Prose Class with Helen Hagemann, Friday 14th November

Friday, 14^th November is Prose with

Helen Hagemann @ the Fremantle Arts Centre:  Helen’s start will be directly after lunch in Room 3

1.00pm-3.00pm

This workshop is called “Secrets & Dramatic Irony”.  Writing exercises and our readings will include part of Anton Chekhov’s story The Lady with the Dog (dramatic irony). This is the last teaching class for the year as we will have readings of our Spilt Ink Winners, plus all who would like to participate in our final class for the year on

28^th November.

 

 

"The Lady with the Dog" (Russian: Дама с собачкой, Dama s sobachkoy)^[1] is a short story by Anton Chekhov first published in 1899. It tells the story of an adulterous affair between a Russian banker and a young lady he meets while vacationing in Yalta. The story comprises four parts: part I describes the initial meeting in Yalta, part II the consummation of the affair and the remaining time in Yalta, part III Gurov's return to Moscow and his visit to Anna's town, and part IV Anna's visits to Moscow. Vladimir Nabokov declared that it was one of the greatest short stories ever written.^[2]

 

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in 1860, the third of six children to a family of a grocer, in Taganrog, Russia, a southern seaport and resort on the Azov Sea. His father, a 3rd-rank Member of the Merchant's Guild, was a religious fanatic and a tyrant who used his children as slaves. Young Chekhov was a part-time assistant in his father's business and also a singer in a church choir. At age 15, he was abandoned by his bankrupt father and lived alone for 3 years while finishing the Classical Gymnazium in Taganrog. Chekhov obtained a scholarship at the Moscow University Medical School in 1879, from which he graduated in 1884 as a Medical Doctor. He practiced general medicine for about ten years.

While a student, Chekhov published numerous short stories and humorous sketches under a pseudonym. He reserved his real name for serious medical publications, saying "medicine is my wife; literature - a mistress." While a doctor, he kept writing and had success with his first books, and his first play "Ivanov." He gradually decreased his medical practice in favour of writing. Chekhov created his own style based on objectivity, brevity, originality, and compassion. It was different from the mainstream Russian literature's scrupulous analytical depiction of "heroes." Chekhov used a delicate fabric of hints, subtle nuances in dialogs, and precise details. He described his original style as an "objective manner of writing." He avoided stereotyping and instructive political messages in favour of cool comic irony. Praised by writers Leo Tolstoy and Nikolai Leskov, he was awarded the Pushkin Prize from the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1888.

 

Reference:  Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lady_with_the_Dog

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Prose Class with Helen Hagemann at the Fremantle Arts Centre

Friday, 31st October is Prose with

Helen Hagemann @ the Fremantle Arts Centre:  Helen’s start will be directly after lunch in Room 3

1.00pm-3.00pm

Class to read excerpts from The Shipping News by Annie Proulx. Writing Exercises and the workshop will look at “sub-texts” in the novel and short story that create intrigue.

OOTA $20.00:  Non-OOTA $25

 The Shipping News

The story centers on Quoyle, a newspaper pressroom worker from upstate New York whose father had immigrated from Newfoundland. Shortly after his parents' joint suicide, Quoyle's unfaithful and abusive wife Petal leaves town and attempts to sell their daughters Bunny and Sunshine to sex traffickers. Soon thereafter, Petal and her lover are killed in a car accident; the young girls are located by police and returned to Quoyle. Despite the safe return of his daughters, Quoyle's life is collapsing. His paternal aunt, Agnis Hamm, convinces him to make a new beginning by returning to their ancestral home in Newfoundland.
In Newfoundland, they move into Agnis's childhood home, an empty house on Quoyle's Point. Quoyle finds work as a reporter for the Gammy Bird, the local newspaper in Killick-Claw, a small town. The Gammy Bird's editor asks him to cover traffic accidents (reminding him of Petal's fate) and also the shipping news, documenting the arrivals and departures of ships from the local port. This develops as Quoyle's signature column.

