Winter in Melbourne has set in and the cold grey days are perfect for catching up on admin, reading a good book or writing a few words. As soon as the sun comes out, I’m drawn out to walk, soak up its warmth before it disappears again, and if I’m very lucky and the light is right, I might capture an image to adorn the Monthly Newsletter. This month it’s a wood duck sunbathing surrounded by feeding grebes at Albert Park Lake.
In early May Minds Shine Bright set up a stall at Ceres Saturday Market. We were indoors, surrounded by vibrant makers and were well received by the patrons who enjoyed the Minds Shine Bright story board and admired the anthologies. It’s rewarding to be able to connect new readers at a grass roots level and it adds some vital additional sales to those from book buyers and the online Minds Shine Bright Bookshop. Building our readership and promoting writers and poets will be a key focus for coming year.
If you enjoy videos and podcasts, then have a listen to Stories and Poems by Minds Shine Bright our new video program which is soon to be a podcast too. Our first series is the Faces of Places Anthology which will feature interviews with the Places writers and poets in the lead up to the November launch of Places Anthology. You can view the pilot episode, featuring an interview with our June Writer in Focus Erini Loucaides on the Minds Shine Bright YouTube channel here. Subscribe to our channel to hear the stories behind the Places writers and poets, insights into writing contemporary poetry and fiction and some inspiring writing tips.
Our writer in Focus for June is writer Erini Loucaides, author of short story, ‘Relentlessly Prismatic’ which won the 2026 Minds Shine Bright Writing Prize.
What inspired you to write ‘Relentlessly Prismatic’?
‘Relentlessly Prismatic’ started out as two stories. The first was a story I felt very passionate about writing – that of a dentist who sees kinship with sanitation workers because they both clear the rot of society. This dentist also envies the workers, the way they are free to hop on and off the sanitation truck, the stars their office, unlike the way he is cooped up in a tiny clinic, hunched under harsh lights. I entered the story in about 6-7 competitions, but it did nothing, so I put it on the backburner. I now see it was too flat and linear of a story, quite one-dimensional. Over a year later I was writing another story about an English woman in the last day or so of her life, speaking from her morphine-induced consciousness. The story explores how Cyprus has cradled and nourished her against the backdrop of a troubled marriage. As I began writing this story, the dentist rose to the forefront, becoming the cancer-stricken woman and much like osmosis, the stories merged.
What do you like most about writing short stories (as distinct from longer (novel/ novella or shorter pieces?)
The simultaneous freedom and discipline the short story affords; it’s a beautiful balance of both. I have great reverence for poets because every word in a poem is a muscle, isn’t it? That takes immense skill and discipline which I don’t have. Novel writing on the other hand is undertaking an Odyssey. It doesn’t offer the containment that the short story does. Lots of patience is needed because there, every page has to be a muscle.
Also, as we know, many writers take respite from their novel with short stories. They’re a great antidote, especially when a story gets picked up and you see your work come to fruition in a much quicker time span than a novel or novella. This in turn puts a lovely billowing wind in your novel sails.
Generally, even with shifting points of view a piece of writing has one narrative voice that holds it together, and yet Relentlessly Prismatic has two very distinct voices that in combination tell the story and somehow it works. When writing this story how did you know when you had that balance right?
Pretty much straight away. By offering only Sara’s point of view, I suspected it might leave readers scratching their heads. Bringing in her husband’s point of view from the hospice provided more scaffolding for the reader. It also grounded and balanced the story and it felt very right. I also have a critique group who also agreed it worked with both points of view – although I’d already sent out the story to MSB by that point!
How does your own journey of migration (or of living in different places) shape your writing?
Living in three different countries before the age of twenty greatly affected me, grafting the cultures and lands onto my own psyche. This is evident in my short story collection which explores the light and shadows of migration. The characters are either fully Cypriot, from the diaspora (especially 1974 refugees like my parents), English or Australian. There’s some interesting confluences too, like the English woman and the Cypriot in ‘Relentlessly Prismatic’ or the marriage between an indigenous Australian and a Cypriot woman from the diaspora. It’s great to see these stories well-received internationally.
I’m also fascinated by the mythology of the places I’ve lived in. In Chullora Public School in Sydney, we were enchanted by stories of the Dreamtime. In the UK I was out scouring Druid lands. And Cyprus . . . well, every twenty minutes, you run into the ruins of ancient temples so you can see why that serves as the inspiration for my novel in progress.
What advice do you have for new writers?
I guess it boils down to approach and attitude to writing so I’ll share mine:
All of the contracts have been sent out to the shortlisted Places writers and poets, and we are sending out the young writers’ and Illustrators contracts next week. Behind the scenes we are working on anthology collation and design, collecting bios and photos and preparing the first drafts to send out to copy editors.
Mark these dates in your calendars. The Melbourne launch of Places will be on Saturday 7th November from 1:00pm AEST and the online international launch will be on Saturday 14th November at 7:00pm AEST. We will let you know the dates for the Young Writers and the Young Illustrators Places Launch soon too.
The bad news is it’s time for Minds Shine Bright to do some critical budget repair, so we are shifting the opening date of our flagship Confidence Writing Competition from August 2026 to August 2027. The competition will close at the end of March 2028, and Confidence 3 will be launched later in the year. We won’t run any other writing competitions until then, but we will run an illustrator’s competition to find the next cover for our upcoming Confidence 3 anthology.
This will enable us to focus on building our readership and writing communities over 2026 and 2027 and it will help us to rebuild a big enough prize pool to ensure that all of the shortlisted writers selected for publication are paid and that the overall prize and category prizes will continue to attract a high quality of contemporary creative writing and poetry.
The good news is that you will have precious time to craft hone and perfect your confidence story, poem, script or short form fiction. All entrants will also be part of our longitudinal study and sub-thematic analysis of the confidence theme in contemporary poetry and fiction which started in 2021 with the inaugural Minds Shine Bright writing competition.
If you want to know what the competition field is like you might consider buying one of the Confidence anthologies at the Minds Shine Bright bookshop or you can take a sneak peek at some of the Confidence 2 writers and poets reading on the Minds Shine Bright YouTube channel @mindshinebright8617.
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