The Berry Best

“I have tried entering competitions before, but I haven’t had the confidence to stick with them. This is the first one where I’ve left the entry in. There was a few I emailed and said, ‘Can I have my entry back? I don’t want it in the competition.’”

Luckily for her, she stuck it out this time. Sam, who hails from Cork, has always had ambitions to be a writer. After sending in her entry she decided that the best way to deal with the fear was not to think about it at all.
“I’d put it out of my mind, then I heard I was short-listed and I was so excited.”
Sam, who is currently studying media production and journalism, is also a mother to a little boy of three. That she entered the competition at all was a combination of chance and good luck.
“On one of my very few nights out, Bulmers approached me with a free Bulmers Berry and a leaflet. I wrote a version of the story about a year ago and then I started working on it again when I heard about the competition and would have put about a good month’s work into it.”
Despite all the calls on her time, Sam is determined to succeed.
“I don’t want to stay on social welfare forever – I really want to write so I want to get back out there.”
Competitions like ‘Who’s Hiding In The Undergrowth?’ are a godsend to aspiring writers, says Sam.
“It’s definitely very important for new writers. It is very daunting having to email an editor and get instant rejection whereas with a competition you’re thinking, ‘Okay, I may actually have a chance.’ There’s nothing to lose at all. That’s brilliant.”
Aspiring writers tend to be voracious readers, so HP was curious to know what kind of books she likes to curl up with when she gets the chance?
“I love Chuck Palahniuk, the author of Fight Club – I love all his books. I really love George Orwell and Aldous Huxley who wrote Brave New World. I really am into dystopian books.”
While Sam’s winning entry, ‘The First Goodbye’, which you can read online at hotpress.com, could not be called dystopian, her short story deals with the serious subject of domestic violence.
“People read about it in the papers and it is an issue that is not being dealt with,” says Sam. “You can really touch the seriousness of it with writing. With a subject like that you have to face how you feel at the end of reading about it and it is something you really have to think about.”
Domestic violence is a topical subject and reports from those working in the area have noted that incidents have been on the increase since the economic downturn set in. Worse still, with more women and children trying to access refuges, there isn’t enough space for them all. At the end of this September, Sharon O’Halloran, director of Safe Ireland, which represents a number of domestic violence services across Ireland, noted that cutbacks had had a serious effect on the ability to deliver essential services to victims. There is no money to open new refuges and existing refuges are finding it more difficult to maintain their services.
‘The Last Goodbye’ examines the intersecting factors that change a happy relationship into an abusive one. Perhaps its most successful feature is Sam’s exploration of the myriad reasons why some women choose to stay with violent partners. These are both practical, such as lack of options caused by poverty, as well as psychological and emotional.
“That’s something a lot of people don’t understand about domestic violence – that there is a self-esteem issue and that the person loves their partner despite what they do. And it is not until they decide that they do want out, that they will leave.”

Read 'The First Goodbye' here.