Margaret Bulleyment tells us about her contribution to the Script Challenge

 

Green Grass of Home

I have written quite a few pieces where I have not been absolutely sure when I am first drafting the  words, whether the piece is really a story, or a script, and some of them (or versions of them) end up as both.

'Green Grass of Home ' was one of those pieces and an obvious choice for Script Challenge as it is also the first piece I ever submitted to Bridge House - and look where that led.

 I was so pleased when you took the trouble to tell me that although the story did not fit with the other stories you had selected for the anthology, you liked the story. Consequently, I submitted it later to CafeLit where every story stands alone and you accepted it. Script Challenge made me think that you deserved it a second time.

I entered another version of 'Green Grass,' in a monologue competition run by Ovation Theatre Awards and reaching the final was invited to the Square Chapel Theatre, in Halifax to direct it. It was wonderful hearing my words brought to life for an audience by a professional actress and Jo Gerard did it proud. A year later I had another short piece 'Guarding the Woolly Mammoth' performed - this time in the Players Theatre in Glossop - and later in the Deddington Festival, here in Oxfordshire.

I would like to eventually dramatise some of my longer stories.  I wrote a full-length children's play Caribbean Calypso for Trinity College's International Playwriting Competition which was performed by an education charity for children in  Bangalore, but that was more like linking individual stories, so developing a longer story would be more of a challenge, but one I would relish.