Category: News

We are delighted to announce the winners and runners up of our Halloween poetry competition! Thanks to everyone who entered. These poems faced some scary competition but in the end were the eeriest of them all. Sit down, relax, enjoy reading them and try to ignore the creaking of the door behind you…

Winners

Under 18: Falling For You by Rowan Beddows

Over 18: The Bone Man by Sarah Mills

Runners-Up

Under 18: Or Else by Anne Holloway

Over 18: The Púca by Eilish Fisher

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Winners

Falling For You by Rowan Beddows

A mirage of leaves, all around,
Falling down, to the ground.
My dress swirls around, playing with the autumn wind,
Our picnic blanket, on the grass, rocks keeping it pinned.
We spin around, underneath the sun,
No one can disturb us here, hon.
In this collage of orange, yellow and red,
With birds soaring overhead.
Our song plays; We fell in love in October, it sings,
Blasting, blazing, we open up our wings.
Stay here,
My dear,
Underneath the autumn sky,
Listening to the birds fly by.
We huddle around the fire,
Our hearts swelling with desire.
Your hazel eyes shimmering with delight,
Always makes me smile bright.
And your lips curled in a smile,
Makes me lose my breath for a while.
Cocoa is passed between us,
“There will be no Halloween this year”, I hear you say, nevertheless,
We can still celebrate with sweets and costumes,
And songs and dancing all afternoon.
Afterall, Halloween is all about ridding evil spirits,
So don’t be sad my love, I’ll sing you the lyrics.
And maybe then you won’t be so down,
I never like to see you frown.
So I’ll visit you, I’ll dance with you, I’ll love you,
I’ll stick to you like gorilla glue,
This October.
And even when the masks hides your frown,
I’ll always know your furrowed crown.
I’ll come around,
Through the battleground,
To be with you,
On this beautiful October noon.

Rowan Beddows always dreamed of becoming a jellyfish timelord, traveling through space but decided writing would probably be easier to accomplish. In her spare time, she also likes to read, listen to music, and obsess over many things to the point her friends are getting quite sick of hearing about She-Ra, Jessie Paege, and Harry Potter. She lives in Tipperary with three crazy, spoiled kitties and three equally crazy siblings, her superhero mom, and her astronomical dad.  

The Bone Man by Sarah Mills

All night long he is on the road,
Never looking back at his chattering load.
Sometimes you can hear the unnerving sound
Of his rickety ride hitting grids on the ground

And for a few moments he stops to stare,
Believing that some ribs lie there 
But being mistaken carries on through the gloom
To crypt and grave, sepulchre and tomb.

His wrist is watchless for he is always at work
And no can see him through the mist and the murk.
Only the moonlight dares to fall on his teeth
As he floats over hill, highland and heath. 

I look out of my window and wait patiently to see
Who drives this mobile ossuary
And I remember the words my mother used to tell me: 
“Do not look for the bone man or he will look for thee.”

Sarah Mills is a 32-year-old aspiring poet and writer from Wiltshire with a bachelor’s degree from The Open University in German, History of Art & Classical Mythology. She writes poetry because it has the ability to express her deepest feelings and she wholeheartedly agrees with Victor Hugo’s statement that ‘words are the mysterious visitors of the soul’. She is thrilled to be one of the winners in this competition and hopes that you all enjoy reading her work as much as she enjoyed writing it.

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Runners-Up

Or Else by Anne Holloway

Soldiers take to the streets. 
‘No surrender, no retreat.’

Divide and conquer: 
Pound on doors 
In twos, or threes,
or sometimes fours. 

‘Give us what we want,
(Or else)’,  
They say. 
‘Give us what we want, please, 
(Or else)’

Their swords are drawn, 
Faces masked,
Pistols pointed,
Broom handles clasped. 

‘Give us what we want, please, 
(Or else)’

Anna Holloway lives in Dublin with her Mum, Dad and younger sister. She likes art, reading, knitting and watching YouTube. She absolutely loathes decision making. 

 The Púca by Eilish Fisher

She steps through the treeline 
over bracken and bramble,
burdock and cleavers.

