ICA news: Maria tops in creative writing

Maria Stephens, a retired primary teacher and member of Longwood Guild in Meath, won this year’s ICA creative writing competition.

Writers had to compose 2,000 words under the title ‘Peace at Last’. Maria didn’t name her two characters — they were simply the Husband and the Wife.

The focus is their different reactions to a wedding invitation and to the event itself. The two have different personalities — he, an ‘outgoing and gregarious individual, full of innate bonhomie’, who liked to ‘engage strangers in conversation in supermarkets, bank queues or cafes’, she was ‘stout and retiring, always carefully made-up, all traces of grey carefully masked in her dark brown hair’.