Bronze Quill Writing Competition 2024

Creative non-fiction

Judge’s report: Caitlin Maling

 This year’s entries into the Bronze Quill Writing Competition, really solidified how versatile creative non-fiction truly is. Entries ranged from loose retellings of historical events, to philosophical meditations, to many, many travel pieces. In many I encountered the true gift of non-fiction, which is to be taken out of my own life and into the place, life or ideas of another person. Within the entries, several themes predominated: family history, travel, illness, historical events and relationships. In each of these themes, I found authors trying to use language to connect outwards from themselves. All entries are to be commended for their vulnerability in writing non-fiction which, by necessity, requires thinking about large concepts like truth without having any characters or world-building to hide behind.

After settling on the winner and runner-up, I found I had a real trouble separating out the remaining top entries into highly-commended and commended. I kept shuffling and re-shuffling them, and luckily I received an email advising me I could make as many recommendations for highly commended, commended, and special mention as I felt necessary. I would also like to note that the following entries made it onto my very long short list: “Stranger in a Strange Land: Concrete Beds”, “The Day the Power Went Out”, “Retreat”, “In a Litte Pine Grove by a Stream”, “Lou”, “Snakes I have known”, “Mindful: The Forest and the Abrolhos”, “There is No Cure”, “Old Friends”, and “The Language of Restraint”. As you can tell from the fact I shortlisted so many entries, the standard was particularly high this year.

Special Mention: With that being said, I would like to award a special mention to Patricia Curtis’ “The Fall”. What kept me returning to this piece was the wry humour of the voice, particularly the wonderful specific details which allowed me into the world, as the final line states “the life of elderly inmates living in a retirement village”. I also particularly admired, the multiplicity of viewpoints and questioning around the central idea of “a fall”.

Commended: One of the primary roles of creative non-fiction, is to allow us access to world’s and lives beyond our own. In “Adding Spice to My Life”, by Melanie Hawkes, we are taken into the spicy world of woman with a physical disability exploring her sexual being. It is a bold and necessary piece, voicing the importance of self-determination around sexual expression, while also being tender and vulnerable right from the opening line “I was in bed with James, a man I really like. No, not liked: was falling in love with.”

Commended: Ruth Owens’ “Advice for Curtain Sales Representatives,” stood out for its irreverence and it’s unique framing, being, as the title says, a series of pieces of advice prepared for potential curtain representatives. It turned a profession I had never before considered, into a way of thinking through wittily the types of awkward encounters we all have with strangers, particularly when invited, as the writer is, into unfamiliar people’s homes.

Commended: “Emerging” by Moria Yelden was a wonderful meditation on how we understand change and one another. Sparking from the writer being asked to use their “newly acquired Auslan skills, to sign the Welcome to Country”, the piece expands outwards to consider the writer’s life teaching yoga and family ancestry, all the while thinking around how we use various forms of language with one another. Like very good non-fiction can do, it uses the writer’s personal circumstances to make readers reconsider their own lives and they assumptions they might hold about things as essential as language.

Highly Commended:  Pat Fletcher’s “Pick and Plough in Parker Point” is a fully realised short piece of memoir detailing an almost disastrous overnight trip to Rottnest in a small boat. Played out hour-by-hour, this extremely vivid piece of writing takes on a ride with a married couple as they try and fail to set an appropriate anchor for their vessel overnight. A lot of the wit of the piece comes from being placed in the mind of the wife as she questions internally but never outloud her husband – the captain’s – judgement, as she writes “I wanted to ask a dozen questions. It was still light, why didn’t he attempt to move? What would happen if …? could we….? Two things to know: don’t appear to question the captain’s judgment; don’t introduce uncertainty into an already unstable situation.”

Highly Commended: There were quite a few essays focussing on travel or migration, but Jacqueline Kelly’s “It’s only for two years, Mum,” stood out for the humour and warmth of its depiction of being born into Wales in 1947 and deciding to migrate to Australia twenty years later. Key to writing about place, is precise details and this piece is peppered with them, from “Standing in the Spion Kop, that most sacred area of Anfield Football Stadium, shivering under five layers of winter clothes” to learning what exactly constitutes a barbeque. This piece also stood out for its incorporation of witty dialogue, the protagonist meeting her future husband at a party, asks him “what’s the collective noun for cockroaches”, and then “a few years later we were married”.

The two top entries truly distinguished themselves in terms of how they were using language and all the tools of the writer to engage the reader and hold them in the worlds of their pieces.

Runner Up: There were actually two essays submitted around September 11, indicating the potency that holds as a historical event. Lyn Tolliday’s essay “Nine Eleven”, takes place on the titular date but far from the happenings in New York. Instead we witness the September 11 tragedy from screens inside a hospital as a parent deals with their own crisis: a child with drug-related psychosis. It takes immense skill to hold these two happenings side-by-side without diminishing either, and Tolliday manages this capably through an unflinching description of their experiences that day.

Winner: From the first line, “When they’re told to smile and wave for the camera, she shrinks back”, I couldn’t put down Maria Mclean’s “School Spirit”. This winning essay is elliptical, it cycles us from the present many times to different places within the author’s high school experiences with a toxic teacher. It illustrates how our memories stay with us, not just in objects we carry like the VHS tape which sparks the initial outpouring of memories, but also how we might reshape those memories from within the person we are now. Told without moralising, it uses its fragmented form to implicitly make us question how the person we are today, relates to all the different people we have been in our lifetimes.