2014 Creative Writing Program

Prose at the Fremantle Arts Centre
Helen Hagemann commences the Prose Class at the Fremantle Arts Centre for 2014 on Friday, 7th February. A new series will look at novel writing and the class focus will be on writing chapters/ or stand-alone chapters suitable for the short story writer. In other words, the lessons will reveal the flexibility of how a writer can be inspired to learn the techniques of chapter writing, alternate hooks to keep the reader inspired and focused and to study how a closed or open-ended story ends as a complete and satisfactory piece of work. Writers will read novel chapters from the best writers/ new writers, not only from Australia, but from all over the globe incl. Kate Grenville, Patrick White, Helen Garner, David Malouf,Virginia Woolf, Don DeLillo, Larry Brown, Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Sonya Hartnett and Donna Tartt to name a few.
   Class members will also have the opportunity to contribute their favourite novels towards the experience of this set of parameters. Critiquing sessions will also be included to help the writer achieve publishing goals.

Venue: Fremantle Arts Centre, 1 Finnerty St. Fremantle
Room: 2 - Upstairs in the north wing
Starts: Friday (fortnightly) on 7th February, 2014
Time: 10.00am til noon
Cost: $20 (OOTA members), $25 (non-OOTA members)

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Writing "LOVE" - Part 2 with Helen Hagemann @ Fremantle Arts Centre

29th November is Prose with Helen Hagemann 10am-noon.  Final class in the 2013 series world-wide short fiction, looks at “Writing Love – Part 2”. Class will read Baby Oil by Robert Drewe from The Bodysurfers. Writing exercises on “love’s  practices”.

Venue:  Room 2, Upstairs, Fremantle Arts Centre, 1Finnerty St. Fremantle

$20 OOTA :  $25 NON-OOTA 

No Booking needed.  All welcome!

Robert Drewe was born in Melbourne, but moved with his family to Perth, at the age of six. He was educated at Hale School, later working as a junior reporter for The West Australian. He moved to Melbourne in his twenties working for The Age and went on to be literary editor at The Australian before turning to fiction. His first book of stories, The Bodysurfers has become an Australian classic – regularly reprinted, widely translated and adapted for screen, stage and radio. His other prize-winning books include The Bay of Contented Men and novels Our Sunshine, The Drowner, Grace, Montebello (2102) & The Local Wildlife (2013). His most prominent work The Shark Net, a semi autobiographical account of Drewe's childhood and adolescence, is a memoir that has been produced as an ABC television series. The name, shark net is a metaphor for the modus operandi of a character in the story, the serial killer Eric Edgar Cooke, whom Drewe met in his childhood and who terrorized the streets of Perth during 1959 to 1963 where he committed 22 violent crimes, 8 of which resulted in death. Robert Drewe is currently working on a sequel to his memoir The Shark Net.

   The Bodysurfers, first published in 1983 by Pan Macmillan, is a collection of twelve short stories that focus on the beach, holidays and coastal living. Certain stories are set in Western Australia while others are on the Pacific Ocean side, especially the Central Coast of NSW. Although most have a coastal setting, Baby Oil (appearing to hint at a 60s tanning lotion) is set apart from the rest. This story explores the shift in relationships that occurred during the sixties with the advent of the pill and sexual freedom for women. In a middle-class Australia, it was no longer the realm of men to have many sexual partners. Anthea is the antitheses of the woman who believed her body was her own agency. As she states in the story ‘my body is mine to do with as I like.’

   In a review of The Bodysurfers, Van Ikin states that, ‘Drewe develops these concerns in more detail, exploring the conflicts and contradictions in the national character. One of the epigraphs about the loss of national values in a statement by Manning Clark was that this was a generation, stripped bare of all faith, stripped bare to lie comfortless on Bondi Beach. Times have changed, but the bedroom scene in Baby Oil supposes the same nudity (esp. with the smell of oil) as the characters slip around on satin sheets, ‘undulating like an ocean swell, rolling and curving towards shore.’

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Alice Munro: Nobel Prize Winner 2013 and study/workshop on her short story "The Office"

15th November is Prose with Helen Hagemann 10am-noon. Class will read the short story The Office by Alice Munro from the anthology Women & Fiction: Short Stories by and about Women. Writing exercises and discussion on Munro’s short stories that reveal a female character’s search for empowerment.

Venue:  Room 2, Upstairs, Fremantle Arts Centre, 1Finnerty St. Fremantle

$20 OOTA :  $25 NON-OOTA 

No Booking needed.  All welcome!

