Competition | 13 June 2009

In Competition No. 2599 you were invited to step into the shoes of a well-known writer, past or present, and give their account, in verse or prose, of a career path they might have taken.

The assignment was inspired by the Observer’s ‘My other life’ column, in which writers reveal their fantasy job. Jan Morris, for example, harbours a desire to take to the waves: ‘If I weren’t me, I would like to be a ship…’.

No ships in a large and excellent entry, but step forward Jane Austen, stripper; John Betjeman, trapeze artist; Harold Pinter, florist; Geoffrey Chaucer, astronaut; and John Samson’s Ernest Hemingway, stand-up comedian (‘Which painter had both inside and outside pissoir? Two-loos Lautrec.’)

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Brendan O’Neill

The moment in the ‘grooming gangs’ debate that shamed Jess Phillips

Wordsworth the surgeon’s revenge fantasy, courtesy of R.S. Gwynn, impressed, as did Jim Hayes’s pastiche of Poe’s ‘The Raven’. On equally sparkling form were Susan Therkelsen, David Mackie, Greg Whitehead and Martin Parker. They were unlucky to lose out to the victors, below, who are each rewarded with £25. Basil Ransome-Davies scoops £30.

Though it is all too fatefully present to my consciousness that it is as an emigré artist — an American who has ‘upped sticks’ to Europe — that the world knows me, and that this is a rôle which I cannot in good faith altogether disown, as one might a fanciful sobriquet, I possess, for good or ill, none of the destinarian certainties that gripped the early congregations of New England: in short, I am an author less born than malgré lui and an exile by way of the designation, so to speak, ‘happening’ to me with the force (albeit not the fatality) of an avalanche, while my inner alter ego, a restless, nativist avatar, skins beaver and dodges tomahawks in the fantastical forests of the still-to-be-civilised West, where in the argot of an untutored yet vital democracy ‘a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do’.