     Over time, Quoyle learns deep and disturbing secrets about his ancestors that emerge in strange ways. As Quoyle builds his new life in Newfoundland, he is transformed. He creates a rewarding job, makes friends, and begins a relationship with a local woman, Wavey Prowse.

Edna Annie Proulx (born August 22, 1935) is an American journalist and author. She has written most frequently as Annie Proulx but has also used the names E. Annie Proulx and E.A. Proulx. Her second novel, The Shipping News (1993), won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and was adapted as a 2001 film of the same name. Her short story "Brokeback Mountain" was adapted as an Academy Award, BAFTA and Golden Globe Award-winning major motion picture released in 2005. She won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her first novel, Postcards.

Reference:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Proulx

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Creative Writing in Fremantle with Helen Hagemann

Friday, 17th October is Prose with

Helen Hagemann @ the Fremantle Arts Centre:  Helen’s start will be directly after lunch in Room 3

1.00pm-3.00pm

Class to read excerpts from Poppy by Drusilla Modjeska. Writing Exercises and discussion will include “fictionalised biography” and modern-day journal writing.

Drusilla Modjeska was born in London in 1946 and was raised in Hampshire. She spent several years in Papua New Guinea (where she was briefly a student at the University of Papua New Guinea) before arriving in Australia in 1971. She studied for an undergraduate degree at the Australian National University before completing a PhD in history at the University of New South Wales which was published as Exiles at Home: Australian Women Writers 1925-1945 (1981).

    Modjeska's writing often explores the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. The best known of her work are Poppy (1990), a fictionalised biography of her mother, and Stravinsky's Lunch (2001), a feminist reappraisal of the lives and work of Australian painters Stella Bowen and Grace Cossington Smith. She has also edited several volumes of stories, poems and essays, including the work of Lesbia Harford and a 'Focus on Papua New Guinea' issue for the literary magazine Meanjin. Her awards for Poppy include: Fellowship of Australian Writers; Herb Thomas Literary Award, 1990. National Book Council Banjo Award for Non-Fiction, 1991, NSW Premier's Douglas Stewart Award for Non-Fiction, 1991, and was also shortlisted in London for the Fawcett Awards and the PEN International Award.

   Poppy is part truth, part fictionalised biography. The story Modjeska tells is of her mother’s unhappy childhood and cold mother, her marriage to a kind but conventional man, their comfortable middle class life in the south of England, and her three children. She later separated from her husband, took a university degree, worked as a probation officer and formed a new relationship, having a love affair with Marcus. Modjeska sets out to collect and sort the evidence of her mother's life. But when the facts refuse to give up their secrets, she follows the threads of history and memory into imagination. There she teases out the story of Poppy, who married at twenty and sang to her children, until suddenly one day in 1959, she was taken away to a sanatorium; a breakdown that lasted for two years.

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Prose Class with Helen Hagemann, Friday 19th September

Friday, 19^th September is Prose with

Helen Hagemann @ the Fremantle Arts Centre:  Our start will be in the Café at 12.45pm, then Room 3 to 2.45pm

Class to read an excerpt from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. Writing Exercises and discussion will look at the “Passage of Time” in the novel, and “shifts in time” in the short story. 

TIME PASSES -  3.    
"But what after all is night? A short space especially when darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave. Night, however, succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers. They lengthen; they darken. Some of them hold aloft clear planets, plates of brightness. The autumn trees, ravaged as they are, take on the flash of tattered flags kindling in the gloom of cool cathedral caves where gold letters on marble pages describe death in battle and how bones bleach and burn far away in Indian sands. The autumn trees gleam in the yellow moonlight, in the light of harvest moons, the light which mellows the energy of labour, and smooths the stubble, and brings the wave lapping blue to the shore."

