Stringer Alumni: Where are they now?

Finn Joughin - published in Sussex Bylines.

Ex-student Finn Joughin (2020) who some of you may remember from plauong the pigeon loving Ronald in ‘The Wooden Frock’ wrote the article below which was published in Sussex Bylines.

https://sussexbylines.co.uk/lockdown-in-manchester-how-not-to-run-a-university/

Finn said of the experience, ‘Indeed it is me. I never thought I’d be a published author but they were very keen on getting younger writers and it actually turned out to be pretty fun.’

Finn Joughin is currently studying for his A-levels at BHASVIC college in Brighton. Though new to journalism, he hopes to publish more works in the future.

Ms Ettinger | Head of Drama

Ex student Caitlin Rothery recently won The National Flash Fiction Youth Competition 2021.

The annual National Flash Fiction Youth Competition, founded in 2013, is organized by the Department of English and the International Flash Fiction Association (IFFA).

You can read Caitlin’s short story ‘Company’ on the opposite page. The prize was £100 of National Book Tokens and publication on this website and in the April issue of Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine.

We are really proud of Caitlin who (with Rebecca Tilley) wrote our lower school play ‘Affliction’ in 2017, when she was in year 9! The two of them were part of the audition process and attended every rehearsal, co-directing with Ms Butler and working with the cast in the transference of their script from page to stage.

Caitlin is currently studying at BHASVIC, It’s great to see her creative spark continuing to glow.

We love to share Dorothy Stringer Alumni Success & Career Paths - If you would like to get in contact and let us know what you are up to please email communications@dorothy-stringer.co.uk. Your lives can inspire our current Stringer students!

COMPANY - Caitlin Rothery

When the guests had gone, they served themselves without pretension, with spoons sticking from metal pans on the hob, and carried a bowl each to the table where five places were set. Warm light from the overhead struck shadows on their brows, a stripe across their eyes when they bowed their heads. It made green the walls, a turquoise which seemed to grow in the gloam, go back and back for miles, giving the impression, thought Cathy, of their being at the bottom of the sea. The driving rain on the windows only added to this sense, its muffled din subduing the party whom it drenched in its sound. The conversation was reassuringly slack, the high energy dissipated, effortlessly tepid. The soup, which had been sitting too long, was lukewarm.

Plastic beads at her sister’s neck clacked as she pulled them absently and, with her right hand, drew an apathetic spoon to her lips, opened them slightly, ate the soup. Cathy watched the window, black now, and her own reflection, face on, a defiant imitation, moving very little. The glass was imperfect; it distorted and betrayed its own mimicry. Now her forehead stretched up and up, illimited, now it compressed and the cheeks elongated, elastic features. The dark outside hollowed her eyes and struck a chiaroscuro effect, a picture of a yellow, skull-like form out of focus. When she changed her gaze, sought the night, the panes rippled, opaque and impenetrable. A fox’s yelp rang on the glass, the strange music of the agitated night troubling the walls, which sealed them in.

The five of them, unified in their lack of pretence, were at once relieved and lost. The absence was absolute: in the empty chairs around the table, leggy and brittle; manifest in the dull passivity of Cathy’s father’s stare. The stray sock on the radiator seemed vividly red, he thought, eyes glazing. Alice, Jason, the four children, and Halle and Paul, all packed up and all gone and this red sock on the radiator, only small enough for little Alfie, all they had left with their absence. He thought, but for that, they were never here.