Upstairs, through the short hallway, shock has set in like the flurry an ambulance makes: lights and sirens to the fore, everything else atrophied. It’s the stretch of rope I’ve just seen…

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Mini Shots #018		Mini Shots #018
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SJ Finn has been scratching words onto paper since she can remember. At the age of eight her peom ‘Winter’ was published in a school magazine and, despite myriad jobs and other distractions, writing has both tethered and allowed her to fly - often at the same moment - ever since. Her short stories have been broadcast on radio and her poetry published in The Age, Cordite and Snorkel. After winning IP Picks, her novel Fine Salt, was published in 2004. She is currently studying a Master of Creative Writing at Melbourne Uni. Finding the Dead was particularly fun to write despite the subject matter, which just goes to show, viewpoint is everything.

She’d caught a glimpse of what looked like a bundle of blue towels. It was carried off the boat by more hands than it needed and news people, onlookers and nearby boaties swarmed the bundle…

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Mini Shots #017		Mini Shots #017
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Sian swapped Aussie Rules and milk bars for travel overseas before finally settling with her husband in south east Queensland. She has been writing since 1999 and has won several literary short story competitions and had stories published in various journals and magazines over the years. What motivates this 39 year old is the human story. Even the most ordinary can be moving and interesting to someone. The arrival of a baby in 2006 meant less headspace for words, but now that bottles and night waking are over, it’s time for more fictional adventure!

Sian works supporting people with intellectual disabilities, but she spends most of her time wiping rice puffs off the floor at home and dreaming about being an author.

Thanks for all who entered the annual Vignette Press Short Story Competition. The level of entries was very high and I know Paddy O’Reilly had a tough time choosing the winners.

First place goes to Bernadette Rafferty for her unique story, Cigarette Vignettes.
Second place goes to Tania Hershman for her lyrical Drinking Vodka in the Afternoon.

Judge’s Report

Cigarette Vignettes

While not a traditional story in that it does not have a cause and effect plot, the vignettes in this sharply written, wry piece form a narrative picture of a small world in which people confide in strangers or unknowingly reveal themselves by a gesture or a phrase. The narrator avoids being judgmental and draws the disparate characters and events into a small cosmos of humanity that is charming and funny and real. 

Drinking Vodka in the Afternoon

In another time and place, a young woman finds herself taking the first step toward freedom and passion when her Russian tutor offers her a glimpse into the wider world. A gentle, beautifully formed story.  

The quality of the stories in the competition was amazing, with a lollyshop variety of styles, genres and concepts. Many of the wonderful stories were one good rewrite or edit short of winning, so I hope their authors will stay with them and go on to win a different competition.  

One of the great things about reading such a variety of stories is when you see so many that break the so-called rules of short story writing and prove that there are no rules. Like Angus’s Playground, which has two dramatic deaths and yet carries this heavy load with a vigorous, challenging voice. Or a bit more special, which uses the voice of a child and yet gets away with language and phrasing the child would not be likely to know, let alone use. In Wristwatch, the narrator is an unlikeable character that nevertheless drives the story along, and in Juggling and Serena the narrators’ motivations wobble a little like real ones. Hero and Thunder and Lightning follow a more traditional story structure but carry it off with aplomb. 

There’s great talent out there, and it’s fantastic to be reading so many stories of this quality.

Paddy O’Reilly

The winning story, Cigarette Vignettes, will be available to purchase as a Mini Shots magazine later in the year.

The landscape was seamless. I recognised this only later. That morning after arriving from interstate I had woken at 5am, anxious, left the house at 6.14, and walked across the point towards the bus shelter knowing that I would be early…

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Mini Shots #016		Mini Shots #016
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Jeff Stewart is a practicing artist and writer who now primarily exhibits, and has made performances, in his home. Recently Jeff has concentrated as much on writing essays that combine theory and personal narrative, as he has on painting. He has also worked for many years as an artist in the Community Cultural Development sector, and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney, Department of Performance Studies.

 Look at that sky, you would think Christ was on his cross again, always no sun at all in this… this… damn it! This part of town. A torn sign on a wall of graffi it says C_M__ARY. It is similar to my mind, full of blanks…

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Mini Shots #015		Mini Shots #015
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Ryan O’Neill was born in Scotland in 1975. He lived and worked as an English teacher in Rwanda, Lithuania, and China, before finally settling in Australia. His stories have appeared in various literary magazines and anthologies including Best Australian Stories 2007, Sleepers Almanac, Meanjin, Wet Ink and Westerly. He has had two short story collections published by Ginninderra Press, Six Tenses and A Famine in Newcastle, the latter of which was shortlisted for the 2007 Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards. He lives in Newcastle, NSW with his wife and daughter.