To the Lighthouse is a 1927 novel by Virginia Woolf. A landmark of high modernism, the novel centres on the Ramsays and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920. Following and extending the tradition of modernist novelists like Marcel Proust and James Joyce, the plot of To the Lighthouse is secondary to its philosophical introspection. The novel includes little dialogue and almost no action; most of it is written as thoughts and observations. The novel recalls childhood emotions and highlights adult relationships. Among the book's many tropes and themes are those of loss, subjectivity, and the problem of perception. In 1998, the Modern Library named To the Lighthouse No. 15 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. In 2005, the novel was chosen by TIME magazine as one of the one hundred best English-language novels from 1923 to present. According to thegreatestbooks.org, a site which uses algorithms to numerically determine the best-received books, To the Lighthouse is the 21st most critically acclaimed work of fiction ever made.  

Adeline Virginia Woolf (25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English writer, and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century.
During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929), with its famous dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." 

Resources: Wikipedia :  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_the_Lighthouse

                                             http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Woolf

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Memoir/Autobiography with Helen Hagemann at FAC

 Friday, 5^th September is Prose with

Helen Hagemann.  10.00am til noon @ the Fremantle Arts Centre Café.  Cost $20

Class to read excerpts from 12 Edmonstone Street by David Malouf. Writing Exercises and discussion will centre on writing “memoir/autobiography” in particular the importance of place; houses also as a suitable subject for the short story writer.  

12 Edmondstone Street combines autobiography with a subtle, almost painterly sense of the ways in which the objects which we surround ourselves, and the places in which we live, build up our private maps of reality and shape our personal mythologies.  Malouf begins by describing with love, evocative detail, the house in Brisbane where he was born and grew up, moving from room to room, always relating the smallest items in it to the life he remembers and his widening perception of the world at large. He moves on to describe life in the Tuscan village where he lived, and the arrival of an Australian Television crew; reflecting on his first visit to India, he touches on the problems of interpreting and evaluating unfamiliar places; back in Australia, he recalls a traumatic wartime journey with his father from Brisbane to Sydney. Funny, humane and beautifully written, this is a unique and extraordinary essay in autobiography.
This remarkable book combines autobiography with a subtle, almost painterly sense of the ways in which the objects which we surround ourselves, and the places in which we live, build up our private maps of reality and shape our personal mythologies. David Malouf begins by describing in love, evocative detail, the house in Brisbane where he was born and grew up, moving from room to room, always relating the smallest items in it to the life he remembers and his widening perception of the world at large. He moves on to describe life in the Tuscan village where he lived, and the arrival of an Australian Television crew; reflecting on his first visit to India, is an internationally acclaimed author. His books include the novels The

Great World (winner of the Commonwealth Writers' prize and the Prix Femina Etranger), Remembering Babylon (shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award), An Imaginary Life, Conversations at Curlow Creek, and his latest, Ransom (winner of the Criticos Prize), the short story collections Dream Stuff ('These stories are pearls' Spectator), and Every Move You Make ('Rare and luminous talent' Guardian), and his autobiographical classic 12 Edmondstone Street. His Collected Stories won the 2008 Australia-Asia Literary Award. In 2008 Malouf was the Scottish Arts' Council Muriel Spark International Fellow. Born in 1934 in Brisbane, he now lives in Sydney. Malouf, internationally recognised as one of Australia’s finest writers, has also written five collections of poetry and three opera libretti.
Books
Here is a list of his works: Johnno, An Imaginary Life, Fly Away Peter, Child’s Play, Harland’s Half Acre, Antipodes, The Great World, Remembering Babylon, The Conversations at Curlow Creek, Dream Stuff. Poetry: ‘Interiors’ (in Four Poets), Bicycle and Other Poems, Neighbours in a Thicket, Poems 1976–7, The Year of the Foxes and Other Poems, First Things Last, Wild Lemons, Selected Poems, Typewriter Music, Plays Blood Relations, Libretti  Baa Baa Black Sheep, Jane Eyre, For my Sister, Jill.

