Arts — Then Do Better

Several poetry, short story, art and a play writing competitions with deadlines coming up. The Oxford Brookes Poetry (28 Aug, deadline) competition. Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, both poetry and short story (31 Aug) and an art prize. Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award (28 Sep, need to be published writer). Manchester Poetry Prize for best portfolio of poems and the Manchester Fiction Prize for best short story (29 Sep). Taking Flight, play competition (30-60 mins, 1 Oct, Asian writers). The big one in poetry, The Poetry Society’s annual National Poetry Competition (31 Oct). Get ready, get set - write - draw - go !

The Oxford Brookes Poetry competition.
The competition is open to both new and established poets aged 18 and over from across the globe and has two categories:
1) Open category (open to all poets aged 18 years and over)
2) English as an Additional Language (EAL) category (open to all poets aged 18 and over who write in English as an Additional Language
The winners of each category will receive £1000 and both runners up £200.

Aesthetica Creative Writing Award
The Aesthetica Creative Writing Award is an international literary prize that celebrates excellence in Poetry and Short Fiction. The prize is now in its 11th year, hosted by Aesthetica Magazine. With the aim to support and nurture new writing talent, it awards publication within an inspiring anthology to a shortlist of 60 writers, including a winner from each category.

The winners are also presented with further opportunities to expand their literary careers: £1,000 cash prize each, a consultation with literary agency Redhammer Management, a Full Membership to The Poetry Society, a subscription to Granta and books courtesy of Bloodaxe Books and Vintage Books.

Poetry entries should be no more than 40 lines
Fiction entries should be no more than 2,000 words
Works published elsewhere are accepted

They also run an Art prize. There are two awards for entry: the Main Art Prize and the Emerging Art Prize. The Emerging Art Prize is open to current students and artists who have graduated within the last two years. The Main Art Prize is open to all, including those eligible for the Emerging Art Prize.

The 2018 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award.
The prize, worth £30,000 to the winner, is an international award, founded in 2010, that is open to any story of up to 6,000 words written in English. Stories need to have been either previously unpublished or only published after 31 December 2016. Five other authors shortlisted for the award will each receive £1,000. The prize is administered by the Society of Authors. To be eligible, the author must simply have a record of prior publication in creative writing in the United Kingdom or Ireland.

The Manchester Writing Competition was established by Carol Ann Duffy in 2008. It offers the UK’s biggest literary prizes for unpublished writing and has awarded more than £135,000 to its winners. Each year two £10,000* prizes are awarded: the Manchester Poetry Prize for best portfolio of poems and the Manchester Fiction Prize for best short story. Designed to encourage and celebrate new writing across the globe the competition is open internationally to new and established writers.
> Manchester Poetry Prize - £10,000*
> Manchester Fiction Prize - £10,000*

There is a play writing competition from Red Dragonfly. It's aimed for Asian writers in the UK only. They are looking for i) a thirty minute to an hour stage play, the subject of which can be anything you want – from something contemporary to more traditional folk and fairy tales- as long as it is family friendly – and we mean the whole family not just small children ii) The play should be written for a cast of up to five actors – although they can double up on characters if you want and iii) workable with a minimal set, however do not let this restrict your imagination – it's amazing what can be accomplished on a stage with very little. Applicants need to be over eighteen and based in the UK but otherwise we are truly open to hearing from anybody.

Finally in this summary, the big Poetry Society competition, it's open globally.

All entries are judged anonymously and the poet’s name must not appear on the poem itself.
All poems must have a title and must not exceed 40 lines in length (excluding title). Entries can be on any subject.
Poems must be the original work of the entrant.
Entries must not have been published, self-published, published on a website, broadcast or featured among the winners in another competition before 31 March 2018.

Get ready, get set - write - draw - go !

Cross fertilise. Read about the autistic mind here and ideas on the arts here. On investing try a thought on stock valuations.

Ursula K Le Guin's Wizard of Earthsea impressed upon me the idea of words, the essence of words, as magic - as items of power. A brilliant story with a thread of understanding about the world we live in told through a completely other world. It made an impact early enough that I didn't understand "genre" so I could appreciate the work without knowing what I "should" or shouldn't like.

She also over her long career has written insightful pieces on the writing process, (a few words to a young writer, here 1968 rejection letter), creativity and Taoism (she has translated Lao Tzu - saying: “The Tao Te Ching is partly in prose, partly in verse; but as we define poetry now, not by rhyme and meter but as a patterned intensity of language, the whole thing is poetry. I wanted to catch that poetry, its terse, strange beauty. Most translations have caught meanings in their net, but prosily, letting the beauty slip through. And in poetry, beauty is no ornament; it is the meaning. It is the truth".

Here is her talking in 1975 at Worldcon.

Some of this is collected in Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016.

The piece (extracts below) on literature as a manual for life is worth the price of the book alone, if you measure such things in dollars and gold. Neil Gamain's commencement speech chimes although David Ogilvy takes the creativity for business much to Le Guin's despair I expect. The book reviews Le Guin gives are of more interest if you are a Le Guin fan.

The Operating Instructions (talk given at Oregon Literary Arts meeting in 2002)

"A poet has been appointed ambassador. A playwright is elected president. Construction workers stand in line with office managers to buy a new novel. Adults seek moral guidance and intellectual challenge in stories about warrior monkeys, one-eyed giants, and crazy knights who fight windmills. Literacy is considered a beginning, not an end. . . . Well, maybe in some other country, but not this one. In America the imagination is generally looked on as something that might be useful when the TV is out of order. Poetry and plays have no relation to practical politics. ...

... Literacy is so you can read the operating instructions. I think the imagination is the single most useful tool mankind possesses. It beats the opposable thumb. I can imagine living without my thumbs, but not without my imagination. I hear voices agreeing with me. “Yes, yes!” they cry. “The creative imagination is a tremendous plus in business! We value creativity, we reward it!” In the marketplace, the word creativity has come to mean the generation of ideas applicable to practical strategies to make larger profits. This reduction has gone on so long that the word creative can hardly be degraded further. I don’t use it any more, yielding it to capitalists and academics to abuse as they like. But they can’t have imagination. Imagination is not a means of making money. It has no place in the vocabulary of profit-making. It is not a weapon, though all weapons originate from it, and their use, or non-use, depends on it, as with all tools and their uses. The imagination is an essential tool of the mind, a fundamental way of thinking, an indispensable means of becoming and remaining human. We have to learn to use it, and how to use it, like any other tool. Children have imagination to start with, as they have body, intellect, the capacity for language: things essential to their humanity, things they need to learn how to use, how to use well. ...

Through story, every culture defines itself and teaches its children how to be people and members of their people—Hmong, !Kung, Hopi, Quechua, French, Californian. . . .

.... Literature remains comparatively, and amazingly, honest and reliable. ...

...Incoherent and commercialised and worm-eaten ... and hype and blather as it is, electronic publication offers those who read a strong new means of active community. The technology is not what matters. Words are what matter. The sharing of words. The activation of imagination through the reading of words. The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life...."

Cross fertilise. Read about the autistic mind here and ideas on the arts here. On investing try a thought on stock valuations.

** according to the Nerdist, the Ghibli film didn't use much of Le Guin's source material at all, but it did bring father and son back together again, so there is that.