Tanis Daly and Andrew Marsh take home top prizes
The Selkirk Adult Learning Program’s (SALP) annual Community Writing Contest featured some fierce competition this year. With the top spots being taken by such wonderful submissions, it would have been difficult to choose the winners, but in the end, Tanis Daly and Andrew Marsh took home the top spots for their pieces.
The SALP Community Writing contest is celebrating its fifth year in our community. It is an annual writing contest that promotes adult literacy and entry options are wide open. From non-fiction, to fiction, to poetry this contest has it all.
The Selkirk Record caught up with this year’s winners to discuss their work and their futures in writing.
Tanis Daly
Daly took home the top prize in the Community Members Category for her fiction piece Big, which features two brothers, the younger of which is frustrated by what he can’t do because he isn’t big yet.
“Anyone that has children probably can relate to this one, I feel like it brings in for me, at the starting point of the story, is the realization that everything is relative,” said Daly.
She explained that something that may seem small to us now like a tower of blocks being knocked over is a big deal to a little kid because their perspective of what is a crisis is different.
“It may seem minor when you look at it, but from their perspective, it’s a bigger deal. The older brother sees that and the other thing that comes into play with the story is, as any kid, they get frustrated. They wish they were bigger. They wish they were older. They wish they could do what others are allowed to do or can do,” said Daly.
She said that the inspiration for the story came from her own two children. She has a son and daughter and though they were close in age, learning to deal with frustrations is something that all children go through.
She was also inspired by her daughter to enter the writing contest. Daly said that she’d been writing privately and her daughter told her about the contest and was the catalyst for her choosing to enter Big into the competition.
Daly said that she was stunned when she found out that she had won the writing contest’s Community Members Category.
“I was really totally, totally shocked when came down to [the last name announced]. It was a very pleasant surprise. It definitely made my day for sure,” she said.
Daly writes not for professional reasons but as a creative pursuit and she invites others to give it a try if it’s something that they think might be interesting.
“When you have an idea, just write it down,” she said.
“If it’s something that you’d like to do anyway, then yeah, just write. It makes it makes you happy and is something positive to focus on.”
She also encourages residents who may be interested in future Community Writing Contests to give it a shot.
“Give it a try. It’ll make you feel good. It’ll exercise your brain. If you like writing, it’s a fun thing to give you joy to do,” said Daly.
Andrew Marsh
Andrew Marsh was the top winner in the Adult Learner Category for his poetry piece Through the Petals.
Though this piece is poetry, it’s a depiction of Marsh’s actual experiences in life.
“It correlates feelings of grief and loss from a perspective that another person almost may not be able to understand. The reason I say that is it’s based on a real event that happened in my life. I was diagnosed with cancer in early 2022 and at the time it was during COVID, [this poem speaks to] everything that was happening,” said Marsh.
Marsh has luckily been two years without any signs of recurrence of cancer but at that time his journey was uncertain.
“I was stuck in bed one day, and I had roses across the room from me. I can’t recall anymore who gave them to me, but I was watching them wilt over time and it felt like something I could connect to at the moment,” he said.
Marsh says that his writing journey started when he was very young. His grandmother, Sharron Marsh was his initial inspiration as a former elementary school teacher. From there he continued to write through a writing club at his elementary school and then as a student at the Comp, he took a creative writing class and fell in love with writing.
Marsh is now an adult learner taking a pre-calculus course as he’s upgrading his education as part of a plan to pursue nursing studies in the future. His current teacher brought up the writing contest and Marsh decided to give it a go
“When I heard about it, I figured this would be a really fun thing to try out and to be honest, a nice little distraction away from math for a bit,” said Marsh.
He says that he was excited to learn about his winning the Adult Learner category of the writing contest.
“I wasn’t expecting to win at all. But I was quite proud of it,” he said.
As someone who has been writing creatively for quite a while his advice to people wanting to take up the hobby is to not overthink it.
“When you write, you tend to go down all these different pathways. You want to plot your beginning, your middle and your end. It’s good to have ideas of what you want to do but don’t concrete things in so hard that you lose your creative freedom in the process,” said Marsh.
He also encourages other learners and community members to consider this writing contest in future years.
“The writing contest is a great way to bring the community together,” said Marsh.
To read Big and Through The Petals visit the SALP website at selkirkadultlearning.wixsite.com/salp.
