By: Staff Writer
May 2, 2023
The Caribbean Magazine Plus Short Story Contest, 2022 finalists open up to Dr Nicola Hunte on how they developed their prize winning stories.
Dr Hunte, the contest’s lead evaluator, who is also the coordinator in English Literatures at the University of the West Indies (UWI) Cave Hill campus, asked the finalists how they decided on their stories.
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Victoria Wilchcombe, third place finalist from Freeport, Grand Bahama, said: “A good topic for me for a short story would be something about family and something about life and kids are the best of life, right? They are the best of us and they are the future of the world.”
Victoria’s story, “Pearls and Granddads,” was meant to be a children’s story, which is a field largely untapped in Caribbean literature.
She also said that knows a little girl who loves rainbows and because of all of this, she was able to put together an entry that everyone would be able to enjoy, from all ages.
Mark Yarde, second place finalist, also said about his entry “To Kill an Alsatian Hound”: “Last year, September, I took up a class of UWI, that was creative writing and prose fiction, and I also was on the hunt for ideas and stuff like that because I’ve never written a short story before.
He added: “One night, I was in my room, I heard somebody screaming upstairs and I felt guilty, because I wasn’t sure what I should or shouldn’t do.”
Mark said he wanted to explore the guilt around issues like abuse and altercations and when he found his inspiration “the story wrote itself.”
He added that he was “imagining universality” to make it more appealing to all audiences so it can transcend the generations.
David Hamilton, first place winner, said about his entry “Kyle,” that he wanted to keep his story timeless by not dating his story. But the book Miguel Street by V.S. Naipaul was a big inspiration for him and has read it over five times already. He added that he wanted to “create a book like that.”
David also said: “ So this story is kind of like a universe of stories that exist of an adolescence in the 90s, going to school and experiencing certain things.”
All of our finalists had amazing stories and Dr Hunte said that it was difficult to separate them from one the other.