Showcase: Toxic + Mediocracy (On A Munday) + Winter Lights

Edited by Charlotte Maddox

Hello, and welcome to November’s last Showcase!

I’m Charlotte, Prize Manager at the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize, awarded by The Wilbur & Niso Smith Foundation. As I wrap up this month’s Showcase, I’ve been reflecting on how perfectly the theme of (R)Evolution aligns with adventure writing. Every adventure, on the page or in life, is a story of change. Sometimes it’s dramatic, sometimes it’s quiet, but it always moves us somewhere new.

The pieces I’ve shared this last month encapsulate this beautifully. We’ve seen revolutions of identity, self-acceptance, defiance and growth. They have reminded me that adventure isn’t only about far-flung places or feats of strength, it’s about transformation, courage and discovering who we are.

This first piece by Jane Acton continues that thread, pushing it into darker territory. Toxic imagines a version of Renaissance Italy where survival, especially for women, means making impossible choices, taking risks and creating your own justice. In this extract, we see a group of women trying to make sense of something awful that has happened, and the quiet resolve that begins to form between them. You can feel something shifting – it’s small, but it’s the beginning of something that might just change everything.

Toxic

No one can think of one thing to say that will make it better so we all go to sleep.

Next morning while they are feeding the children and loading each other up for the day’s journey they talk about who is to blame.

Nanna whispers, “What kind of boy will sell his own sister?” The others tut at that, it’s too much. They have sons.

Tomassia is bent over hunting for a dropped basket under the cart. “That’s not fair. Young men make mistakes.”

Nanna yaps. “Come on. He’s sold her and sold her cheap. How long before the man’s done all he wants with her, do you think?”

Tomassia straightens up. “She’ll have a baby in her, before long. He can’t paint that.”

“What’s her pretty face worth then?” Paula sounds pleased somehow, as if she’s won an argument. She knots a blanket around a rattle of spoons and bowls.

“I hope none of my boys would let any man treat their sister badly.” Tomassia says.

“We complain about the mess and the smell and the work of a man,” Paula tucks in a scarf, “but this is what you need them for. If her father was alive, do you think he’d let men treat her that way?”

“My father would’ve killed him.” Nanna snaps, “He was a pig, but he protected us.”

“Mine too.” Paula snarls, “He’d have kicked Iacomo’s arse til he learned to be a better man too. What good have their lawyer’s papers and the right to work done her? He’d’ve done better by her to marry her off, make sure it was done before he died.”

Tommasia folds a side of bacon into a clean cloth. “My brothers would’ve paid the painter a visit and that would have been the last trouble she had out of him. They’re fierce tempered, hell to be around, but no boys bothered me.”

Paula makes a sound, a growl. “I sometimes wish I was a man. So I could do something about men like that, the jackals you know, fight them, scare them, make them sorry.”

Nanna laughs. “I’ve never met a man who does anything but talk big and look the other way have you?”

“No, I suppose not.”

“Well if women were men there’d be nothing wrong in the world would there?” Tommasia says, and stops and whimpers. “That poor girl.”

I go with Lucia, to get water to put on the fire. We hear the women talking as we walk away until their voices don’t carry further, but we know how the talk will go, whose fault it is, how there is nothing to be done, what a shame. Little dogs barking at the end of their ropes.

Lucia and I haul the buckets up the bank and put them down. She looks at me. Her voice is different, slow.

“When she was tiny, a baby really, and I had to go to visit my father, he was sick. I left her with my sister-in-law. Veronica held on to me hard, her little nails left marks on my arms. She didn’t cry, she just hung on, a tight, determined frown. It should have made me laugh, such a wee thing, thinking if she tried she could make things the way she wanted. But it broke my heart a bit. I peeled her off me and I put my arms around her, and I told her be good, be brave, and I’ll be back soon. I knew she’d be safe, or I couldn’t have stood to leave her.” She is quiet, as if she’s run out of words. “I know there is nothing I can do to help her, but it hurts like a touch on sun burnt skin.”

With that, the idea comes to me clear and fast like the water filling our buckets.

