Writing

 

 

Nicola Monaghan's debut novel The Killing Jar was published in 2006 to critical acclaim and went on to win a Betty Trask, the Authors' Club First Novel Award and the Waverton Good Read. She has since published a second novel Starfishing, and a novella, The Okinawa Dragon, as well as a number of stories and articles in anthologies and magazines.

 

 

A Higher State of Consciousness, extract from Starfishing (Vintage, 2009)

You walk throught the door and into a wall of sound.

It's so loud it sends you off balance, makes it dificult to put one foot in front of another.

The room is immense and lofty, the size of an aircraft hangar, and it boils with people pushing and shouting and clambering over each other. The air crackles. Static moves the tiny hairs on your arms and the back of your neck; you feel it sweep your body.

The clothes people are wearing make your eyes dart about, they send you dizzy with their blues and reds and stripes and stars. The hot pool of bodies oozes sweat, which fills the air and floods your senses. Everyone's squashed against each other with their arms in the air and as you walk through, they suck you in. Your heart's pounding, you're pumped full of chemicals. You don't run and you don't fight and they build and build and it makes you light headed. High.

 

 

Cathy Grindrod is a former Derbyshire Poet Laureate and has published several collections of poetry, the most recent of which is The Sky, Head On.  She is also a playwright and wrote the libretto for the oratorio, More Glass Than Wall, nominated for a BBC Radio 3 Composer of the Year Award.

He shaves off his beard after 20 years, from The Sky, Head On (Shoestring, 2009)

When he shaved off his beard
and his face hatched,

she was shy, shrank
in its glare like a fledgling,

peeped out on its newness,
creeping in to watch him sleep

in the chair, brazen,
sunrising from cushions.

And speaking of mornings,
she listened hard

for the sud, scrape, slosh,
of sleek drips unhindered,

glistening their proof
on pink porcelain,

stroked his smoothness,
first with one finger,

shocked by its tight tip's trail,
later with five of them,

sliding like skaters unrinked.
Love, she thought,

as they lay, that first time,
lights blazing,

and he turned to her,
bedclothes pushed down,

his face wide open.

 

 

 

Paul Anderson specialises in writing about the future of technology and was awarded the inaugural Computer Science Writer of the Year prize in 2007. He is writing a book called Web 2.0 and Beyond, to be published by Taylor & Francis in 2012.

 

 

 

Extract from Paul's winning entry in the British Midland Voyager Travel Writing Competition

There is a small fishing village in northern Scotland where you can buy a Russian scrabble set. Or so a customer at the bar of the local Ferry Boat Inn told me. The old sea dog may have been pulling my leg, but there is something fishy about a place where a red hammer and sickle hangs in the parish church, and the local bar has rouble notes pinned to the walls.

The village of Ullapool lies hard by the shores of Loch Broom on the north west Scottish coast. First sight for visitors is from the rise of a hill on the A835 Inverness road; a splash of whitewashed houses arranged in a curve on a promontory jutting out into the loch. And it is a beautiful sight on a fine spring morning; the azure mirror of the loch surrounded by the snow-capped mountains of Inverlael Forest and the sea stretching away past the Summer isles into an endless sky.

 

Roberta Dewa began writing in her twenties, and during the 1980s had three genre historical novels published by Robert Hale. For the next 20 years, she was fully occupied by academic life and teaching, and only returned to writing 10 years ago, when she started to write serious fiction and poetry for the first time.  She is currently working on editing The Memory of Bridges, which she began during her MA in Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University in 2006.

The Power House, extract from The Memory of Bridges

Wilford. The word is a soft word. No anger in it, no raised voice, no storms. It has the willows in it, the riverside willows whose branches my mother cuts each spring to watch the grey buds break open into green. And it has the river in it - ford - the river Trent before the time of Wilford's bridges, a time I do not remember, but when there was a ferryboat which served as a conduit across the river until the bridge was built. A time of drowning, of limp bodies lying cold in the riverside mortuary next to St Wilfrid's Church.