Sue’s paper, ‘Communicating Gender: A Creative-Critical Approach to Pronouns in Speculative Fiction’, is based on a chapter from her PhD thesis, and has been published in Foundation 147 (Volume 13). As with any writing, although the idea and main body of work is imagined by the author, there is input from other academics, editors, and writerly friends. It is this collection of people, their expertise and encouragement, who make the end product the best it can be.
Along with her colleagues at the Writers Company, Sue has been making short videos to help students with the writing process, including the hard-to-understand Omniscient Point of View here.
Sue’s 500 word story, ”Consequences’: Winning at Life’, which appears in the Spring Issue of Wivenhoe News, uses the well-known party game as a story frame. Starting with ‘When they met’ and ending with ‘The Consequences was….’ it tells the story of a jilted woman who confronts her past lover, and finds solace with her rescue dog.
Sue’s only now getting back to writing short fiction after finishing her PhD in Creative Writing. This month she won the Wivenhoe News flash fiction competition on the subject of ‘Shelf’. As with all themed competitions, in order to stand out, it’s better to avoid the obvious themes (‘left on the shelf’ ‘mantelpieces’ etc). Sue chose to use the idea of a shelf cut into a mountain, for a bungee jump.
Sue Dawes has had one story longlisted and one shortlisted in the WLC flash fiction competition, ‘Walking Home’. The first, ‘Home is where the heart is buried‘ was originally a much longer prose poem about loss and remembrance. The inspiration for the second story, which has been shortlisted: ‘Unpicking the thread‘ (which will appear in a chapbook) came from a workshop led by EL Rhodes. The exercise involved writing about a walk and incorporating random words given during the writing process. This was a great way of changing the direction of the story, and thinking about unusual ways to use the random words as descriptions. Not all of the words ended up in the final draft but they certainly shaped it.
Drawing on her experience as a writer, teacher and an editor for The Writers’ Company, Sue Dawes has written a blog post about self-editing here. The blog post comprises a simple check-list, which can be followed when editing your own creative work.
Over the last few months, Sue Dawes and Emma K Pey have been editing an anthology for Colchester Writenight, a local community writing group. The anthology is a collection of vignettes and stories by Writenight members using the theme ‘open book’. Stories range from the everyday to the fantastic. The anthology, introduced by local writer A L Kennedy, is due to be published in October by Patrician Press.
This Haibun, published in CHO, begun life in a collaborative workshop led by Tim Gardiner for Colchester Writenight. Tim was kind enough to allow members to use some of his haiku published in The Flintknapper’s Ghost (Alba Publishing, 2018) to form new senryu.
After a Haiku workshop, led by Tim Gardiner, at her community writing group Colchester Writenight, Sue started to write some senryū*, hoping to use them in the novel she’s writing. For this haibun published in Failed Haiku, she coupled senryū with short prose.
*A senryū is a Japanese short poetry form, often consisting of 17 syllables written over three lines, and is quite similar to a haiku, except it tends to focus on the human condition rather than nature.
This little re-told fairy tale by Sue Dawes appeared in Flash Flood, which is a yearly online publication, comprising of flash fiction stories posted every ten minutes throughout National Flash Fiction Day (24 hours). This year it was the 26th June. The word limit was 300 words, and it was a challenge to balance the original tale with a twist.
Spring 2021Janus Literary Story Prize Anthology Cover photo
Credit: “In Peril” by John Atkinson Grimshaw (1879) (Public Domain)
Sue’s story Salt tears was recently published by Janus Literary, in their Spring anthology, which can be accessed here. The idea for the story came from an exercise, penned over ten years ago. Sue used the deadline to rewrite the story, which she felt had been missing something. The theme ‘the dark, wild sea’ meant there were no barriers to how deep and dark she could go.
Sue recently won the ‘Language evolves’ speculative short story competition, hosted by Cardiff University. It wasn’t just a matter of creating a story but also imagining how humans learned to speak. Cardiff offered some free workshops with links to papers written about the subject to spark ideas. Sue wrote about olfactory communication, imagining what it must be like for an outsider, with this dominant form of communication, to view our society.
More information can be accessed here
The story will appear in the Summer issue of the New Welsh review
Sue Dawes 