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.

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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

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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.

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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.”

             

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Bringing out the Writer in You - Classes at the Fremantle Arts Centre 2015

Creative Writing Classes for the Writer in You

Shane McCauley and Helen Hagemann offer friendly, insightful and erudite classes at the Fremantle Arts Centre, every Friday from 1pm.  Why not join us, together with members of the Out of the Asylum Writers Group, for some informative and fun writing classes. Shane conducts the poetry class on alternate Fridays to the Prose class with Helen Hagemann.
Fremantle Arts Centre, Room 3, upstairs in the main building. Shane's first class is this Friday, 16th January @ 1pm. Helen starts the Prose class on Friday, 6th February. All welcome!

Shane McCauley has wide experience in the teaching field, having taught previously at Edith Cowan University, at TAFE Midland, was joint editor of OOTA’s publication The Weighing of the Heart, and has taught poetry at the FAC for 7 years. He is an award-winning published poet with several collections, including The Chinese Feast, Deep Sea Diver, The Butterfly Man, Shadow Behind the Heart, Glassmaker & The Drunken Elk (both Sunline Press). His latest chapbook from Studio is called  Ghost Catcher, and there's a new collection waiting in the wings. Shane offers a wealth of knowledge, an expert on formalism and creates a learned, stimulating poetry class for beginners, emerging writers, as well as published poets.

Helen Hagemann commences the Prose Class at the Fremantle Arts Centre on Friday, 6th February. This year’s course will look at all genres of fiction: novel, novella, short stories, flash fiction, creative non-fiction, etc.  Chosen randomly each fortnight, writers will learn the techniques and differences of all fiction genres. Helen brings to the course her academic knowledge and practice of all types of creative writing, esp. the classics and contemporary works.
Helen is a prize-winning poet with poetry and prose published in major Australian literary journals. In 2004, she won an ASA poetry mentorship studying with NSW poet, Jean Kent. In 2008, she won a Varuna Longlines/ Poetry workshop in Katoomba, NSW. In association with the Australian Poetry Centre's New Poets Program her collection, Evangelyne & Other Poems, was published in 2009. Her recent collection of Arc & Shadow was published by Sunline Press, 2013. Helen teaches with the benefits of an MA in Creative Writing, writing short stories, prose poetry, and bringing a second novel to completion. Her classes are informative, fun and often filled with surprises.

Duration of course: February - December —no booking required.
These are casual (alternate poetry/prose) fortnightly classes. Fridays, 1pm. Cost $20 OOTA member, $25 Non-OOTA member.

So why not come along, try us out, we cater to beginners with no pressure. You can learn to write prose, (mainly the short story & techniques) and poetry with established West Australian poets? Find us also on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/WritingattheCentre

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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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