During the month of February, VON accepted entries to our first writing contest with famous writer Clive Matson as judge. We are pleased to present the winning poem by Karla Duarte of Nicoya.

“I didn’t expect to win; I felt satisfied with just the fact that a writer would read my work,” Duarte expressed, “and truly I feel honored with the positive view he gave me of my poems, as well as knowing that they will be published in the newspaper that I admire so much for the tenacity and the focus it has, principally environmental, makes me very happy.”

Matson described her poetry as “a resonant lyric, beautifully written, reminiscent of the early Pablo Neruda, with a dash of deeply felt surrealism."
Matson said that all of the pieces submitted to the competition were excellent, representing a variety of totally different genres including poetry, narratives, short stories and satire.

Honorable mentions go to Howard Kramer for his story “Sunday, Futbol Sunday,” to Peter Wright for “Private Eye” and to Luis Fernando Barrantes Cortés for “Conversación con un Auténtico Narrador” (Conversation with an Authentic Narrator).

Matson, who leads an annual writing workshop in Nosara, lives in Oakland, California and has authored several books and collections of poetry, including “Let the Crazy Child Write!” a guide to unleashing the creative unconscious while writing. He began teaching creative writing in 1978, earned an MFA (master’s degree in fine arts) in poetry from Colombia University and has taught more than 3,000 writing seminars.

As our winner, Duarte will enjoy a free night’s stay at the luxury hotel L’acqua Viva.

How Karla Learned the Power of Writing
Karla describes herself as a very quiet person from a rural zone with little knowledge of writing but when she was a little girl in school, she found that she could express herself better in writing, and when a teacher took seriously a letter of complaint that she wrote, she tasted the power of the written word. 
A couple of years ago, going through the most important loss of her life, everything seemed slow and painful and mentally couldn’t channel anything.
 
Then someone told her to write, so she started writing poems. She said she threw those first poems away, but later started writing again and noticed that something had changed: “It was that I wrote, and not the pain nor the fear, but rather I was stronger than this and I could be what I wanted and reach wherever I wanted just by dreaming it, by wanting it.”

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