“You asked me what I will do when we get to the city?” I say. She hadn’t, of course, but like all talkers, she thinks of herself as the sort who takes an interest in people. “I make soap and lotions to sell. I have an idea how we can make a soap, a sort of soap, an ointment, that will help Veronica. But I will need your help in exchange. You said your husband left a deed. He had good lawyers, you said.”

“The money is gone, I told you. We have only enough to set ourselves up.”

“I don’t need money. I need what your daughter had, the papers that allowed her to trade, that let you have your own money.”

“But even if I give you the lawyer’s name you can’t instruct them. Male relatives must grant the agency. Do you have male relatives?”

Not anymore.

“You said Iacomo can copy anything he sees? Have him make a twin of your papers, putting in my name instead of Veronica’s and yours. I will make the soap and explain what to do with it. I can sign my name, Iacomo must forge my husband’s.”

“You said you are not married” So she was listening a little.

“I’m not. But to make a living I need people to believe I am a widow.”

If she’d asked questions I’d’ve had no answers, I had not planned it, I was picking up ideas like mushrooms as I found them by the road. But she didn’t ask.

“I don’t want him to do anything dishonest,” she says, as if he has not already.

“Then don’t.” I say, “go on to Bologna with your son, wait to hear from your daughter, she will write and tell you how she is I’m sure, let you know if she needs anything.”

“How will soap keep her safe?”

“If you agree, I will make it and then I will tell you.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“Not as dangerous as doing nothing.”

“Is it poison? It won’t kill anyone?” A fierce question, she wants me to say it will.

(c) Jane Acton, 2025

Jane is one of our 2024 New Voices winners. When the award reopens in 2026, we’ll once again be looking for writers with stories they’re ready to shape and strengthen. Selected authors receive a full year of mentorship and one-to-one editorial guidance in order to take their idea into a finished manuscript. If you’d like to find out more about the New Voices award, click here.

*****

Next, this poem turns our attention to the quiet revolutions of the everyday. It takes the monotony of daily life: the washing machine turning, the routines we fall into, the sense of being worn down to something threadbare, and confronts an uncomfortable truth: repetition changes us too. Even the smallest cycles, the ones we barely think about, can shape our emotional landscape.

Mediocracy (On A Munday) 

A mundane morning for prosaic preoccupations
A hollow rut
A washing machine
Which churns around a rickety axis.
Spin cycle.

Each day
A bootless bleach
Of wooly, amorphous
Obscurity,
Faded, gray, thread-bare.

We sit waiting…
Shallow eyes
Staring with primal intensity
At an industrial wheel of fortune.

Grated, twisted, wrung
Parched dry.
Pegged upon an
Interminable bread-line

A daily rotation,
Bound for dirt.

(c) Gila Mielke, 2025

*****

Our final piece, Winter Lights, with its shimmering sky and shifting light, feels alive with movement. The colours ripple across the sky, casting the mountains and trees in a soft, otherworldly glow. There’s motion even in the quiet: the snow settling, the light drifting and the trees swaying. It’s a reminder that change doesn’t need to be loud to be profound. It’s the kind of painting that makes you want to reflect.

*****

As I look back over the stories, poems, extracts and memories this month’s incredible contributors have shared and the common themes of defiance, identity, fear, wonder, loss and self-discovery, I’ve been thinking about how change really works.

We’re often told to seize the day, to transform our lives overnight and to make bold leaps. And while those big, cinematic revolutions are inspiring, most of us live inside much smaller ones. Tiny shifts in perspective, quiet acts of courage and choosing to keep going, even when we’re tired, still counts. Picking ourselves back up after a setback and allowing something new to take root.

That, I think, is why I love adventure stories so much. Yes, they take us somewhere extraordinary: to exciting places, unfamiliar cultures, impossible challenges, but they also open up new horizons within us. They ask us to question, to learn, to imagine differently. Whether gently or boldly, they invite us into our own personal revolutions.

And maybe that’s the heart of it: change doesn’t always look like a mountain moved. Sometimes it looks like just a single step taken: no matter how small, it’s brave nonetheless.

*****

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*****

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