He watches her bend her body 
like a curled leaf, 
green as honeyed sap rising. 

He rolls his tongue to the sky,
sipping the spicy scent of skin,
as she pauses by a lone hawthorn.

She dips her hands to wetness
drinking in clear well water,
fights against the tearing gorse.

In shaggy purpose, 
he shudders through mossed woods,
bows low by her side.

In faith she climbs 
up and onto his muscled spine.

Eilish Fisher grew up on a farm in rural Vermont and moved to Ireland in 1998. After more than twenty years in Ireland, she considers herself both a Wicklow and Vermont writer.  Her poetry has been published in Crannog Literary Magazine, Three Drops From a Cauldron, The Ogham Stone and Cailleach literary journals and in the anthology Writing Home; The ‘New Irish’ Poets, published by Dedalus Press. In summer, 2020 she won second place in the Ken Saro-Wiwa Poetry Competition and was also awarded a place on the Words Ireland Mentoring Programme for young adult and children’s literature. Her first children’s novel was short-listed for the Mslexia Children’s Novel Award in 2018.  She received a master’s degree in early medieval Irish history and literature and a doctorate in medieval English literature from the National University of Ireland, Maynooth.  Eilish lives in Glenmalure, County Wicklow.

 

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We are so thrilled to share our contributors for Issue 3! We received a record number of submissions this issue and we can’t wait for you to enjoy the final pieces.

Reviewers

Under 18 

Rebecca Downey
Esmée Kidd
Hanna-Rose Sullivan
Aoibhe Toft

Over 18

Camille Boelt Hindsgaul
Joanna Geoghegan
Paddy Lennon
Jessica Militante
Emma Muldoon Ryan
Lorna Mulvihill
Anne Murray
Niamh O’Donnell
Lorna O’Dea
Medb O’Gorman
Luke Power
Anet Rumberg
Aoife Sheehan
Courtney Smyth

Writers

Under 18

Megan Rutter
Molly McDonagh
Charlotte Edwards
Angel Ifyawuchi
Nadine Kelly Hughes
Paxton Calder
Maitreyi Parakh
S. Rupsha Mitra
Anna Holloway

Over 19

Oyanne Gahann
Laura Spierings
Kaden Elijah
Valerie Hunter
Sinéad Creedon
Mark Stewart

Artists

Under 18

Olivia Boylan
Béibhinn Collins
Rachel O’Brien

Over 19

Ana Slattery
Martins Deep
Rebecca Johnson

Features

Jennifer Gouck

Jenny Duffy

Interviews with

Deirdre Sullivan

Áine Ní Ghlinn

It’s the time of year for ghouls, goblins, ghosts

All of the creatures that you fear the most

To inspire you to make eery rhymes

About this most spooky and fun of times!

Paper Lanterns are delighted to announce our Halloween Poetry Competition! We want to read your poetry inspired by the most atmospheric time of year. The competition is open for teens (13-18 years) and adults (19+ years) and there will be a winner in each category!

Be in with a chance to win this spooktastic prize:
• The winning poems will be published on the Paper Lanterns website
• A book voucher
• A Halloween goody-bag

The rules are simple:
• Poems must be no longer than 40 lines
• Writing must be appropriate for a teenage audience
• The theme is Halloween – interpret that anyway you like!

How to submit:
• Pay a submission fee of €3.00 through our PayPal account at this link – paypal.me/PaperLanternsJournal
• Keep a note of your PayPal receipt number
• Submit through the form below
o Your poem must be saved as a word doc
o Do not have your name written on the word doc
o You will need to write your PayPal receipt number in this form as proof of your submission fee

You can submit as many times as you like, but you will need to pay the submission fee for each poem.

Deadline is October 25th – winners will be announced on Halloween!

Sponsored Submissions

If you are unable to afford the submission fee, please contact us about arranging a sponsored submission.

If you are interested in donating to the competition to sponsor the submission of a writer, please do get in touch (we will be forever grateful). Email: paperlanternsjournal@gmail.com (please don’t send your submission to us over email – fill in the form!)

That’s it! Time to get writing. We can’t wait to read your booooo-tiful poems!

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Calling all teachers!

