Submissions open now

Deadline April 1, 2016

Winners will be announced April 15, 2016

Submission Rules: 3 categories:

o non-fiction, (1500 words max)

o fiction (1500 words max,)

o poetry (1 page single spaced max)

o Submit entry as a Word Document ( Font Times New Roman, Size 12)

1st prize - $100, 2

nd prize - $50, 3

rd prize - $25

3 honourable mentions in each category.

Winners and honourable mentions will be published in RCLAS E-Zine, Wordplay

at Work.

Winners invited to read at LitFest New West, May 14, 2016.

Fees $10 per submission for members, $20 per submission for non-members.

Maximum three submissions per person, total combined in any of our categories.

Previously published work will be accepted as long as author retains copyright.

Cover letter to include Name, Address, Email, Phone, Category, Title, Payment info. Blind judging. Submissions to judges are anonymous.

Current Board Members are not eligible to submit. SUBMISSION and Payment OPTION 1:

Pay via Paypal at www.rclas.com AND email entry and cover letter to secretary@rclas.com

SUBMISSION and PAYMENT OPTION 2:

Email Word Document entry to secretary@rclas.com (DO NOT mail submission) and mail your cheque or money order to:

Royal City Literary Arts Society Box #308 – 720 6th Street

New Westminster, BC V3L 3C5

For further information Email: secretary@rclas.com

RCLAS Write On! Contest

2016

FULL DETAILS & PAYMENT OPTIONS

2016 Write On! Contest Poetry Judge

Alan Girling is a sometime poet and full

time teacher who grew up in North

Vancouver, lived in Tokyo for six years where

he started a family, and now lives in the

community of Burkeville, Richmond.

Once, he wrote primarily short fiction and

memoir, but over time that evolved into poetry

as more and more often he came to see the

stories he wrote as essentially poems waiting to

reveal themselves. Since then, he has tried his best to explore the language of

poetry in all its forms and to share his discoveries where he can. His work, for

instance, has been found in journals and anthologies, heard on the radio and at live

readings, and even viewed in shop windows. These opportunities include Lichen

Arts and Letters, Pagitica, Hobart, The MacGuffin, Smokelong Quarterly, FreeFall,

Galleon, In My Bed, Body Breakdowns, Blue Skies, Black Heart, Canadian

Stories, CBC Radio, World Poetry Café, Poetic Justice, Surrey Muse and the

downtown streets of Hamilton, Ontario and New Westminster, B.C. His chapbook,

To Talk Less, is also available to anyone who asks.

He was a 2003 Larry Turner Award for non-fiction finalist, and his play,

‘Whatever Happened to Tom Dudkowski’ was produced in 2007 for Vancouver's

Walking Fish Festival.He is happy to have won two prizes for his poetry, the 2006

Vancouver Co-op Radio Community Dreams Contest and the 2015 Royal City

Literary Arts Society Write On! Contest.

Currently, he sits on the board of the Royal City Literary Arts Society where he

hopes to be able to recognize and promote the best work of others.

2016 Write On! Contest Fiction Judge

Elizabeth Houlton Schofield writes about the

mundane and the everyday, who doesn’t have a little

drama in their life?

Liz’s stories have appeared in the Globe and Mail,

and been published in Drunk Monkeys and in

Hearing Voices, the Bareback Anthology, 2014. She

won the Honorable Mention at The Surrey

International Writer’s Festival, 2013, and 2014 and

was published in the conference anthologies.

Shortlisted for Literary Writes 2013 (Federation of

BC Writers), and Room magazine’s Reader’s Choice

Awards 2012, she won the RCLAS Write On! 2015 fiction contest, came second in

the same category and won honourable mentions in creative non-fiction and fiction

in 2014 and 2015. Her poem, He’s Not My Daddy, was one of those chosen for the

poetry walk to mark the unveiling of the Wait For me, Daddy monument in New

Westminster, BC, October 2014

Liz recently left Beautiful British Columbia after twenty years, following her heart

back to Manchester, UK, finally sleeping in the same bed every night as her

lifetime love. She travels back to BC regularly, it’s her ‘other’ home. She is

currently working on the first of a three novel trilogy set in Port Moody, compiling

two books of short stories, and planning her vegetable and herb garden.