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Update on Writing at the Centre's Venue

Currently we are conducting classes in the cafe of the Fremantle Arts Centre. This is in order to keep the class fees to a minimum as we realise writers/poets are not always that flushed with funds. Our new venue is also a temporary measure to combat the ever-increasing rent rises imposed by the FAC.  Shane McCauley and Helen Hagemann as tutors could not see their way clear to keep absorbing the high rent increases. The rent being one third of the takings. Therefore the Poetry and Prose classes have moved to the cafe, a more intimate space in the small cafe room. We hope that this will suffice until a more suitable venue can be found. We are looking at other venues, so Writing at the Centre may become Writing at Victoria Hall, or Writing at the Grove.
Stay tuned!

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Novel Writing with Helen Hagemann at the Fremantle Arts Centre

  Prose Class with Helen Hagemann on Friday, 22nd August at 10.00am. Class to read excerpts from Nick Earls’ Zigzag Street.  Writing Exercises and discussion will revolve around creating the light and poignant elements in your novel, narrative or short story. 

Venue: Fremantle Arts Centre

Cost: $25 OOTA $30 Non-OOTA

Nick Earls (born 8 October 1963 in Newtownards, Northern Ireland) is an award-winning novelist from Brisbane, Australia. He writes humorous popular fiction about everyday life, and is often compared to Nick Hornby. (These days the genre is called “Lad Lit” as opposed to “Chick Lit.”) The majority of Earls' novels are set in his hometown of Brisbane, a fact which led to his high local profile, and his fronting of a major Brisbane tourism campaign. Zigzag Street, his second novel, won the Betty Trask Award in the UK 1998 (sharing with Kiran Desai's Hullaballoo in the Guava Orchard) and Perfect Skin was the only novel nominated for an Australian Comedy Award in 2003. 48 Shades of Brown was awarded Book of the Year (older readers) by the Children's Book Council of Australia in 2000, and in the US it was a Kirkus Reviews selection in its books of the year for 2004. 48 Shades of Brown and Perfect Skin have been adapted into feature films, with Solo un Padre, the film adapted from the Italian edition of Perfect Skin, a top-ten box office hit in Italy in 2008. 48 Shades of Brown, Zigzag Street and Perfect Skin have all been successfully adapted for theatre, and the Zigzag Street play toured nationally in 2005. The True Story Of Butterfish was also performed as a play. He recently published a collection of stories Welcome To Normal.

    Zigzag Street is a classic tale of a 28 year-old Richard Derrington living in inner-city suburban Red Hill, Brisbane. There are some serious laugh-out-loud moments and a male take on the whole dating/relationship scene. Recently dumped by his long term girlfriend Anna, he lurches from one debacle to another as he struggles to come to terms with his bachelor life. In between 'renovating' the home that belonged to his recently deceased grandmother, Rick falls for his boss Hilary, plays bad tennis with his best mate Jeff, and tries his best to care for Greg, his late grandmother's stubborn ginger cat. He eventually meets up with Rachel Vilikovski which gets off to a bad start with his uncontrollable, bowel gas.

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Creative Writing in Fremantle with Helen Hagemann

Helen Hagemann’s Prose class resumes at the Fremantle Arts Centre on Friday 8^th August.  The class will read 2 excerpts, one from Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace and the other from Amanda Curtin’s novel Elemental. Writing exercises and discussion will revolve around the placement of history (whether true or made-up) in fiction. For the short story writer the aim will be to include some historical, social or contemporary event/news within the narrative.  Note: Class fee increase, $25 OOTA  -  $30 NON-OOTA. Venue: Room 2 Upstairs, Fremantle Arts Centre @ 10.00am

