Category: Uncategorized (Page 1 of 4)

The 2023 Pamela Miller Prize

It’s that time of the year again with the Pamela Miller Prize, our annual flash fiction competition.

The winner of the Pamela Miller Prize will receive a certificate and $100 first prize, as well as publication in the Ballarat Writers newsletter and website. The winner will be announced at the Ballarat Writers July members’ night. 

The Pamela Miller Prize first ran in 2015, in memory of Pamela Miller, who was a very active and productive member of Ballarat Writers. She was a writer of short stories and poetry, and won the short story competition with ‘Murder at MADE’ in 2014. Early in 2015, Pamela wrote a very popular poem called ‘Bronze Heads—The Prime Minister’s Walk’ as part of a Ballarat Writers project during the Begonia Festival.

Entries open: Monday 1 May

Entries close: Wednesday 31 May

Ballarat Writers is accepting fictional prose entries of up to 450 words on the theme Smile. Entry is free. 

This is limited to members of Ballarat Writers, so make sure you’ve joined or renewed your membership!

All entries must:

  • be original and unpublished
  • be written by a current member of Ballarat Writers (judging committee members cannot enter)
  • engage with the theme Smile, and be 450 words in length or less (not including the title)
  • be sent to competitions@ballaratwriters.com with the subject line ‘2023 Pamela Miller Prize Entry’.

As the competition will be a blind judging, please do not include your name or contact details on the entry. 

You can read more about the Pamela Miller prize here.

Good luck and happy writing!

AGM is nigh

Ballarat Writers invites members to attend our annual general meeting on 16 February.

We do need to make quorum, so please come along if you can.

The AGM tends to not require a big commitment in time. There is the opportunity to have a meal and a drink along with a catch-up outside of the official business, and there will be a free drink for members to help mark the occasion. 

A key point of business will be the election of the committee to oversee operations for the year ahead. Advance nominations close today, 9 February, but nominations will be accepted from the floor at the AGM.

Some committee members will not be standing again so please consider if contributing to BW and the writing community through a committee role is something you’d like to do. There is a handover plan in place to ease the transition.

We are calling for nominations for the following Office Bearers:

  • Chairperson
  • Treasurer & Membership Coordinator
  • Secretary/Public Officer
  • Competitions Coordinator                                                        
  • Publicity & Media Coordinator
  • General Committee Member 

Note: The position of Treasurer requires skills and experience in finance and/or bookkeeping. Position reports and descriptions are available from the website.

Where: Bunch of Grapes, 401 Pleasant St South, Ballarat
When: 6.30pm, 16 February 2022
Cost: FREE 
Refreshments: Drinks and meals will be available to purchase, and members will be provided with a drink ticket on arrival valid for basic alcoholic beverages, soft drinks, tea and coffee.
Covid: The venue will be operating under the Covid restrictions of the day. Proof of double vaccination is required to attend.

For further information contact Rebecca Fletcher: chairperson@ballaratwriters.com

August Members’ Night goes online

With new lockdown restrictions ruling out our usual meeting at the Bunch of Grapes, our monthly Members’ Night is going to Zoom on Wednesday 25 August. Details have been sent via newsletter, so please let us know if you have not received them or need assistance with navigating the Zoom environment! Fingers crossed we will be back at the table in September!

Pamela Miller Award winner announced

The winner of the 2021 Pamela Miller Award was announced at the June Members’ Night on 30 June.

Richenda Rudman was judged the winner with ‘Returning the Sharps’. Richenda won $100, an engraved glass and a certificate. Congratulations!

Eight entries were received for the contest, for BW members only. Judges were members of the Ballarat Writers committee: Rebecca Fletcher, Kirstyn McDermott, Laura Wilson, Nicole Kelly, Megan Riedl and Jason Nahrung.

Entries had to be fictional prose entries of up to 500 words on the theme A New Start.

July Writers Corner – social media

Writers Corner is back! With the June event having been cancelled due to Covid restrictions, July will pick up where we left off with a discussion of social media for writers.

Do you have followers or are you a follower, perhaps a blogger or a vlogger, tweeter, snapper, and or a chatter?  Maybe you just enjoy a surf, virtually speaking from a digitised reality. 

Is it a matter of sitting in front of your keyboard and tapping away, word after word, sentence after sentence – taking the words straight to the world wide web? Is social media the ultimate in self-publishing – do it anytime, anywhere, put it out there? Well, maybe not.

Building content is difficult. Reaching and keeping followers (audience) is not easy. Just because you have built it, they may not come.  But you should come to Writers Corner and tell your social media story.

Come along on Tuesday 6 July at 2pm at the Bunch of Grapes in Pleasant Street, Ballarat, and join the Writers Corner discussion about social media and putting yourself out there in the digital universe.

