Once upon a time…

Anna Sayburn celebrates achieving a childhood ambition.

Anna checks out the spooky stories in One Eye Grey

Reading and writing stories was a huge part of my childhood. Stories influenced my earliest career choices (pirate, detective, cabin boy) until I cottoned on to the idea that writing adventure stories was more feasible than taking part in them.

Aged 10, I started writing The Life and Times of Captain O’Neil, a maritime adventure of uncertain period, taking in tumultous storms, spear-waving natives, and ferocious eskimos. I decided I would earn my living from selling stories to magazines.

Captain O’Neil got home safely, but unsurprisingly never made it into print. Somewhere along the way I decided that fact was not just stranger than fiction, but usually paid better. So I became a journalist. Maybe piracy and detection were more my line after all.

Then came Dulwich OnView, and I started writing purely for fun again. Earlier this year I interviewed Chris Roberts, editor of One Eye Grey, a ‘penny dreadful’ magazine of spooky stories for 21st century London. Finally galvinised into action, I wrote down a story that had been playing around my mind about Greenwich, where I lived before moving to Dulwich.

I was thrilled and delighted when Chris and his team accepted my story, The Stag, set in Henry VIII’s old hunting grounds of Greenwich Park. The story is one of many about strange goings-on in London in the latest One Eye Grey. Others in the collection that chilled my bones included Ravensbourne, by Scott Wood, which takes you on a walk through the darker histories of New Cross, and the truly terrifying Talking to them by ‘Neckinger Nell’.

So I’m now the proud owner of my first piece of published fiction in a magazine. It only took me 29 years – and it wouldn’t have happened without Dulwich OnView.

To find out more contributing, sponsoring or even buying a copy of One Eye Grey, go to FandM Publications.