The organisers of the Letterkenny Cathedral Quarter Literary Festival contacted me recently, to let me know that my flash fiction story This Will Be the Hole is one of six stories shortlisted for the Letterkenny Flash Fiction Prize.
What’s the Letterkenny Cathedral Quarter Literary Festival?
Letterkenny is a town in Donegal, Republic of Ireland. It’s on Loch Swilly in the north-west of Ulster, one of the four Irish provinces. The Cathedral Quarter is the old town, the area around the cathedral that’s being regenerating.
This is how they describe the literary festival:
The Letterkenny Cathedral Quarter Literary Festival is the flagship event in our Cultural Programme and is held on the third weekend in October. Established in 2016, this innovative dynamic festival celebrates our area’s unique links with Jane Austen and Brendan Behan whilst promoting the best in local talent.
The festival also features a podcast, Quills and the Quarter which is available on Spotify here, Apple Podcasts here, and Amazon Podcasts here.
The Shortlist for the Letterkenny Flash Fiction Prize
Here’s the announcement of the shortlist from the Letterkenny Cathedral Quarter Literary Festival website:
Letterkenny Flash Fiction Prize: What’s the Prize?
The winner will receive €150 and the runner-up €100. All the shortlisted works win vouchers.
Letterkenny Flash Fiction Prize: Who chooses the winner?
Averil Meehan, a flash fiction writer, poet, and dramatist, is the judge for the competition. She judged the entries blind, i.e. she didn’t know who’d written each story, so couldn’t be influenced by any unconscious biases. I support blind judging, and blind submissions in general.
What’s This Will Be The Hole about?
It’s a 300-word flash fiction story inspired by the summer I spent working on a building site when I was nineteen. We were underpinning the walls of a bungalow, which involved digging holes under the walls and filling them with concrete. It was a tough job, particularly as the soil was mostly clay, and I wasn’t used to hard manual work.
It was a formative experience, mostly in that it left me never wanting to work on a building site ever again.
There were good things about it. The boss was funny. It was summer, so it was warm most of the time and working outside on a sunny day wasn’t so bad. I got much stronger and more muscly, which was cool.
But lifting clay out of a hole is fundamentally not a fun job. And that’s what This Will Be The Hole humorously comments on.
I wrote an early version of the story during a writing retreat at Moniack Mhor near Inverness. It was originally about 400 words long. For the competition, I edited the original story, trimming it down to meet the very low 300-word limit. It’s an interesting discipline trying to tell a story in 300 words.
What Happened Next?
The prize-giving was on the 19th October, and was well attended—there were about fifty or sixty people in the audience. I met the other authors and we all read our stories to the audience. Mary Black’s story won the overall prize. I got a certificate and €50 for being shortlisted.
So, not quite there, again, for me. Being shortlisted for prizes but not winning them is becoming a bit of a theme for me. Maybe one day…
Want to Read This Will Be The Hole?
With the accolade of being shortlisted for the prize, hopefully This Will Be the Hole will be published. If it is, then I’ll post a link. Otherwise, I’ll post the story here.
Thoughts?
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