Writers Corner – tools of the trade

Do you use pen and paper, dictionary and/or thesaurus, laptop and/or desktop? Are you a fan of Word or Scrivener?  Does technology get in the way of the creative moment?

Tools of the Trade: this deceptively rich topic should give us a couple of hours of interesting discussion at our May edition of Writers Corner, a casual, loosely moderated discussion group for BW members and prospective members.

There are research processes and resources – Trove? Your local library? Others? How about eavesdropping on the morning commute or the local coffee shop? Note taking and filing, and the good old Post-it note, all tools of the trade!

Love them or hate them, it is time to talk about them. Humans are renowned tool makers, and we all love a good tool.

Never mind the vagaries of Microsoft Word or the richness of Scrivener.  Who has a favourite dictionary or thesaurus with well-thumbed pages showing the ravages of overuse; checking those subtle nuances to give your writing that special edge?

You might be writing a couple of hundred words for your local community newsletter (hint) or the ultimate Rocky Horror saga of speculative fiction with a romantic twist; perhaps you are in the middle of your dissertation on the finer elements of the decline of neo capitalist empires; keeping track of notes, ideas, context and continuity can benefit from good processes, indexing, filing and search routines.

Image: Pixabay

Come along on 4 May at the Bunch of Grapes, 401 Pleasant St, Ballarat, from 2pm to 4pm and share your ideas for the tools you like, or gripe about the tools you dislike – whether it be pens, pencils, coloured biros, quill and ink, a filing cabinet or a shoe box or simply the art of observation. 

Questions? Contact BW or hit us up at the Facebook event.

Writers Corner – travel writing

Image by Dariusz Sankowski from Pixabay

Do you have a favourite piece of travel writing? Has reading stories of travelling inspired you to pack a bag and take to the road, jet set off to strange lands?  What was it about that writing that inspired you?

The discussion topic for our first Writers Corner, on Tuesday 6 April, is travel writing. This creative form of nonfiction is often based on the writer’s encounter with foreign places.  However, it can also take several other forms, which is something we can explore.

There is a practical side to travel writing: tips and advice, the must see’s and do’s, and how to get from one place to another.

In these restricted times travel writing would seem questionable. Writing about travel may fuel aspirations that cannot be achieved, or alternatively make how-to’s and itinerary planning even more critical.

Travel writing is not simply a product of the industrial revolution or the jet setter age; this popular form of writing has been written since Classical times. A couple of early examples include:

· Rutilius Claudius Namatianus (fl. 5th century)  

De reditu suo (Concerning His Return, c. 416) – the poet describes his voyage along the Mediterranean seacoast from Rome to Gaul.

·  Xuanzang (602–664)

Great Tang Records on the Western Regions (646) – narrative of the Buddhist monk’s journey from China to India.

More recent examples would include:

  • Travels with Charley in Search of America by John Steinbeck (1962)
  • The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain(1869)
  • Wind, Sand, and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1939)
  • The Sea to Sardinia by D H Lawrence (1923)
  • On the Road is a 1957 novel by American writer Jack Kerouac, based on the travels of Kerouac and his friends across the United States.
  • The Road to Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson (2015)

Want more travel writing? Check out this event with Tamara Sheward, being hosted by Ballarat Libraries on 16 April!

event details at trybooking

Travel writing takes many different forms, they might more readily be described as follows:

  • Destination pieces
  • Special interest for types of travel, e.g., hiking, cycling, caravanning, backpacking or something more quirky.
  • Holidays and events – family vacation
  • festivals.
  • Personal adventures
  • Travel blogging
  • Itineraries
  • Travel guides
  • Memoir of personal travel.

Questions to help kick off your thoughts:

  • Why do you want to write about travel?
  • Do you have a collection of tips for other travellers going to a particular destination?
  • Is the travel just a backdrop to another adventure or drama, a setting for a romance?
  • Could Murder on the Orient Express be thought of as writing with a travel theme?
  • How to transport your reader to a new place?
  • Travelling during pandemics?
  • Places to publish – do you have suggestions?

Where, when and what to bring

Bunch of Grapes Hotel, 401 Pleasant St, Ballarat, on the first Tuesday in April: that’s the 6th, at 2pm; the bar will be open. Come along for a relaxed, loosely moderated discussion about the topic. It would be useful to bring a pen and paper in case we decide to get creative.

Click for the Facebook event

Email publicity AT ballaratwriters.com with queries

Committee for 2021 announced

Following on from the AGM this month, the committee welcomes Nicole Kelly to the role of Competitions Co-ordinator!

Last year’s co-ordinator, Megan J. Riedl, has moved to a general committee position.

The committee thanks departing general committee members Zoe Werner, David Mellows and Brooke Vogt for their contributions last year.