Alice Munro (born 10 July 1931) is a Canadian author writing in English. Munro's work has been described as having revolutionized the architecture of short stories, especially in its tendency to move forward and backward in time. Munro's fiction is most often set in her native Huron County in southwestern Ontario. Her stories explore human complexities in an uncomplicated prose style. Munro's writing has established her as "one of our greatest contemporary writers of fiction," or, as Cynthia Ozick put it, "our Chekhov."

    Munro was born Alice Ann Laidlaw in Wingham, Ontario. Her father, Robert Eric Laidlaw, was a fox and mink farmer, and her mother, Anne Clarke Laidlaw (née Chamney), was a schoolteacher. Munro began writing as a teenager, publishing her first story, "The Dimensions of a Shadow," in 1950 while studying English and journalism at the University of Western Ontario under a two-year scholarship. During this period she worked as a waitress, a tobacco picker, and a library clerk. In 1951, she left the university, where she had been majoring in English since 1949, to marry fellow student James Munro. They moved to Dundarave, West Vancouver, for James's job in a department store. In 1963, the couple moved to Victoria, where they opened Munro's Books, which still operates.

   Munro's highly acclaimed first collection of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), won the Governor General's Award, Canada's highest literary prize. That success was followed by Lives of Girls and Women (1971), a collection of interlinked stories sometimes erroneously described as a novel. In 1978, Munro's collection of interlinked stories Who Do You Think You Are? was published (titled The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose in the United States). This book earned Munro a second Governor General's Literary Award. From 1979 to 1982, she toured Australia, China and Scandinavia. In 1980, Munro held the position of writer in residence at both the University of British Columbia and the University of Queensland. Through the 1980s and 1990s, she published a short-story collection about once every four years.

   In 2013, Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for her work as "master of the modern short story". She is the recipient of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize, and the Nobel Prize in Literature for her lifetime body of work, however at the age of 82, Munro cites ill health as the reason for not attending the award ceremony in Sweden in December.                                                  Resource : Wikipedia 2013

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Prose Class with Helen Hagemann: Friday, 1st November

1st November @ the FAC is Prose with Helen Hagemann 10am-noon. Class will read the title story A Good Man is Hard to Find from Flannery O'Connor's short stories, A Good Man is Hard to Find. Writing exercises will look at suspense and grotesque characters, and how O'Connor subverts notions of religious fundamentalism.

Venue:  Room 2, Upstairs, Fremantle Arts Centre, 1Finnerty St. Fremantle

$20 OOTA :  $25 NON-OOTA 

No Booking needed.  All welcome!

Mary Flannery O'Connor (March 25, 1925 – August 3, 1964) was an American writer and essayist. An important voice in American literature, O'Connor wrote two novels and 32 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries. She was a Southern writer who often wrote in a Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque characters. O'Connor's writing also reflected her own Roman Catholic faith, and frequently examined questions of morality and ethics.

Her Complete Stories won the 1972 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and was named the "Best of the National Book Awards" by internet visitors in 2009.
Regarding her emphasis of the grotesque, O'Connor said: "anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic." Her texts usually take place in the South and revolve around morally flawed characters, while the issue of race often appears in the background. One of her trademarks is foreshadowing, giving a reader an idea of what will happen far before it happens. Most of her works feature disturbing elements, though she did not like to be characterized as cynical. "I am tired of reading reviews that call A Good Man is Hard to Find brutal and sarcastic," she writes. "The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism... when I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror."
Her two novels were Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960). She also published two books of short stories: A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (published posthumously in 1965.
She felt deeply informed by the sacramental, and by the Thomist notion that the created world is charged with God. Yet she would not write apologetic fiction of the kind prevalent in the Catholic literature of the time, explaining that a writer's meaning must be evident in his or her fiction without didacticism. She wrote ironic, subtly allegorical fiction about deceptively backward Southern characters, usually fundamentalist Protestants, who undergo transformations of character that to O'Connor's thinking brought them closer to the Catholic mind. The transformation is often accomplished through pain, violence, and ludicrous behavior in the pursuit of the holy. However grotesque the setting, she tried to portray her characters as they might be touched by divine grace. This ruled out a sentimental understanding of the stories' violence, as of her own illness. O'Connor wrote: "Grace changes us and change is painful." She also had a deeply sardonic sense of humor, often based in the disparity between her characters' limited perceptions and the awesome fate awaiting them. Another source of humor is frequently found in the attempt of well-meaning liberals to cope with the rural South on their own terms. O'Connor uses such characters' inability to come to terms with race, poverty, and fundamentalism, other than in sentimental illusions, as an example of the failure of the secular world in the twentieth century.
However, several stories reveal that O'Connor was familiar with some of the most sensitive contemporary issues that her liberal and fundamentalist characters might encounter. She addressed the Holocaust in her famous story "The Displaced Person," and racial integration in "Everything That Rises Must Converge." O'Connor's fiction often included references to the problem of race in the South; occasionally, racial issues come to the forefront, as in "The Artificial Nigger," "Everything that Rises Must Converge," and "Judgment Day," her last short story and a drastically rewritten version of her first published story, "The Geranium." Fragments exist of an unfinished novel tentatively titled Why Do the Heathen Rage? that draws from several of her short stories, including "Why Do the Heathen Rage?," "The Enduring Chill," and "The Partridge Festival."   (Resource:  Wikipedia)

