looking for Alaska

I wasn’t cold, but I was shivering when I walked onto the Clayton Road overpass. I wasn’t scared either, even when I climbed over the rail. I didn’t feel much of anything.

— Craig Silvey, Honeybee

For some years of my twenties, I was very much in love with a man who would not leave his wife. For not one moment of this relationship was I unaware of what every single popular culture representation of such an arrangement portended my fate to be.

— Madeleine Gary, Green Dot