'Given Phrase' Entries - 1st February, 2016

On 1 February, 30 members attended to read out their stories for our first competition of 2016, for which there were 21 varied entries. Our prompt was taken from this year's National Association of Writers' Group's 'given phrase' category: “and then the whispering started”. And plenty of intriguing whispering there was: whispering in woods, in a strange room in a château and on an aeroplane. The whisperers included fairies, a voice in someone's head and a long-dead school friend. Among those who heard the whispers were a fallen woman, a middle-aged widower, a middle-aged adulteress, a disaffected teenaged girl and an unsettled teenaged boy. We experienced tension at a corporate event, conflict between slave and cruel slave owner, the sadness of two young lovers' parting and a bus ride through London's Christmas lights. There was a whiff of mystery and myth: the song of Aneirin, an exquisitely wrought but mysterious serpent necklace and a sinister pond, rippling with fables. We look forward to the judge's results on 29^th February, when successful local writer, Alexandra Benedict, will be visiting to give her feedback.