February 2015 ~ Writing at the Centre

Tuesday 24 February 2015

First Dog on the Moon and the Fair Australia Prize

First Dog on the Moon and the Fair Australia Prize

We're very pleased to announce that First Dog on the Moon will be a judge of the graphics and cartoons section of the Fair Australia Prize.

The Fair Australia Prize is actually four prizes of $5000 each: graphics and cartoons, poetry, essays and fiction. Supported by the National Union of Workers the prize engages with issues of working conditions, fairness and equality and changing Australia. Entries close 1 April.

https://overland.org.au/2015/01/the-overland-nuw-fair-australia-prize/

Writers at Writers' Festivals and their Books: Prose Class 20th February, 2015

Friday, 20th February is Prose with Helen Hagemann
Fremantle Arts Centre: Helen’s start will be directly after lunch in Room 3, 1.00pm-3.00pm
Class to read an excerpt from Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. Writing Exercises and discussion will revolve around writers at writers' festivals. In particular we will look at Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and her sudden switch of POV mid-paragraph. Do we make or like that leap as readers and do we follow suit as writers?
OOTA $20.00: Non-OOTA $25

Dame Hilary Mary Mantel, DBE FRSL (born Thompson on 6 July 1952), is an English writer whose work ranges in subject from personal memoir and short story to historical fiction and essay. She has twice been awarded the Booker Prize. She won her first Booker Prize for the 2009 novel Wolf Hall, a fictional account of Thomas Cromwell's rise to power in the court of Henry VIII. She won her second Booker Prize for the 2012 novel Bring Up the Bodies, the second installment of the Thomas Cromwell trilogy. Mantel was the first woman to receive the award twice, following in the footsteps of J. M. Coetzee, Peter Carey and J. G. Farrell (who posthumously won the Lost Man Booker Prize). The third installment to the Thomas Cromwell trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, is set to be published in 2015.

Wolf Hall
Tudor England. Henry VIII is on the throne, but has no heir. Cardinal Wolsey is charged with securing his divorce. Into this atmosphere of distrust comes Thomas Cromwell - a man as ruthlessly ambitious in his wider politics as he is for himself. His reforming agenda is carried out in the grip of a self-interested parliament and a king who fluctuates between romantic passions and murderous rages.

Currently, Hilary Mantel is a guest author at this year's Perth Writers Festival.

References: Goodreads & Wikipedia.

Our Newsletter

Starting from March 2015, Writing at the Centre plans to keep our Prose writers informed of upcoming classes, opportunities and events that would be of interest. This is a separate newsletter to the Out of the Asylum Network Tuesday and hopefully you will enjoy this little effort that we'll put together from time to time. The newsletter will be available on this site for download (Just click 'newsletter' tab). Your choice is to view it in your browser or to download and print. You can receive it via email or as a class handout. Also this newsletter hopes to be as brief as possible.

We aim to advertise future classes, although not the poetry class by Shane McCauley as he is quite popular by word of mouth, from years of expertise and experience, and working in the writing community. If there is any local or national poetry news we will post here as a separate blog entry.

If you are interested in attending our classes, send us an email to writingatthecentre@gmail.com

Many thanks,
Helen Hagemann

News for writers in the Fremantle Community, Perth & Surrounds

Writing at the Centre, an independent writing group in affiliation with Out of the Asylum Writers Group, offers alternate prose and poetry classes each Friday afternoon @ 1pm in Room 3 of the Fremantle Arts Centre. We originally emerged from a grass-roots writing class as early as in the days when Elizabeth Jolley taught at the lovely old heritage building, Fremantle Arts Centre. Susan Hayes, the State Literature Officer, held office in the building and organised and supported creative writing classes. From there it grew into a non-profit organisation known as OOTA (Out of the Asylum Inc.) and classes now flourish with the attendance of OOTA writers, encouraged by tutors Shane McCauley and Helen Hagemann. Our aims are to nurture writers, to encourage the craft of writing and to promote our writing-base for those writers interested in furthering their skills, their publications and career.

The Centre provides a a fortnightly course in poetry from January to December in the capable hands of Shane McCauley. Helen Hagemann conducts the prose class and offers a variety of studies, readings, writing exercises, and critiquing sessions that also run fortnightly from February to December.


The grounds at the Fremantle Arts Centre

In the coming months, we will be posting writing news, events, local workshops, and advertising our own independent class news. This may develop into a newsletter page, as well as an A5 printed sheet for prospective new members who attend the class for the first time. It is envisaged that we will also have a publication page where you can read our writers' work. This will be mainly prose, however we will not exclude poetry. We hope to promote our existing class members as well as reach as many beginners of writing as possible.

Helen Hagemann's First Class for 2015 @ the FAC

Flash Fiction: Introducing Angela Meyer, Lydia Davis & Girija Tropp

Helen Hagemann's first class for 2015 at the FAC on Friday 6th February @ 1pm looks at Flash Fiction. This workshop introduces three exponents of the form, Angela Meyer, Lydia Davis and Girija Tropp.

“For Sale: Baby shoes, Never worn” is a short-short story by Ernest Hemingway, and in its brilliance conveys more than it says in 6 words.

Nowadays we call this micro- or flash fiction. However, the general rule for flash fiction is a word count of a maximum of 250 to 500 words; although many might argue with this. Seizure publishes prose between 50 and 500 words. Cuttlefish (WA’s new journal from Roland Leach) requires up to 250 words. Spineless Wonders assembles prose poetry and micro-fiction together routinely – often without signalling a difference between the forms.

-o-

Girija Tropp is a winner of the Boston Review Prize and the Josephine Ulrick Literature Award 2006. She has been published in AGNI, Best Australian Stories 2005 and 2006, Fiction International, Mississippi Review, Denver Quarterly, and other magazines. Her Twitter handle is @girijawrites. (updated 11/2013)

Angela Meyer, is a writer, editor, professional reader, Melburnian, whisky-drinker, Bowie nut, movie-lover, vintage fan, absurdist, aesthete, and blogs at Literary Minded. She is the author of a book of flash fiction, Captives (Inkerman & Blunt), and the editor of an anthology of spooky Australian stories, The Great Unknown (Spineless Wonders).

Lydia Davis, award-winning fiction writer and translator, was born in Northampton (Massachusetts) in 1947. She is famous in literary circles for her extremely brief and brilliantly inventive short stories. In 2013, she was the winner of the Man Booker International prize. Her recent collection, “Varieties of Disturbance” (May 2007), was featured on the front cover of the “Los Angeles Times Book Review”. Her “Samuel Johnson Is Indignant” (2001) was praised by “Elle” magazine for its “Highly intelligent, wildly entertaining stories, bound by visionary, philosophical, comic prose—part Gertrude Stein, part Simone Weil, and pure Lydia Davis.”