Nature’s Banquet

Inspiration

Nature’s Banquet was originally written for Round Three of the 2009 Whittaker Prize. The prompt used was a picture of a dog holding the body of a rabbit in its jaws. It was given a score of 58/100 by the judge, Geoff Nelder, putting it in 18th place out of 24. The judge commented that the risky second person perspective made it very difficult for the reader to know the protagonist. He also pointed out that slipping into first person – eg Don’t make me laugh, meant there was authorial intrusion too adding to the confusion.

Placings

Nature’s Banquet won 1st prize in Earlyworks Press 2009 Old Magic in a New Age competition.

Performances

I read this story at the Story Fridays Feral event on March 7th, 2014 in Bath. It was a lot of fun to perform.

Notes

This ended up as an exercise in writing a second person piece, with all the risks that entails. Some people like it, others hate it. But you won't find out unless you try. I did at least change that "Don't make me laugh" to "You're kidding," but I didn't change a lot else before sending it out again. The only thing I'm not happy about is Bonzo the dog. I should have come up with a more neutral name for him.