The Monthly talks short form poetry with Roberta Beary – Part 4 – Where to next?

How do you feel about winning prizes for your work?

I tend not to enter many competitions now because I think once you get established, you can leave open that space for others.

Winning the Bridport was a shock to me. When they were trying to contact me I had blocked the number because I thought it was a spam call, I didn’t know who was trying to get in touch with me, and the call came from the UK. Eventually the woman from the prize emailed me and I contacted her. But even after the discussion I hadn’t realised that I had won. I thought I had placed.

The only reason I entered that contest was because I was taking an online Flash Fiction workshop with Jude Higgins who runs the Bath Flash Fiction Festival, and she had asked everyone in the class to support the Bridport because it was very supportive of Flash Fiction. It is expensive to enter the Bridport Prize and you can only enter once in each category.  I entered in all three categories to support Jude’s request: flash fiction, poetry and short story. The poem I entered had been rejected over 60 times.

“Girl”, a prose poem by writer Jamaica Kincaid was published in the New Yorker in 1978. For decades, her poem has been published all over the world in Flash anthologies or Prose anthologies. I thought if Jamaica Kincaid’s work can be put into different genres I can do that too. Previously, I’d submitted ‘After You Self-Medicate with Roethke’s The Waking Read by Text-to-Speech App’ as Flash Fiction and it had received good comments but it wasn’t right for the various journals or contests I had sent it in to. I polished it a little more, changed the genre category and sent it in to the Bridport and it won.

After You Self-Medicate with Roethke’s “The Waking” Read by Text-to-Speech App

By Roberta Beary

You’re in one of your weepy moods and your mother turns her sea green eyes and lifts your baby from your arms and says did you ever notice her little heart shaped face so like yours and you say no but now that you mention it and you smile as your mother hands you back your baby who opens to your breast and afterwards watches you with milk drunk eyes half closed as you unlatch and when you turn your mother is gone and the baby is sleeping so you lay her on the lighthouse quilt while you answer the doorbell and sign for yet another package and your mother is somewhere you can’t see no matter how many corners you scan as you lift the lighthouse quilt and what falls away is always and is near and the baby you hold looks nothing like your baby well maybe a little in the curve of her mouth or the way one eye is slightly higher than the other or perhaps it is the heart shape of the tiny face that is somewhat familiar in her dress of yellow polka dots and just then your daughter asks you for her baby and what falls away is always and is near and you lift the baby who watches you with milk drunk eyes half closed and as you lay her in your daughter’s arms the lighthouse quilt slips to the floor and the doorbell rings you sign for yet another package you tell yourself the ache is for that long ago stray your mother brought home how he followed your every forbidden step and you feel yourself get weepy in a way your daughter never does not even when your mother died but she did a lovely job with the memorial photos that one of the three of you in matching yellow polka dots and what falls away is always and is near and you do your timed breathing standing at the window where the magnolia petals brush the rain or is it the other way around which is something your mother would know and you tell yourself that when people say weave the unspoken words into a letter to read at the graveside they don’t know what the hell they’re talking about and the magnolia unfurls its petals as the rain sings a lullaby you once knew but now is a fragment of bees buzzing over the figs that have fallen as you lay in the shade of your mother’s yellow polka dots while you wait for her to say something momentous but she only asks for her reading glasses and the two nurses erase her name from the whiteboard and you go back to your timed breathing until your daughter says would you mind holding the baby and her sea green eyes look weepy like a memory tucked inside your pocket and you lift the baby from your daughter’s arms and as the lighthouse quilt slips the baby unfurls her fists and smiles a crescent moon and you say did you ever notice the baby’s little heart shaped face so like yours and your daughter says no but now that you mention it and you hear your mother calling from inside your other pocket and what falls away is always and is near.

Does the fact that you have won prizes for your work help out regarding the confidence you need to work as an editor?

I think that has more to do with the kind of law I practised.  I worked on Housing Law, ensuring that housing regulations were complied with. When I went to Japan I was thrown into Patent Law, things like Coca Cola franchises being used in Japan, Chrysler Cars with their steering wheels on the other side of the car from the Japanese point of view, and I just had to learn everything.

I can remember almost being in tears and going to speak to this older women, and I was saying that I didn’t think I could do the job, and she said to get a couple of text books, read up on licencing laws and things like that, and the more you do the more you will know. I felt that advice sort of gave me permission and so I learned on the job.

The same thing happened when I returned to the States and I had to learn another branch of Law. I started in 1997 and by 2007 I could do the job in my sleep. And I think that after you have been doing something for 10 years, you should be able to do very competently.

It wasn’t as if something magical happened. I really did grit my teeth and gave it my all. I am a much better editor now than I was when I started.

Where to now?

I have a Flash Fiction collection I have been working on, I started pre-pandemic so it must be 6 years now. I do want to get back to that with my keener editorial eye. I want to rearrange it, reorder it and take out some of what I consider to be the weaker work. I still consider myself a Flash Fiction novice even though I have been writing and publishing flash since 2013.

I am more confident about my haibun, as I have been writing in that form since the early 2000s. I am working on a new collection of “memoir haibun”. It’s an area that hasn’t been explored by many writers. I feel there is a place for me in that evolving genre. Some of the 80 haibun in my most recent collection, Crazy Bitches: Selected Haibun 2004-2024 (MacQ 2025) do fall under the memoir umbrella. But I want to do more, to dig deeper, in my own writing.