Mslexia

Mslexia, the magazine for women who write | www.mslexia.co.uk

Competition winners 2008

Meet Sarah Klenbort...

I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, in a house full of books, with two bookworms for parents. I played soccer nearly every day, even in the long, hot, sticky summers, with my faithful father on the sideline, dreaming of air-conditioning, smoking cigars, and stealing glances at his New York Review of Books.

When I graduated from high school, I went to Beijing for a year to study Chinese. This was 1993/94, when Beijing’s bike lanes were bigger than the car lanes. There were six million black bicycles, and I was on one of them, peddling to the shops, or Tiananmen Square. During school breaks I travelled to Sichuan province where I ate snake and turtle, and to Kunming – 67 hours on a train ‘hardsleeper,’ where I practiced Chinese with the other passengers, staring out at the passing countryside, eating peanuts, and throwing the shells on the floor. Back in Beijing I learned to squat and pee over a trough that was the public tso suo (toilet), while Chinese women pointed and laughed at my bright white bum. I walked past beggars with babies. I got yelled at constantly, Wai Guo! (foreigner!), they said, and pointed at me, confirming my minority status, both privileged and strange in the eyes of the Chinese.

After China I attempted college a couple of times, but couldn’t sit still in a classroom. My second attempt was at the University of Oregon, where it rains every day, where I fell madly in love with an Ecuadorian, dropped out of school, and planned to move to Quito. But he dumped me for a virgin in Ecuador, and I ended up in debt, living at home again in Atlanta, working at Blockbuster, depressed, lonely, mortified. At 21, I began travelling, and ended up in Australia, living with my brother. I waited tables at an Italian restaurant: cash in hand.

...winning the Mslexia Short Story Competition has given me confidence.

Later, I got a visa to work in the UK, where I stayed on a friend’s lumpy couch in Watford. I went to Wales for the weekend, met a Welsh carpenter, and stayed for three years. I returned to college – the University of Glamorgan – and under the encouragement of Rob Middlehurst, a compassionate inspiring teacher – I began to write. Two years later, at 25 I married the carpenter, graduated, and moved to New York City, where I taught ESL for a year, then did an MFA in fiction at Columbia University. At Columbia, I wrote a novel based on my family’s experience fleeing from the Nazis during World War II, but I never sent the novel out, as I didn’t think it was good enough. I was also very involved in what turned out to be a failed campaign to get a Democrat into the White House in 2004. George W. Bush won re-election in November; we moved to Sydney, Australia in January.

In Sydney, I taught ESL, and wrote short stories (one of which was published in the U.S. and in Australia); I continued to work on my novel. We planned to stay in Australia for six months, but we were there for 18. When I got into a fully funded PhD program in Binghamton, New York, (a three-hour drive north west of NYC), we returned to the U.S. In three years, I did a PhD, taught creative writing to undergraduates, directed the Writing By Degrees Conference, was the fiction editor for the literary magazine, Harpur Palate, wrote a book, and had a baby.

My second book is a collection of linked short stories. I was inspired by other linked collections, such as Edwidge Danticat’s powerful book, The Dew Breaker. In my book, The Jew Who Loved Christmas, the characters are the same throughout, but each story is also complete on its own. I haven’t sent it out, but I think I will now – winning the Mslexia Short Story Competition has given me confidence.

One day, while in the line at the drive through at Starbucks in my SUV in Binghamton, I looked into my rearview mirror at my beautiful baby sleeping in her car seat, and had an epiphany: I did not want to be here.

Binghamton is a small city with a lot of churches, high unemployment, a large university and cheap houses. In 2006 we bought an old converted barn on a country road, and lived happily with our organic vegetable patch, two cats, and a wood fire stove. We were surrounded by snow six months of the year, which was beautiful, but cold. We bought two SUVs, necessary for the snow. My brave Welsh husband commuted two hours a day, and worked outside in temperatures reaching –25ºC.

Kaitlyn Klenbort Harris was born, ten weeks premature, on the first of December 2007 (after six days of labor!?@%^$%!). She came out, crying, love her – she was a tough girl from the start, and she’s been an absolute joy ever since.

One day, while in the line at the drive through at Starbucks in my SUV in Binghamton, I looked into my rearview mirror at my beautiful baby sleeping in her car seat, and had an epiphany: I did not want to be here. I wanted to walk to a coffee shop, and sit down, and drink a cup of coffee out of a mug, and maybe even meet a friend there and talk to that friend face to face. I did not want my child to grow up with such a huge environmental footprint.

Later that same year, there was a shooting in an ESL classroom not far from the library where I took Kaitlyn in downtown Binghamton. Fourteen people were killed, including the crazed gunman. The reaction was nearly as sickening as the incident – people called for looser gun laws; they suggested teachers carry handguns to class. This reinforced our decision to move to Australia, where gun laws are strict (following shooting in Tasmania in 1996).

I graduated in May, 2009, and taught one last literature class at Binghamton University that summer. Then we sold our house, and sold or donated nearly all of our things (including a thousand books!). We boarded a plane to Sydney, our final destination this time. No more moving.

Last month, I had a nonfiction piece published in Ninth Letter, a literary journal in the U.S. It’s an essay, ‘Real Men Don’t Cry,’ that compares ideas of masculinity in Shakespeare’s time to ideas of masculinity now. Since winning the Mslexia competition, I’ve also won a HarperCollins Varuna Award for Manuscript Development. There are five winners and we will spend 10 days at a writing retreat in Australia’s Blue Mountains where we will each work on our manuscripts with a HarperCollins editor. They will then have the option to publish the finished book.