Bonus pop quiz: What’s missing from this story? Answers to info@vignettepress.com.au

Three years of this, plus infinity; I’ve been doing this since I was three. Since my parents and Simon’s dad got together over dinner one night, dinner and a slide show and decided it would be a great idea if our families went on a little trip and, you know, saw the country…

Mini Shots are a steal at $4 each ($6 for international) for single issues or you can subscribe to the series here.

Mini Shots #014		Mini Shots #014
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Jane Rawson launched her career at age five when her poem, ‘My pussy cat’, was published on the fridge. Since then, her fiction has been published by Cardigan Press and her travel writing by Lonely Planet, while various employers have paid her to churn out copy on topics as gripping as management training, hotel bedspreads and superannuation legislation. Neither of her novels has as yet been published by anyone.

After stints in Phnom Penh, Prague, San Francisco and Canberra, she developed an allergy to travel that has seen her settle down in Melbourne with a truck driver and a small cat (but not the cat in the eponymous poem). You can find her online (occasionally) at Travel Skerricks.

So every Sunday morning, he carried his plastic basket containing a week’s worth of dirty clothes out to the little communal laundry just opposite the Hills Hoist…

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Mini Shots #013		Mini Shots #013
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David Cohen was born in Perth and has lived in Melbourne since 2002. His short fiction has appeared in Allnighter, HQ (winner of the HQ/Flamingo Short Story Prize), Meanjin, Metro, Space: New Writing, Westerly and elsewhere. His novel Fear of Tennis, published by Black Pepper in 2007, was selected by poet Les Murray as a Book of the Year in the Times Literary Supplement (UK), The Age and The West Australian. David has also written the occasional script for theatre and television, including and episode of SBS’s Marx and Venus. He is currently completing a second novel.

Hunkered down low in the bucket seats sourced from The Trading Post and picked up from some bloke in Dandenong, we are a patchwork of our Dangerfield best…

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Mini Shots #012		Mini Shots #012
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Samone Bos is a writer and commissioning editor, specialising in non-fiction titles, but she loves to spin a yarn. Her first published story was The Magic Wishing Bench, featured in the Mildura West Primary School magazine (summer of ‘83 edition). Influenced by Enid Blyton’s Adventures of the Wishing-Chair, the tale of Trickles the pixie and an insipid jelly-scoffing brother and sister duo ended with ‘And they lived happily ever after … until Thursday.’ This was stolen from The Bald Twit Lion by Spike Milligan, the point of difference being that Spike’s story ended with ‘until the next day’. Samone considered this a subversive hoot, but it left most of her fellow grade two literati murmuring ‘huh?’

Originality a strong point, Samone has written half a novel based (very closely) on her life and times teaching English in Tokyo.

You can catch her bobbing around the internet on the following questionable websites:
www.momofreaksout.com.au
nomoreblanktapes.wordpress.com

The Fast Lane Soundtrack!
Pull up a comfy chair, settle in to read The Fast Lane and step back in time with our authentic mid-nineties mixtape… vignettepress.com.au/podcasts/thefastlane mixtape.mp3

It was their first summer and the bright light lingered forever. Animal noises changed from bird-calls into discreet scurryings and long loping thuds and when it was hot he was lulled into believing that his estate outside Prague no longer existed…

Mini Shots are a steal at $4 each, or $6 for international delivery.

Mini Shots #011		Mini Shots #011
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Phillip Edmonds is the author of two collections of short stories - Big Boys and Don’t Let me Fall. After taking a break from fiction for a number of years he is publishing again. His story ‘The Soapbook’ is published in Griffith Review no. 19 and he has recently completed a novella entitled Leaving home with Henry which is loosely the story of Henry Lawson returning to contemporary Australia. He is the founding co-managing editor of Wetink (the magazine of new writing) and he teaches in the English Department at Adelaide University.

Free download! Mini Shots #011 Foxes, by Phillip Edmonds

Rhys McDonald is a freelance cartoonist and illustrator and is responsible for:

A more or less self taught artist working mainly in digital mediums he produces varied works both digitally and traditionally for a range of clients.