New York Times Review of Alias Grace

There's nothing like the spectacle of female villainy brought to justice to revive the ancient, tired, apparently endless debate over whether women are by nature saintly or demonic. Unleashed by ghastly visions of the angel of the house clutching a knife or pistol, a swarm of Furies rises shrieking from our collective unconscious, along with a flock of martyrs. Meanwhile, our vengeful passions or pious sympathies are never so aroused as when the depraved criminal or unjustly slandered innocent happens to be touchingly young and attractive.
One such alleged miscreant -- a double murderess, no less -- is at the heart of Margaret Atwood's ambitious new novel, ''Alias Grace.'' Its protagonist is a historical figure, the notorious Grace Marks, a handsome but hapless Irish immigrant who worked as a scullery maid in Toronto in the 1840's. At the age of 16, she was convicted of abetting the brutal murder of her employer, Thomas Kinnear, and his pregnant housekeeper and paramour, Nancy Montgomery. The question of Grace's innocence or guilt has always been in some doubt -- a matter that Ms. Atwood deftly re-examines through the lens of what we have since learned about the traumatized psyche.
''Alias Grace'' has the physical heft and weighty authority of a 19th-century novel. In its scope, its moral seriousness, its paradoxically ponderous and engrossing narrative, the book evokes the high Victorian mode, spiced with the spooky plot twists and playfully devious teases of the equally high Gothic -- the literary styles of the period in which the book is set.
Margaret Atwood has always had much in common with those writers of the last century who were engaged less by the subtle minutiae of human interaction than by the chance to use fiction as a means of exploring and dramatizing ideas. So, after reading her novels, we may find it harder to recall her characters than to remember the larger issues their destinies reflect: the tidy convergence of misogyny and totalitarian social control in ''The Handmaid's Tale,'' the machinations of female power and malice in ''Cat's Eye'' and ''The Robber Bride.'' Part of what's interesting about ''Alias Grace'' is that among the themes it addresses (guilt and innocence; conscience and consciousness; Victorian notions of criminality, insanity, gender and class) is the irreducible and unique mystery of the individual personality.
Who better to tackle this puzzle than Simon Jordan, a well-meaning young doctor from Massachusetts employed by a committee of pious do-gooders petitioning the Canadian Government to pardon the unfortunate and (after 15 years in prisons and asylums) possibly rehabilitated Grace? Despite the confession extracted from her at the time of her arrest, she claims to have no memory of her part in the murders committed by the surly hired hand, James McDermott, her co-worker and purported lover. Was she an active participant or a horrified witness? Fired by scientific curiosity, armed with the latest theories about mental illness, Dr. Jordan sets out to help Grace retrieve the memories that shock and damage have erased.
The novel is told in sections that alternate Grace's point of view with a third-person narration closely focused on Simon Jordan. For the most part, the servant girl's hair-raising story unfolds through long interviews, during which the doctor urges her to reflect upon her life. Grace's gloriously commonsensical, observant, often lyrical perspective guides us through her impoverished childhood, her rough trans-Atlantic passage and her tranquil interlude in service among the Toronto bourgeoisie -- all the way to the fateful sojourn at the country house in which Thomas Kinnear lives in sin with Nancy Montgomery.
Much of this is beautifully written and convincingly imagined. Ms. Atwood manages the considerable achievement of finding a voice for Grace -- and a tone for her narrative -- that doesn't seem mannered, anachronistic or archaic. With startling authenticity, she renders, for example, the delirious joy that a fresh red radish or a newly plucked chicken offers a woman who has survived on prison fare. Arguably, the book's great strength lies in its elegant and evocative descriptions of the domestic activities that once commanded the full attention of women from the less privileged classes:
''When we had a wash hanging out and the first drops began to fall, we would rush out with the baskets and gather all in as quickly as we could, and then haul it up the stairs and hang it out anew in the drying room, as it could not be allowed to sit in the baskets for long because of mildew. . . . The shirts and the nightgowns flapping in the breeze on a sunny day were like large white birds, or angels rejoicing, although without any heads. But when we hung the same things up inside, in the gray twilight of the drying room, they looked different, like pale ghosts of themselves hovering and shimmering there in the gloom.''
Reference:  http://www.nytimes.com/1996/12/29/books/death-and-the-maid.html
Review of Elemental
In her final years, Meggie Tulloch writes her life story as a gift to her granddaughter. From her childhood in rural Scotland at the start of the twentieth century to her youth in fisheries gutting herring and her emigration to a young Fremantle, Meggie fills exercise books and letters with stories for her Laura-lambsie.
In this act of life-writing, Amanda Curtin’s Elemental looks at memory and family history as narrative. ‘There’s no-one can tell a story true,’ Meggie Tulloch writes, worrying over what to include and what to omit. At times, when experiences are too hard to divulge, she drops into third person, using story as proxy. Much like Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Elemental draws Meggie’s act of writing as cathartic: an exorcism of demons from family history, paired with an understanding that truth can never be told in its entirety.
Although the novel is divided into parts as per the four elements, water is the strong point that holds Elemental together. In Meggie’s childhood Scotland, water is held in the wind with grit, salt bites at wounds, and stings are wrapped in bandages damp with vinegar. ‘The sea is a witch,’ Meggie’s Granda warns, ‘a witch an’ a mother.’ Throughout the book this depiction of the ocean as both antagonist and carer rings true. The sea provides refuge for Meggie, giving her work and, later, a new life in Australia, but it is also a space in which the darker parts of the Tullochs’ history takes place.
Reference:  http://www.readings.com.au/review/elemental-by-amanda-curtin