Passionate about the story, Liz looks forward to reading and enjoying the entries in

the RCLAS 2016 Write On! Contest. Tell the story, tell it well, move her to tears,

laughter or joy or pain it doesn’t matter. Move her...

Photo Credit: Pharos 2014

2016 Write On! Contest Non-Fiction Judge

Christina Myers worked as a community journalist

in the metro Vancouver region for more than a

decade, covering a spectrum of beats. She is a past

winner of provincial and national journalism awards,

and has won or been shortlisted for a number of

writing competitions in the last year in fiction and

non-fiction, including shortlist for the 2015

Storyteller’s Award at the Surrey International Writers

Conference in fiction. She is among the authors in a

forthcoming book of collected non-fiction being

published later this year and also contributed to the

Emerge15 Anthology published last October. She was a member of The Writer's

Studio at SFU in 2015, returned to the program this year as a mentor apprentice in

non-fiction, and continues to freelance with local media from time to time. She

holds a bachelor of arts in psychology (UBC), a bachelor of journalism (TRU) and

a certificate in creative writing (SFU).

She lives with her husband and two children in a very old house in North Surrey

that is too small for all of the vintage kitchenwares she can’t resist bringing home

from dusty thrift shops. She has a fondness for rainbow knee socks, fascinators and

geeky board games.

Find her tweeting (occasionally) on Twitter: @ChristinaMyersA.

RCLAS WRITER OF THE MONTH

Celeste Snowber

Celeste Snowber, PhD is a dancer, educator and poet/writer who is an Associate Professor in the Faculty

of Education at Simon Fraser University. Author of Embodied prayer and co-author of Landscapes of

aesthetic education, she has written extensively in the area of arts and embodiment and continues to

create site-specific performances in the natural world and her last full-length performance was entitled,

“Woman giving birth to a red pepper.” Her poetry has been published in journals ranging from Quills,

Kurungabaa, Blue Skies, Ararat, The Armenite, Language and Literacy and Journal of Curriculum

Theorizing as well as in many edited books. Celeste is passionate about creating from experiences of

daily life and collaborating with other artists both in performance and writing. She has pioneered ways

of writing from the body and embodied inquiry within her scholarship and teaching and is a sought after

mentor for graduate students. Her most recent book of poetry is Wild tourist: Instructions to a wild

tourist from the divine feminine (Silver Bow Publishing). Celeste lives outside Vancouver, B.C., with her

husband and is a mother of three amazing adult sons.

Her website can be found at www.celestesnowber.com and blog is www.bodypsalms.com.

#crows

#spring

#afavouriteplace

Blue Tits © Joyce Goodwin

In the Dublin of our childhood, we had milk delivered to the front door in glass

bottles. The bottle tops were made of shiny foil. In those days milk was milk and

the cream always rose to the top. Our mother would carefully skim it off into a

blue and white striped jug and save it for her coffee, or perhaps our jelly. My

sisters and I saved up the silver tops whenever we could and gave them to “the

Missions” in Africa, to help the “black babies”. We never quite understood what

the children of Africa would do with all that silver; we just knew they needed it

desperately.

Every morning was a race against time to save the bottle tops. There was

something very attractive to the birds about that silver. My favourite bird, was

then, and still is today, a cheeky, blue and yellow bird, the Blue Tit. Those little

birds inhabited and sang their way through my childhood.

If we children were awake in the early hours, tucked into bed still, reluctant to get

up into the unheated room, we would hear the milkman coming. The clinking of

bottles was our alarm bell, one sound of the dawn chorus in the neighbourhood.

The other sound was the singing of the cheery birds as they shredded our bottle

tops and drank our cream. Often we just lay there knowing what was going on

outside our front door, knowing the birds had beaten us to it. The results of their

vandalism lay scattered around in tiny shiny pieces. We never caught them in the

act so to speak because by the time we unlocked the door to grab the milk, they

had flown away and were probably watching us from the nearby chestnut tree,

their little beaks dripping with cream.

Where Are They? © Nasreen Pejvack

When I first came to Canada, I settled in Ottawa. For the first few months, I

was busy finding a place for us to live, getting my son into school and then

researching what I wanted to do and what kind of skills I would need to begin my

new life.

