Creative Writing

This is the page where we’ll regroup our upcoming deadlines for creative writing events and all calls for participation. We will update it regularly!

The Edith Wharton Writing Competition

We hope by now you’ve heard about our Edith Wharton workshop on Wednesday 4 October – free, friendly, open to all. We’re looking forward to seeing you!

To tie in with the workshop, we’re holding a competition. Again, it’s open to everyone, so whether you’re in Glasgow or further afield, we would love to hear from you. If you can’t join us for the workshop on the day, take part another way with this competition. (We want lots of entries from workshop attendees too of course.) And, yes, there will be prizes!

There are two options for the competition. We would like you either to write a summary alternative ending to any work by Wharton, or a sequel. Your entry can be anything from a single sentence to a passage of up to 250 words. It can be any style, any genre: prose, verse, comic, serious… let your imagination roam!

Have you sometimes wished a work by Edith Wharton ended differently? Now’s your chance! Or have you sometimes wondered what might have happened after the final page? Let us know…

In alternative Wharton narratives, does The House of Mirth’s Lily Bart marry Rosedale, marry Selden to live un/happily ever after, marry neither? Move in with Gerty and learn to embrace dinginess? Does The Custom of the Country’s Undine achieve her latest wish and become an ambassador’s wife? Does Summer’s Lawyer Royall get up from the armchair only to be stabbed by Charity with the brooch? Could there even be a happy ending to Ethan Frome – or is that beyond all our imaginations? The choice is yours!

Whatever your “take”, we’d love to hear from you. Please email us your entries, subject heading “Wharton competition”, giving your name and location to transatlantic.women@gmail.com by Friday 29 September. We’re delighted that our Wharton speakers at the workshop have agreed to act as judges for the competition. We’ll be announcing the winners at the workshop, and posting the decisions online shortly after. We’d love to post some of our favourite entries on the TLW site (with first name only, and general location), so unless you tell us otherwise in your emailed entry, we take it that you are happy for us to do this and to share your narrative.

That’s it! Happy writing. Don’t forget: deadline Friday 29 September. We’re looking forward to travelling with you to other Wharton worlds….

Past competitions

Prized Book Club Writing Competition: Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country

Deadline: January 30th 2017 – all submissions (one per category) to be sent to transatlantic.women@gmail.com

You can:

A.      Write an online dating profile for Undine. It can be written by Undine herself or by any other protagonist. Maximum 150 words.

or

B.      Create one of Mrs. Heeny’s newspaper clippings: Write a journalistic report on one of Undine’s parties. Maximum 150 words.

You can find the winning entry for this competition here.

Student Creative Writing Showcase

Deadline: February 14th 2017 – send all submissions of no more than 1,500 words of prose or 3 poems (totalling 5-7 minutes of reading time) to info@scottishwriterscentre.org.uk, with Transatlantic Literary Women as the subject title. Please include a brief bio.

We are inviting student submissions that respond to the theme Transatlantic Literary Women. The event will also involve readings from work by relevant writers, such as Sylvia Plath, Gertrude Stein and Edith Wharton. We welcome volunteer readers. This event is free to attend and all are welcome.

Creative Writing Submissions topics might include, but are not limited to:

• Scottish women writers and the Americas
• Transatlanticism and International Women’s Day
• Female writers’ and the transatlantic anti-slavery network
• Campaigning for (and against) suffrage
• Race and class and famous “others”
• Responses to work by transatlantic poets and authors
• Transatlanticism in a digital age
• Transatlantic poetics

Feel free to contact us for information!