2021 Kilvington Writers Festival
The Kilvington Writers Festival is an annual event that includes many events and initiatives to help inspire a love of creative writing. A major highlight is the writing competition that invites students, staff and parents to enter a piece of writing based on the Festival’s theme.
Winners are announced at an Awards ceremony, which also includes a high-profile guest speaker. The following excerpt was written by Tina Cui in Year 10 who was the winner of the EAL (English as an Additional Language) category.
MEMOIR
Tina Qi, Year 9
The window refracted the moonlight onto my teardrops; the salty water glowed like a glint of light on broken glass. A few stars twinkled like diamonds on the navy-blue firmament. With a table covered up with colourless Math test papers, my heart filled up with bitterness.
Tears, like a brook, trickled down my face. Propped up against my bedhead in the middle of a winter night, I sensed how my hope had been washed away bit by bit by my teardrops.
Pride, along with hope, had been corrupted and swallowed by my characteristic sensitivity. With the faint light from the window, I could barely see the shortest hand of the clock striking 12. The new day unfolded. I fell onto my pillow and closed my eyes. I really did not want to embrace the rising sun.
As the teacher strode into the classroom with a pile of pale booklets, my body stiffened. My heart was beating like an automatic and rhymical drum. I did not want to face my score. With blurred vision, I looked down at the test paper, every red cross written on the test seems to have been written with my own blood.
The bell indicating the end of the school day rang. I hurried out of the school gate. As I spotted my mum waiting for me beside the car, tears split the car and my mum into two pieces. My mum warmly asked me what happened at school.
With unsteady breaths, I explained everything to her and showed her my test paper with the horrible mark written on it. Looking at the paper, my mum laughed at my naivety, "Practice does not always means winning, and you must accept this truth. You must adapt to the ups and downs in life,” she stated. “This test is an insignificant one and this mark is just a number. Not many people are geniuses and we do not expect you to be one. The process of learning and how to learn is what you are learning now.”
Life is not always going in the direction you want it to go, but you need to adapt to it and stay hopeful. Along the pathway of growing up, we will taste different flavours of life. Sweetness is a flavour and bitterness is another. As the old saying says - ‘Honing gives a sharp edge to a sword.’
The process of ‘honing’ is never comfortable and not everyone can end up being a sharp sword, but the process of ‘honing’ can give a person the gift of diligence. Diligence is not how hard you work; it is the ability to stand up again after you fall over.
The sun spreads its brilliance to the land with a gentle breeze, and a new day presents itself. I open the curtain and smile at the rising sun. The bird in my soul is ready to sing again.