Do you have readers, writers and artists in your class that you think would be interested in being involved with Paper Lanterns? We are putting together a newsletter for teachers and other youth workers to help their students get involved.

Sign up to our teacher newsletter for more info –  https://forms.gle/4CxZJuSmyGfFADRR8

Submissions close for Issue 3 on September 13th. We’ve put together a poster that you can print out an stick on your classroom wall, in your library – wherever students will see it! Download here – Paper Lanterns Schools Issue 3

We are so thrilled to announce the winners of the ‘Right Here, Right Now’ Flash Fiction Competition!

Winner of the Under 18 category is First Came the Virus by Molly McDonagh.

Winner of the 18+ category is Ocean Waves by David Deady

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First Came the Virus

First came the virus, then came the leak. Pale green plasterboard, cracked and rotting, surrounded her on this dark, barely lit corridor. Damp had started to seep down from the roof but job loss had meant there was no one to fix it. Money was a problem. They hadn’t been open for months and so had made no income of any sort. The wood-panelled floor had started to lift too. So much to do with so little time. They were expected to be open by Tuesday. How, Kelly had no idea. Anything that wasn’t soaking wet from the leaking pipe was covered in an inch of dust. Miraculously, the kitchen had stayed dry. Kelly didn’t fancy having to move everything to clean it. Her staff wouldn’t be back for another few days and anyway, she wasn’t sure she would be able to pay all of them. Yellow warning stickers covered the windows and the floor, with about half of the oak tables and chairs pushed out to the back to allow for social distancing. Like customers would follow that anyway. Sighing, Kelly took up her brush.

Molly McDonagh

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Ocean Waves

James didn’t think he’d get to see the ocean again. Sitting on a crumbling wall overlooking the entire bay, he bounced the backs of his trainers off the stone in slow succession. The old bike he’d rescued from his parent’s shed lay abandoned on the swathe of beachgrass that stretched out beneath him. There had been a storm the night before and the battered thickets were finally beginning to regain their vigour, gently swaying in the panacea of some late summer sunshine.

Finally alone and away from the throngs of people intending for the main beach, James allowed himself a moment to relax. He unlooped the mask from his ears and breathed in the salty air, filling his lungs to capacity, hoping to ease the knots that had been shackled in his stomach for months now. So much of the world had changed, but there was something so reassuringly enduring about being able to see this serene vista, a familiarity that was lost in the city now where tendrils of the virus had touched every surface. 

He sighed and vaulted himself down off the wall as he began to make his way to a part of the shore that remained hidden. The path was involved and tricky but James was sure footed. His battered sneakers instinctively gripped to the craggy rocks he knew would safeguard his passage, gliding by the treacherous ones covered in a slick of green seaweed. It seemed like there’d been a trail long ago, but years of weathering and overgrowth had seen to its vanishing.

The trip was more than ritual now. A latent muscle memory took over and within seconds his feet landed on a patch of dry, dusty sand. Seagulls squawked and soared overhead, lunging at the small bubbles on the shoreline in search of hidden bivalves and snails that appeared when the tide retreated out. James removed his shoes and socks, allowing his toes to wriggle and adventure for a second before he slowly walked to the edge of the water.

Frigid waves lapped eagerly at James’s ankles. Every one of his senses was ravenous after months of isolation; each thunderous swell of water was a sparkling aria that welcomed him home. Nothing was the same though. He had lost and sacrificed so much. But at least the sea still remained, strong and unyielding. A seemingly small delight, but one that made James’s heart soar.

David Deady

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About the Authors

Hi, I’m Molly McDonagh. I’m 14 years old and I love rock climbing, reading, writing, drawing, cinema and cycling. My fav subject in school is probably English or Art but I like TG too! I have two younger brothers and a baby sister. I also have a dog called Daisy. My instagram account is called @artbymolly2020.

David Deady is a copywriter who works in Dublin and has an MA in American literature and film from UCC. He has been published in Sonder Magazine, Huffington Post, HeadStuff and other online media outlets. He loves pop culture and spends his time writing thinkpieces about Hilary Duff.

Twitter: @david_deady

Instagram: @aboynameddavid