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WRITING AT THE CENTRE NEWS

Shane McCauley and Helen Hagemann wish to advise members that due to regular interim increases of rent at the Fremantle Arts Centre, we have no alternative but to increase class fees to $25 OOTA and $30 Non-OOTA.  This new fee commences on Friday, 8^th August. We also add that we are reluctant to do this, and do begrudge the fact that we often sit in a cold room in winter and stuffy hot premises in summer. However, the FAC is our home, our base, and both Shane and Helen hope you understand that the increase is unavoidable.

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This Week We're at the Swanbourne Bookcaffe - Prose with Helen Hagemann (25th July, 2014)

 

NOTICE: The Fremantle Arts Centre is closed for renovations until 2nd August.

PROSE WITH HELEN HAGEMANN

Friday, 25th July, is Prose with Helen Hagemann.  10.00am til noon @ the Swanbourne Bookcaffe.

The class will include writing exercises and critiquing (esp. your short stories for the Spilt Ink!). Please bring enough copies to hand out to your fellow writers. (If writers need to leave early we can choose which order you prefer).There is no charge for this class, but writers will need to order food and coffee to satisfy the owners for providing the space.

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Helen Hagemann Returns with the 2014 Series: Novel Writing/Chapters at the FAC

HELEN HAGEMANN RETURNS THIS WEEK IN THE PROSE SERIES: NOVEL WRITING / Chapters or Short Stories..  FRIDAY, 11^TH JULY AT THE FREMANTLE ARTS CENTRE, 10.00AM – MIDDAY.

The workshop will look at writing LITANY in PROSE.

Class to read examples of litany in Yann Martel’s Man Booker Prize winner “Life of Pi.”


Venue: Fremantle Arts Centre, 1 Finnerty St. Fremantle
Room: 2 - Upstairs in the north wing
Date: Friday, 11th July, 2014
Time: 10.00am til noon
Cost: $20 (OOTA members), $25 (non-OOTA members)

Life of Pi is a Canadian fantasy adventure novel by Yann Martel published in 2001. The protagonist, Piscine Molitor "Pi" Patel, an Indian boy from Pondicherry, explores issues of spirituality and practicality from an early age. He survives 227 days after a shipwreck while stranded on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.
The novel, which has sold more than ten million copies worldwide,was rejected by at least five London publishing houses before being accepted by Knopf Canada, which published it in September 2001. The UK edition won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction the following year. It was also chosen for CBC Radio's Canada Reads 2003, where it was championed by author Nancy Lee. The French translation, L'Histoire de Pi, was chosen in the French CBC version of the contest Le combat des livres, where it was championed by Louise Forestier^. The novel won the 2003 Boeke Prize, a South African novel award. In 2004, it won the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature in Best Adult Fiction for years 2001–2003. In 2012 it was adapted into a theatrical feature film directed by Ang Lee with a screenplay by David Magee.

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