I live now with my family in a two-bedroom flat, a fifteen-minute walk to the blue Pacific Ocean. I get around by bicycle; there’s a seat on the back for Kaitlyn. My husband works outside in the sun, and sometimes goes for a surf before work. I teach literature at the University of Western Sydney on Tuesdays as a casual tutor, and I teach Creative Writing at Sydney Community College on Thursday evenings (for very little money, but it’s rewarding). I love teaching, and regret that there are fewer career opportunities for me here, but it’s a better life. My husband and I work less here. I write at naptime. I’m in two book clubs. I swim nearly every day. Kaitlyn loves the water, too. She loves being outside – we all do. We’ve been camping every month since we moved back six months ago. We miss our families, but we’ve made good friends here, and unlike America, people have time for their friends.

That’s my story, so far. Thank you for reading.

Read Sarah Klenbort's winning story: Love: A Painting

Meet Anne Bentley...

Born in 1967, I spent my first six years in Coventry where my father, following his family tradition, worked as a coal miner. Vague memories of cigarette smoke, undercurrents of anxiety about ‘the pit,’ the acquisition of an older brother and birth of a younger one, are the only traces of my early life. When I was six, my family decamped to the Zambian ‘Copperbelt’ where my father immersed himself in copper mining and his children ran free amongst the houses and lands of fellow expats. The sun must have suited me as I shot from bottom of the class to near the top, began devouring books and forming passionate female friendships along the Enid Blyton or Louisa M Alcott mould. My ideas of femininity were shaped by the girls at St Clare’s and the Little Women. I dreamed of England with its rain and cold, sweaters and hockey fields. I gorged on mangoes and guavas from the trees in the garden while yearning for the taste of Kent strawberries and Cornish cream.

I dreamed of England with its rain and cold, sweaters and hockey fields. I gorged on mangoes and guavas from the trees in the garden while yearning for the taste of Kent strawberries and Cornish cream.

Six years later, the family returned to England, shivering on the tarmac in unsuitable clothes. My father had been treated for a brain tumour and was no longer able to work in copper mines or mines of any sort. After various starts, my parents bought a grocer’s shop in Manchester and we lived above it. It was Manchester that reacquainted me with rain. In Zambia the rainy season, brought swift, strong deluges that filled the cracks in scorched earth and made steam rise from grateful soil. The rain came and went, was celebrated and sought after. In Manchester the rain piddled and drizzled, endlessly, and the sky never seemed to get properly blue, certainly not Copperbelt blue.

I took a long time to fit back into English life. In Zambia we had been wealthy and privileged; In England we were poor, strange and spoke ‘posh.’ I retreated behind a wall of shyness and books and emerged at 18 with a place at Oxford University. Casting studies aside, I threw myself into socialist politics. Anti-Apartheid, Miners Support Group and St Hugh’s Left Caucus all gave outlet for a girl lost in a frightening world. While my political activities may not have engendered a socialist revolution, they gave me an enduring belief in the need for social justice and political compassion.

After university, I taught English in a Japanese Senior High School, ate more fresh fish in two years than in all the preceding 21 years combined, and conducted love affairs in broken Japanese. After two years, heavily influenced by Paul Theroux’s Riding the Iron Rooster, I travelled alone through China, zigzagging through provinces in trains, and backpacking in hostels of varying hygiene. En route, in Kashgar, I accidentally picked up a fiancé and we married about a fortnight later in Pakistan.

While the buzz of publication provided an amazing high, I felt that some part of my creativity wasn’t being fully expressed. I longed to write fiction, but was afraid that by doing so I’d expose and bring shame on myself.

The marriage was as brief as the courtship, but it got me back to England and to the business of my adult life. Various jobs in social care followed. I worked with homeless people at St Martin in the Fields, with mentally vulnerable ex-offenders in Camberwell and as a staff counsellor in the Metropolitan Police Service. Throughout this time, I was saturated in the narratives of vulnerable, marginalized people and desperate to bring their stories to a wider audience. Unable to give myself permission or confidence to write them, I sought the framework of academia and, via research and study, wrote about my work for academic journals. While the buzz of publication provided an amazing high, I felt that some part of my creativity wasn’t being fully expressed. I longed to write fiction, but was afraid that by doing so I’d expose and bring shame on myself. I took a postal course with the Open College of the Arts (OCA) and delighted in the first flush of supported creative writing. I got the bug big time then. I didn’t send work out or get published but I kept finding myself with a pen and notebook, jotting down odd scribbles, random turns of phrase and my feelings about people picking their noses in public. I took course after course with the OCA, at Birkbeck College and Spread The Word, hungry for maps to navigate the life of writing. My counselling work was fulfilling but all-consuming, so I found a job counselling students at a university, term-time only, so that I could make more space for my own words.

However instead of a novel, I gave birth to two boys in quick succession and was introduced to the magnificent loss of freedom that is parenthood. Their births tilted my world on its axis, they loosened my hands from the corporate ladder and I found a new selfhood blossoming around these magical creatures that I was to be mother to. Their births led me away from the urban world of commuter trains and wraparound childcare to the borders of Cornwall and Devon, where now I enjoy my boys, the beaches, The Calstock Writers’ Group and the knowledge that a new story is always around the corner.

Read Anne Bentley's winning story: The Journey

Meet Karen Jones...

Karen Jones has been writing for several years. Her work has appeared in The New Writer, Writers’ Forum, Candis Magazine, Guildhall Press anthology The Wonderful World of Worders, Leaf Books anthology Discovering a Comet and more micro-fiction, Edit Red anthology City Smells and online at Alors, et Toi? and Our Atticus. She was shortlisted for the 2007 Asham Award. Apart from writing, her main interest is salsa dancing. Fortunately her writing is far better than her dancing, which will never earn more than sympathetic smiles.

Read Karen Jones' winning story: The Upside-down Jesus

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