Creative Writing Workshop and Short Story Competition for We Read Auckland August 2026
Give me a whiteboard and marker pen and and I’m back in the classroom doing what I loved for decades at university: encouraging writers to form meaning in words. Lots of waving hands to make my point…
A fabulous engaged group and a warmly-hosted evening at the Mahurangi East Library with tea and snacks to keep everyone’s pens rolling.
And to keep the momentum flowing a short story competition. The challenge: no more than two hundred words to take the reader on a journey. Some excellent entries challenged me to pick the best, the top three on display at the Mahurangi East Library, one of the best community libraries in Aotearoa.
Creative Writing Workshop and Competition, Dalmatian Archive and Museum 29.06.25
On a cold yet sunny Sunday seven writers gathered in the clubrooms of Villa Dalmacija to hone the craft of writing. We started with exercises in close reading the beginnings of several well-known autobiographies, memoirs and first-person narratives. Then the group responded to object prompts—a collection of memorabilia I’d gathered from Croatia, the former Yugoslavia, from family—which produced some rewarding first drafts. Each writer was then encouraged to develop this response for the short story competition I was to judge in a few weeks’ time. The ever-committed and extremely generous Slavenka was on hand to facilitate, and none of us wanted to stop the session at the allotted one and a half hours.
Needless to say the stories that were entered into the competition were striking and original, the winning entry by Louise Maich a standout.
Congratulations to all participants: I look forward to meeting you all again in the new year for an extended, supportive writing session.
From the 1925 September/October Dalmatian Cultural Society Newsletter:
