Cadenza have regular competitions and short-listed stories appear in the magazine alongside regular submissions. There are five competition stories in this issue and it’s interesting to read the judges’ report on these. The winning three are the best of the five. ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Madman’ by Chris Bleach is a blackly humorous story told by an artist with mental health problems. There’s a particularly good encounter with Prince Charles.

‘Spontaneous’ by Antony Davies is extremely funny, but there’s a serious inconsistency in the use of tense, with the narration constantly switching back and forth between past and present for no good reason. ‘Of Dog and Man and Woman’ by Rusty Barnes features a narrator who initially refuses to come to terms with the fact that his dog is dying, and tries to keep her alive. Threaded through this is the end of his relationship with his wife. This is a good story, though some minor editing would have sorted out a few grammatical and layout errors.

’Susan Sarandon in the Textile Mill’ by Kate Swindlehurst, a short-listed competition story that didn’t make it beyond the final five, is one of the more flawed pieces of writing in Cadenza 13. There are two narrators in this story. The first is so under-developed, she exists to do little else than offer the reader an outside view of the second narrator - the Susan Sarandon of the textile mill. This second narrator takes over, almost squeezing the first one out, and what’s particularly problematic is that the second character’s initial narration is completely internalised, resulting in a jarring switch in point of view. The story works best when it describes the second character’s time in a hospice with a dying relative.

’Luther’ by Cherie Jones has a few awkward sentences, which are further confused by an absence of commas leading to misrelated words and clauses. In spite of this, ‘Luther’ still manages to be one of the more memorable pieces in issue 13. The characters leap off the page and there is humour and pathos. ‘Hard to Explain’ by Rebecca Toennessen is set in Milwaukee shortly after the capture of Jeffrey Dahmer. Although the story is well written, the narrator’s frequent memos to herself on a Dictaphone seem out of place and somewhat disruptive. That said, this is still one of the best stories in issue 13. Steven Paul Kennedy’s ‘December 19’, Anthony Lynch’s ‘The Argument’ and ‘Free to a Good Home’ by Amanda Holmes are also well worth reading. The fiction in Cadenza 13 is from the UK, North America, Barbados, and Australia.

The poetry is mostly grouped together. There’s a new poetry editor at Cadenza - Bill Conelly. He gives us an idea of what he’s looking for in submissions in his ‘Bard Attitude’ column. Ned Balbo’s ‘Hitchhiker’ is the strongest poem, a haunting piece of work. There’s humour in Melissa Balmain’s ‘Villain Elle’, her ‘Insomniac’s Prayer’ and Zoë Gabriel’s ‘Beyond the Sea’. Davide Trame’s ‘Land’ and Simon Kewin’s ‘Unearthed’ are worth reading too. Kim Bridgford’s ‘Geysers, Iceland’ is more or less a sonnet, in the sense of having fourteen lines and ten syllables to a line, except that the syllable count is disrupted briefly in the second verse: “And something’s always just about to happen: / Bubbling up with blue before it spurts. / And something’s always just about to open / Inside our breath where all our breathing starts.” This is the most lyrical verse in the poem. Meanwhile, ‘Some Facts About Stars’ by Wendy Cope opens the poetry section, and John Costello’s ‘Stars’ appears at the end, providing a nice symmetry.

There are other poems and stories that deserve a mention, and non-fiction too, including an interview with Jim Crace, and an article on writing by Roger Harvey. On the negative side, there are a few punctuation, grammatical and formatting problems throughout the magazine, partly through the presence of the flawed competition stories, but elsewhere too. There is perhaps a need for stronger editorial intervention. Otherwise, this is a magazine worth checking out.

Kara Kellar Bell is a film and media graduate from the West of Scotland, with a passion for European novels, French films, silent cinema, and Brazilian music (everything from Daniela Mercury and other pop stars through to bossa nova). As a writer, she likes to have room to move around creatively, so she’s not located in one genre. She writes realism and also stories of a more fantastic nature, usually grounded to some extent in the real world. She also takes delight in writing across the sexual spectrum, and as a bisexual, considers it important to remind people that things are not always black and white, either/or, in sexuality or in gender. For a selection of Kara’s writing on the Showcase section of this site, click here

© 2005 Laura Hird All rights reserved.