Flash Fiction Competition 2024
In May this year Charlie was the winner of the first Writers Rebel Flash Fiction competition. Writing about climate change and hope, inspired by her experience of pregnancy loss and motherhood.
People often joke that all my mates are nurses and that I have missed my calling, but I am extremely squeamish, and I do feel like stories heal people. When we can see ourselves, have a safe space to feel grief and love in a story it is a type of magic.
I am currently recording my poetry as videos and developing my practice as a spoken word artist with the aim to publish a short collection over the next few years. My work seeks to create a space where we can discuss things that are taboo or difficult in a way that is hopeful and positive.
After years of being a storyteller and performer, voicing, performing and helping to develop other people’s tales, Covid came. And so, alongside eating more cake, drinking more wine and trying to stay sane, I began to take my writing seriously. My monologue ‘Fever’ won a place on X @clubcoronavirus and was performed and directed in a celebration of art continuing through the pandemic.
In 2020 I landed a place on the Curtis Brown write your novel course and then fell pregnant with my son. Being pregnant is a miracle and like having vertigo and a serious case of the shits, all at the same time, for around 6 to 36 weeks. So, my satirical murder novel fell to the wayside, and I resigned myself to watching episodes of ‘The Vicar of Dibley’ back-to-back, because everything else felt far too serious and made me either throw up or question all my life choices in a hormonal fug of hysteria. My poems Babcia, Positive Again and Specialist were published in anthologies as my baby grew.
Now, my son is a toddler, which is like a teenager on crack wearing a nappy in a smaller, cuter body, that hugs you regularly and as regularly has you held in hostage like situations over whether or not it is time for their nee-nee, their milkie or a bath-bath.
This year my short fiction ‘Togetherness’ was published in Steel Jackdaw magazine. I later recorded it for my podcast, it looks at cancer and death and was written in a full embrace of my ADHD way of thinking and writing.
I’m currently working with award winning writer Elley-Ray Hennessy on a commission called ‘Voices for Ukraine’. And I write regularly in a group called Dialect, whose artistic director invited me to join after following my motherhood and menopause blogs on the gram.
Audio Files
Heart on Heart