Creative Writing Ink Journal
Our Creative Writing Ink Journal publishes the winning entries of our monthly Creative Writing Ink competitions. For further details on our free to enter monthly competitions just visit our Competitions and Events page.
The winners of our monthly competitions are listed below.
April Competition Winner
Maria Kiernan, Mullingar, Co. Westmeath, Ireland
To read, please click here
Shortlisted:
Rebecca Reddin – Today
Paul Protheroe – Contagious
Ruth Elizabeth Powell – Yak Cabaret
March Competition Winner
Optimism by Vera Sugár, Roehampton, London
To read, please click here
Shortlisted:
Mark Airlie – Broken Minature Geometries
Joseph Burke – Whispers
Emmy Todd
February Competition Winner
Winner: Getting away from it all, by Bill Hodson, York, England
To read, please click here
Shortlisted:
Patrick O’Laoghaire – Achilles and Briseis
Roisin Browne (Haiku)
Clare Lally – Little Pleasures
January Competition Winner
A Winter Baby, by Pauline Murphy, Co. Clare, Ireland
To read, please click here
December Competition Winner
Reflecting Queenie, by Anne Goodwin, Nottinghamshire, England
To read, please click here
November Competition Winner
Conkers, by Peter Branson
October Competition Winner
Cemetery Rose, by Barry Carter, Hull, England
To read, please click here
September Competition Winner
Drenched, by Trisha McKinney, Dublin, Ireland
To read please click here
August Competition Winner
The Rainy Day, by Martin Keaveney, Ireland
To read, please click here
Quarterly Competition Winner (May-July 2012)
Juliet Wilson, Edinburgh, Scotland.
July Poetry Winner
Morning Tea, by Celia Donoghue, Dublin, Ireland
To read, please click here
July Short Story Winner
Narcissine Attraction, by Andrew Campbell-Kearsey, Brighton, East Sussex, England
To read, please click here
June Short Story Winner
Duck a l’Orange, by Nicola Garrett, Dunboyne, Co. Meath, Ireland
To read Nicola’s story, please click here
June Poetry Winner
Celestial Beings, by Marie Munnelly, Ireland
Please click here to read
May Short Story Winner
Luna, by Colm Reynor, Dublin
To read Luna, please click here
May Poetry Winner
Sleep Disturbed, by Juliet Wilson, Edinburgh
To read Sleep Disturbed, please click here
April Short Story Winner
Killing, by Samuel Dodson, Warwick, United Kingdom
To read, please click here
April Poetry Winner
Tapir by Bern Butler, Galway, Ireland
To read, please click here
March Poetry Winner
Love for a Sister, Marie Munnelly
To read, please click here
March Short Story Winner
What Goes Around, Joan Skura, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
To read, please click here
February Poetry Winner
My Senses, My Memories by Rose Kelland, Suffolk, United Kingdom
To read, please click here
February Short Story Winner
Admiral Knightsky, by David O’Connor, Co. Dublin
To read, please click here
January Short Story Winner
Behind the Lace, by Cynthia Allen, United Kingdom
To read the full story, click here
January Poetry Winner
Safety First, by Peter Branson, United Kingdom
December Poetry Winner
Jonathan Cooper, Sheffield, United Kingdom
Windy Day
Assault again my bitter ear
You poltergeist, so cumbersome
With rage, as forged in yesteryear,
Where warmth holds no dominion.
Now animate the battered limbs
Of summer’s leafy sentinels;
Your one-voice choir shrieks winter’s hymns
In praise of dark confessionals.
Assault again my weathered face
Dried up, save for the tears of cold.
Pierce not my pulled-tight carapace;
Touch not my thoughts of summer’s gold.
December Short Story Winner
Jessie, by Rose Kelland, Suffolk, United Kingdom
Read full story here
November Poetry Winner
C.R. Redd, North Somerset, England
Death on the Motorway
They died on the motorway. In no way
Connected, these strangers connected
For one last time. An awful death, not
Because of the shrieking inferno
Nor their choking in the acrid blackness
That was everywhere, and overcame them.
I cannot imagine those, so they do not
Affect me. And yet when I heard I cried
Because they died nowhere, not even
Half-way home. These bodies were in
Transit, travelling, leaving, going.
I do not want to die on the motorway
In the middle of nowhere, the grey road.
I want to die stationary, where I seem
Permanent to the ground.
__________________________________________________
November Short Story Winner & Quarterly Competition Winner (Nov 2011-Jan 2012)
Nora Hegarty, Waterford, Ireland
The Christmas Cake
Giving the kitchen table one last unnecessary wipe, Mrs Mooney decided that today was the day to think about baking her Christmas cake. Every year, good or bad, brought November and every November brought this decision. She had lost track of how many times the ritual had been followed. God, it made her feel jaded and old. This year, she thought, looking out at four mad magpies strutting around the garden, it’s going to be different. This year, it’s going to be my way. Now that she had her mind made up, she was very definite. The birds’ boldness as they squawked and screeched, taking charge of the place though they were complete imposters only served to bolster her further. She would buy a cake and shock them all.