During those busy few months, I kept an eye out for people who may look

like those from the First Nations of this land: darker skin, beautiful long black hair,

perhaps different languages. I remember one day I went to school a bit early to

pick up my son, and waited by the door to see if any First Nations people came to

pick up their children. None. No parents nor any students…

I began to wonder why I couldn’t see them anywhere, and even whether any

had survived the wars of conquest I had heard about. I wanted to ask people,

though did not know how. To my mind they were the first people of this huge

continent, and they should be everywhere.

I completed a term of my new college program and managed to make some

close friends. One was a sweet girl with whom I often studied. One day at our

lunch break I boldly asked what happened to the people of this land from before

the Europeans arrived, and why I could not see them like everybody else.

“Oh,” she said, then stared at me for a bit. “Good question, I think they are

mostly living on reserves.”

“What is a reserve?” I asked

“A place they have as their land and they live there together.”

“And where is that?”

“I do not know, at the edges of cities, I guess,” she said.

Well, that was not good enough for me. I wanted to know why people that I

heard had lived here for thousands of years were not easily seen on the streets, at

workplaces, and in schools like everybody else. Also, I learned that though my

friend was a very nice person, she didn’t know much about First Nations people,

nor cared to know. It was disappointing.

A few more weeks passed and the May 1st International Labor Day arrived. I

knew that that celebration had been changed to the first Monday of September,

though I never understood why. I went where I was told there may be some

gathering in downtown Vancouver. There, after several years living in Ottawa and

now in Vancouver, I finally met a good number of First Nations people. Many

seemed in very poor condition, but many were absolutely smart, walking around

talking and educating.

Then I heard a strong voice with a unique accent speaking. He was

communicating about “my people” so beautifully. He talked about the enforced

reservations as segregation, hunger, displacement, genocide, as well as disappeared

and murdered women.

It was a beautiful day, though breathing became so difficult all of a sudden.

------------------------------------------------------------------- copyright Nasreen Pejvack

RCLAS Board

President: James Felton

Vice-President: Janet Kvammen

Secretary: Antonia Levi

Treasurer: Nancy Pilling

Director at Large: Aidan Chafe

Director at Large: Dominic DiCarlo

Director (Event Coordinator): Sonya Furst-Yuen

Director at Large: Alan Girling

Board Assistant Deborah L. Kelly (Membership Coordinator)

Board Advisors

Renée Saklikar

Sylvia Taylor

Janet Kvammen, RCLAS Vice-President/E-zine janetkvammen@rclas.com

Antonia Levi secretary@rclas.com

Open Call for Submissions - RCLAS Members Only

Poetry & Prose Open Call for Submissions including the following

themes/features:

National Poetry Month April/May Themes: Poems written after your

favourite poet, Rain, and Open Call (Poetry, Short Stories, Book excerpts

& lyrics are all welcome for submission to future issues of Wordplay at

work.) Deadline 15th of the month.

June: Open Call. No Theme. Deadline 15th of May. No E-zine in July and

August.

Submit Word documents (include your name on document title) to

janetkvammen@rclas.com

VOLUNTEERS NEEDED!

If you would like to participate in a single event, or make an even

bigger contribution, please contact our event coordinator.

Director/Event Coordinator: Sonya Furst-Yuen

sonya.yuen@rclas.com

WORDPLAY AT WORK FEEDBACK & E-ZINE SUBMISSIONS

Thank you to our Sponsors

City of New Westminster

Arts Council of New Westminster

New Westminster Public Library

Judy Darcy, MLA

Renaissance Books

100 Braid Street Studios

The Network Hub - New Westminster

Boston Pizza

The Heritage Grill

Original’s Restaurante Mexicano

See upcoming events at www.rclas.com

www.poeticjusticenewwest.org

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March 2016 Wordplay at work ISSN 2291- 4269

Contact:

janetkvammen@rclas.com RCLAS Vice-President/

E-zine Design

“The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

– Sylvia Plath

“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”

― Stephen King

“You can make anything by writing.” ― C.S.

Lewis

Afterbirth © Janet Kvammen

nesting branches of birch

cascade, grasping

robins egg speckled sky blue

gnarled roots upended

reveal subterrain – wide open

water breaks, promise fulfilled

the extraction of spring

torn from winter’s icy womb

in flood of march showers

afterbirth splatters trees

with pink blossom

dawn’s second coming heralded

the soulful cry of birds in chorus

red with blood

feathers charred by virgin sun

Bless barren fields

coastal mountains

distant earth mother

witness passage

witness renewal