The English Language and Literature department is pleased to announce the winners of this year’s creative writing contests. The Writing Contest Committee shares a few thoughts on each of the winning entries.
The Joyce Marshall Hsia Memorial Poetry Prize:
First prize
Julien Sheppard BA’21, current MA History student, Patrick Power Fellow in Applied History
We were moved by the narrative energy and particularity in these poems, and by the exactness of the perceptions of natural detail (the shimmer of gaspereau). One believes in the human voices, the characters one encounters: “When did you stop asking / about Margaret?” Some of the poems drew us in with their chilling images, their calculated ambiguities; others by immersing us in a conjured matrix of human and creaturely relationship.
Second prize
Patrick Inkpen, BA student, English major
We liked the range of themes, forms and tones in this submission, and the way this poet marries poetic convention to original perception. There’s a compelling oddness about many of these poems, despite their traditional formal structures.
Third prize
Melisa Kaya, BA student, English major, Creative Writing minor
We admire this poet’s attention to detail, to the metapoeic resonances that are possible on the page. The locutions are unexpected and vivid: "I crawled from my mother’s hollow like a squirrel of a willow ...." The concrete poem which begins the submission felt fresh and true: a new perception wrested from language, given linguistic form.
The Margó Takacs Marshall Memorial Prize For Excellence In Short Story Writing
First prize – “Gone for Good”
By Melisa Kaya, English major
A metanarrative characterized by an uncompromising wildness, an unwillingness to resolve; it seemed to us the most interesting of the submissions, though we sometimes struggled to follow the narrative thread. Still, we have decided to honour it with the first prize, to recognize its ambition and its distinctness, vis-à-vis the other submissions.
Second prize – "Where Do We Go?"
By Alex Baker, MA Philosophy student
A grisly existential tale, which surprised us with a new take on a familiar genre-fiction scenario. The sentences are compellingly constructed and the characters and settings are deftly evoked.
Third prize – "Soliloquy of Something"
By Theodore Moss III, BSc student
A story that gradually brings us into sympathy with what initially seems a one-note narrator: the story moves from simplicity to complexity in a way that is compelling. What begins as a simple story about teenaged love and rejection becomes a complex story about friendship and meaning.
The annual poetry and short fiction contests are open to any student currently enrolled at Saint Mary’s University. Next year’s deadline for submissions will be in March 2023. Some of the previous winners have gone on to become nationally celebrated writers, such as Sue Goyette, Jenny Haysom, Jill MacLean and Danny Jacobs.