What would they make of that, she wondered, making her way upstairs, rooting out her good shoes, pulling on her raincoat and running a comb through her hair. She smiled at her reflection in the landing mirror. Her hair, due an overhaul before Christmas had grown out of its usual rigid bob, and was starting to curl in little wisps around her face. In a certain light, she thought it made her look positively girlish. Her well cut raincoat hid an abundance of middle age spread and its jade green colour complimented her eyes. Mrs Mooney was on a high.
Read full story here
_______________________________________________________
October Poetry Winner
Elizabeth Jardine Godwin, Staffordshire, United Kingdom
Moth
Elizabeth Godwin
Flashing over polished stones,
our candles bobbed
like plums in cold water
and glanced across the foxgloves
and cow parsleyscenes we had breasted
in the tang of that late summer afternoon’s high smoulder.
October Short Story Winner
Michael Poyser, Leeds, United Kingdom – “The Importance of Being Furnaced.”
September Poetry Competition Winner
Susan Morgan, Newry, Northern Ireland – “Guzelyurt”
September Short Story Competition Winner
Henry St.Leger-Davey, Winchester, England
I went to the beach today
I start to feel uncomfortable, sitting here still. Her damp cheeks make me want to stand up; push the world over; dismiss it; throw it away; reject it; tell it something must be wrong with it; tell it that it’s failing; make it see that its purpose, whether it doesn’t include her or me (or is one of those ‘the point is there’s no point’ so-zen-it’s-crazy mentalities), can’t possibly be doing its job right when she, she is sitting here at the edge of this wooden platform with her frame collapsing into her stomach and her sobs sinking ever deeper into her chest with each rush of salt sliding down the bridge of her nose, manoeuvring over and around the resigned freckles in its path, palely dotted like the careless afterthought of a painter flicking the last specks of orange off his brush. The way they rest on her, parallel to the curved hoods of her eyes, reminds me of the faint caresses prodded into the sand by the first dozen drops of February rain (who goes to the beach in February?).
Continue reading I went to the beach today
August Short Story & Quarterly Competition Winner (Aug-Oct 2011)
Amanda Bowden, Bristol, England
Papier Mache Doll
Amanda Bowden
I pull my long black woollen coat around me. Lennon lies quietly at my feet, the cold air teasing his fur. My sister tells me it’s disrespectful to take a dog to a funeral. I don’t see why. It’s a woodland funeral. Dad’s in a wicker coffin. She doesn’t like that either, Jasmine. God only knows how she turned out so conventionally; so staid, so normal.
Twanged notes play with the still air – Evan on the five-stringed banjo. Dad’s banjo. He finishes the song, pauses then throws the banjo into the grave. It thuds and gives off a final note. Jasmine pulls a face like she’s tasted something nasty.
The grave is starting to look like a white elephant stall. So far it contains – as well as dad – a flat cap, a scarf, a necklace, a coin, a crystal, a belt buckle, several CDs and photos, football programmes, a CND badge and the banjo.
Continue reading Papier Mache Doll
August Poetry Winner
Annie Lang, Sheffield, England
The Midnight Poet
I met a woman on a beach last night while I was sleeping.
The beach crept into my room, and I fell to land
in seas too warm to be this far north.
She smiled at me, and cocked a gun,
and said, ‘Don’t you think you’d better run?’
I told her, even dreaming, I do not rhyme the lines,
and she laughed at me and said she knew.
‘I know your lines,’ she said, and the gun melted.
It split through her fingers and splattered on the sand,
and inky hearts drew themselves beneath us.
‘You write your soul, and leave it raw,’ she said,
and the hearts mourned the toes that drew them.
‘You do not write, you bleed,’ she said, and barefoot
drew lines through the hearts and boxes around the lines.
July Short Story Competition Winner
C.R. Redd, North Somerset, England.
The White Hart
He was a self-styled wise man. A man who, to all troubled newcomers, would bestow simple and perfect advice. These concise nuggets of wisdom were always found amidst an air of sobriety indicative of a man who has seen everything, and often accompanied with a lowering of eyebrows that creased the leather of his face. It was not unusual for an entire evening to be spent in sombre consult with some poor downtrodden stranger, whose problems were inevitably eradicated by the clarity of his words. There was not much to discriminate him from the other men of his certain time and place, bound as he was to the path life had laid out for him. Continue reading The White Hart
July Poetry Competition Winner
Henry St Leger-Davey, Winchester, England
Just not as they ought to be.
This time, last night, was the Wednesday of my discontent,
Which did flourish, surprised at its own appearance.
Could I her compare to a day so impaired
By rain? Mere moments past being told of light
And warmth… unforgettable picnics and such,
To tell to our child ‘round the crackle of reddening timber,
The tale of that day, that dear day we so dined,
But it rained it just rained and forgot I was there.
Continue reading Just not as they ought to be
June Poetry Competition Winner
May Poetry Winner & Quarterly Competition May 11-July 11 Winner
Quarterly Competition Feb 11-April 11 Winner
Quarterly Competition Nov 10-Jan 11 Winner
August Short Story Winner – (& 2010 Quarterly Competition Winner)