Think you have what it takes?

Want to get some practice?

Just need an excuse to put pen to paper?

Then enter the Secret Attic Short Story Competition!

Each month you can submit an entry that will be passed onto our judges who will pick the best and award a winner. During some months the subject matter will be a 'free for all', where you can write anything you like, other months will have a specific theme.

Previous Competition Winners

February 2005 David Willshaw

April 2005 Christine Sutton

May 2005 George L. Darley

Dinner of a Lifetime

If you could have a dinner of a lifetime; with whom would you dine; Sir Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein, Michaelangelo Buonarroti, Sir Walter Raleigh or Leonard Bernstein?

Sir Winston Churchill was a master orator and his writing skills earned him a Nobel Prize for Literature. And, his English reserve surfaced when he said, “I have never accepted what many people have kindly said – namely that I inspired the nation. Their will was resolute and remorseless, and as it proved, unconquerable. It fell to me to express it… It was the nation and the race dwelling all around the globe that had the lion’s heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar,”

Albert Einstein, the renowned physicist and mathematician, gave the world the quantum of light and the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion of particles, atomic theory, the special theory of relativity, the principle of general relativity where gravitation is equivalent to acceleration. And who can forget mc2nd , the equivalence of mass and energy formula where “m” is mass and “c” is the speed of light to list but a few of his achievements.

Michaelangelo Buonarroti died at the age of 84 in 1564. But he left behind his marble sculpture David, 16’-10” tall and his renowned painting of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel that took four years to complete. All of his paintings of people are so life-like a viewer gets goosebumps.

Every child knows the tale of Sir Walter Raleigh laying his cape over a puddle so the queen would not soil her shoes. English gallantry had no bounds; so the tale goes. Sir Walter took part in the victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588 and his influence in Queen Elizabeth’s Court reached its height in the 1590’s. He was a soldier, poet, explorer and historian. He helped introduce the potato plant and tobacco use to Ireland. But, while on an expedition in South America to search for gold he invaded Spanish territory against the orders of King James I, a transgression that cost him his head.

Leonard Bernstein as a conductor, composer and pianist ranks a one of the most famous figures in American music in the 1900’s. Bernstein served as musical director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra from 1958 to 1969. He wrote musicals, symphonies, ballets and a short opera, Trouble In Tahiti (1952).

One more candidate comes to mind as a dinner companion. As host of a gathering of Nobel Prize winners at the White House President John F. Kennedy said, “This is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”

Then again, no list would be complete without such fellows as Aristotle, Plato, Justinian, Confuscious, Mahatma Ghandi, Immanual Kant, Ghengis Khan, Henry David Thoreau, Robert Frost, W. B. Yeats, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, Earnest Hemingway, William Shakespeare and you could add fifty names or more. But this only builds an insurmountable wall of indecision, and leads to no decision at all.

No matter your predilection whether it is to art, music, literature, philosophy, law, politics or even warfare; nothing takes place without communication. The skill of using words, sounds or pictures to convey the thought, feeling or emotion at hand, is indispensable.

So my choice would be a journalist noted for his wit and writing skill that left no doubt as to his purpose, while conveying a word picture that also left no doubt as to the scene or its characters -

“I was glad I was born long enough ago to remember, now, the days when the town had genuine color, and life here was worth living. I remember Guy’s Hotel. I remember the Concordia Opera House. I remember the old Courthouse. Better still, I remember Mike Sheehan’s old saloon in Light Street – the medieval and lovely alley; now a horror borrowed from the boom towns of the Middle West.

“Was there ever a better saloon in the world? Don’t argue: I refuse to listen. The decay of Baltimore, I believe, may be very accurately measured by the distance separating Mike’s incomparable bar from the soda-fountains which now pollute the neighborhood – above all, by the distance separating its noble customers (with their gold watch-chains and their elegant boiled shirts!) from the poor fish who now lap up Coca-Cola.”
-H.L. Mencken
Evening Sun, Feb. 15, 1926

Would you like another taste?

“Take wine, women and song, add plenty of A-No. 1 victuals, the belch and bellow of oratory, a balmy but stimulating climate and a whiff of patriotism, and it must be obvious that you have a dose with a very powerful kick in it. This, precisely, was the dose that made the Democratic national convention of 1920, holden in San Francisco, the most charming in American annals. No one who was present at its sessions will ever forget it. It made history for its voluptuous loveliness, just as the Baltimore convention of 1912 made history for its infernal heat, and the New York convention of 1924 for its 103 ballots and its unparalleled din. Whenever I meet an old-timer who took part in it we fall into maudlin reminiscences of it, and tears drop off the end of our noses. It came within an inch of being perfect.

It was San Francisco’s brave answer to the Nazi-inspired earthquake of April 18, 1906…” – Romantic Intermezzo [1920] From Heathen Days, 1890-1936, New York, Alfred A. Knopf Inc.

So my choice for a dinner companion is the late H. L. Mencken, a Baltimore native and newspaperman. There is no doubt, the meal would go from aperitif to dessert without my need to utter a word. He’s my kind of guy.

You have someone else in mind, I am sure.