It’s officially spooky season. You know what that means… let’s get ourselves fabulously frightened!  

To celebrate this Halloween, all of us on the Maker team wanted to set you writers a scarily good challenge. Often life can present us with many challenges that evoke fear within us. Causley himself often wrote of his own greatest fears, including human mortality in ‘Eden Rock’ and the horrors of the war in the ‘Ballad of the Bread Man.’ This month we want to challenge you to write– in any form and style you please– about the scariest time in your life. Ranging from perhaps your own ghostly encounter to sitting an exam. The key here is dramatizing your personal experiences, successfully evoking the fear you felt to the reader themselves. This month we will be accepting poetry of up to 30 lines and prose/memoir of up to 2,000 words. 

All submissions must be emailed to themaker@causleytrust.org, along with a brief bio of yourself and your writing background. Deadline for submissions will be 10th October 2022. 

*Disclaimer: this task is designed to stretch your abilities as writers and reveal to you how deep writers can go when we put our minds to it. If you will feel personally triggered writing about a certain event or time, please do not do so. Look after yourselves first, writing second!