Otherwise, familiar faces abound!

The 2021 committee is:

Chair:                                                  Rebecca Fletcher      

Treasurer & Membership Officer:     Kirstyn McDermott  

Secretary/Public Officer:                    Laura Wilson             

Publicity & Media Coordinator:          Jason Nahrung

Competitions Coordinator:                 Nicole Kelly

Unassigned Committee Member:      Megan Riedl  

Unassigned Committee Member:      Phil Green

The committee welcomes contributions and suggestions from members. If there is a project you think would be well suited to Ballarat Writers that you’d like to be involved in, please feel free to get in touch at a Members’ Night or through this website.

If you’d like to contribute to the blog, please email the Publicity and Media Coordinator (publicity AT ballaratwriters.com).

BW competitions in 2021

After feedback from our members survey and the engagement with Ballarat Flash in the past few years, the Ballarat Writers committee has decided to stop running the monthly Ballarat Flash competition.

It will be replaced with regular writing prompts on our Facebook page and in our Ballarat Writers newsletter.

The Pamela Miller Prize will continue as an annual prize for members, and we are currently working on how we can make it a bigger and better opportunity for the first half of the year, with the winner announced at our June members night.

The biennial prize will continue to alternate between the Southern Cross Short Story Prize (2021) and the Martha Richardson Memorial Poetry Prize (2022).

If you have any comments, questions or ideas, please feel free to contact Megan on ballaratwriterscompetitions@gmail.com or, better still, join our committee at the AGM on 10 February and make a contribution to Ballarat Writers! Contact our Chair, Rebecca, on chairperson@ballaratwriters.com to find out more

Book review: When the Apricots Bloom, by Gina Wilkinson

Title: When the Apricots Bloom

Author: Gina Wilkinson

Publisher: Hachette Australia, 2020

Gina Wilkinson is a journalist, foreign correspondent and documentary-maker.  In this debut novel we follow three young women living in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The story is based on the writer’s personal experience of life in Baghdad under Saddam.

Two teenagers pledge love and loyalty with a blood oath. Huda is a village girl. Rania is a sheikh’s granddaughter, Iraqi nobility. After sharing a delightful adolescence on the banks of the Tigris, Huda and Rania lose contact.

When Saddam seizes power in Iraq, war, sanctions and tyranny bring the golden years of the Fertile Crescent to a bloody end. Tensions with Washington increase and a nervous Iraq increases security. Embassies withdraw non-essential staff.  Iraqis live in fear of Saddam’s secret police. They can invade your home, threaten your children or even snatch you off the streets.

Twenty-four years after their oath, Huda and Rania are struggling to raise their own teenagers in dangerous circumstances. Rania has contacts in the resistance. When Huda’s brothers are killed in a brutally crushed uprising, Rania disappears, hiding a shameful secret. Huda holds Rania responsible for the boys’ deaths.

When Huda lands a secretarial job at the Australian Embassy it seems too good to be true. Then the secret police order her to spy on Ally Wilson, the young wife of the Australian Deputy Ambassador to Iraq. The brutal intrusion of uniformed men into her home shatters Huda’s world. Her teenaged son, they warn, can be ordered into the regime’s murderous militia which trains boys to be killers.

Ally must hide her American citizenship, a deception that is dangerous. Western women are not safe on the streets. Ally, naïve and reckless, goes out alone. Huda tries to protect her even while she is forced to spy on her.

Read a Q&A with Gina Wilkinson about When the Apricots Bloom

at better reading

The secret police order Rania’s teenaged daughter to the presidential palace where sadistic sexual practices are known to take place. Rania and Huda are now reunited in an uneasy alliance to save their endangered children. They plan to smuggle them out of the country by forcing Ally to use her diplomatic position to help them.

In a world that nurtures suspicion rather than trust the women push the boundaries of safety. Friendships form despite the dangers and torture them in an emotional tug-of-war as the regime forces them to keep secrets from each other. The closer they become, the more they fear each other. Emotions are on-edge as they fight off the urge to trust. Blood oaths are stronger than anything … aren’t they?

Wilkinson weaves a gripping, page-turning plot of intrigue, fear and courage. When the Apricots Bloom takes us into a world that is foreign, exotic and terrifying as its strong characters struggle under the rise of tyranny. It challenges our comfortable existence and our privilege and reminds us that nations we have demonised and gone to war with are populated with people just like us. Knowing that I had more in common with the naïve Ally Wilson than with the brave Iraqi women, I read When the Apricots Bloom with sadness, huge respect and admiration for the courage of those who survive and resist. I cannot recommend it highly enough. It will not disappoint.

Reviewed by: Maureen Riches, January 2021

Ballarat Writers Inc. Book Review Group

« Older posts

© 2024 Ballarat Writers

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