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Writing "LOVE" with Helen Hagemann @ Fremantle Arts Centre

Writing LOVE - a Prose Workshop with Helen Hagemann

Join Helen Hagemann on Friday, 18th October for a Prose Workshop on writing about LOVE. The class will look at author Larry Brown and his short story collection Big Bad Love, and will read Falling Out of Love.
Writing exercises and a discussion will revolve around the inclusion of a separate love story to the main narrative of LOVE.

Venue:  Room 2, Upstairs, Fremantle Arts Centre, 1Finnerty St. Fremantle

$20 OOTA :  $25 NON-OOTA 

No Booking needed.  All welcome!

William Larry Brown was born on July 9, 1951, in Oxford, a town with a literary tradition stretching from William Faulkner to John Grisham. But for much of his life Mr. Brown, the son of a restless sharecropper father and a mother who was a store owner and postmaster, seemed to be anything but the bookish type.
Before graduating from high school in 1969, he failed senior English and had to attend summer school, he told an interviewer in 2000. Soon after, he enlisted in the Marines, serving for two years in noncombat positions.
After his discharge Mr. Brown returned to Mississippi, where he worked a variety of odd jobs - over the years they included lumberjack, house painter, hay hauler and fence builder - before joining the Oxford Fire Department in 1973.
He remained a firefighter for 16 years, during which he began to teach himself how to write, reading obsessively the work of Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver, Cormac McCarthy and, of course, Faulkner. For years afterward he would be referred to as "the fireman-writer," enough so that he tired of that designation and discouraged its use.Though he took one writing course at the University of Mississippi, he honed his craft by writing scores of stories, many of which were rejected before he got one published in 1982 in, of all places, Easyriders, a bikers' magazine.
Five years later another story, "Facing the Music," published in the Mississippi Review, a literary journal, caught the attention of Shannon Ravenel, a founder of Algonquin Books. "I called him and asked if he had other stories," Ms. Ravenel recalled. "He said he had a lot."
Algonquin published nine of them in a 1988 collection, also titled "Facing the Music." A novel came a year later: "Dirty Work," about two Vietnam veterans from Mississippi - one white, the other black; one with his face blown off, the other missing all four limbs - who find themselves in adjacent hospital beds.
"Right from the beginning he was willing to look very straight into the depths of human pain without blinking," Ms. Ravenel said. "If you didn't blink and were willing to stand there and look with him, you could learn some remarkable things."
Mr. Brown's characters had dark, brutal lives, often overtaken by drinking and sex and ruinous relationships. But Mr. Brown, though as spare in conversation as in his writing, was neither brooding nor a wanderer. He is survived by his mother, Leona Brown, of Tula, Miss., near Oxford; his wife of 30 years, Mary Annie Coleman Brown; his children Billy Ray, Shane and LeAnne, all of the Oxford area; and two grandchildren.
Being from Oxford, Mr. Brown was frequently compared to Faulkner. But his prose was direct and simple - perhaps better compared to Carver or Hemingway - as in the opening of "Fay," based on a character that first appears in "Joe."
"She came down out of the hills that were growing black with night, and in the dusty road her feet found small broken stones that made her wince," he wrote. "Alone for the first time in the world and full dark coming quickly. House lights winked through the trees as she walked and swung her purse from her hand. She could hear cars passing down the asphalt but she was still a long way from that. More than once she stopped and looked back up into the ridges that stood behind her, thinking things over, but each time she shook her head and went on." 

Resource

Larry Brown, Author of Spare, Dark Stories, Dies at 53 By EDWARD WYATT

Published: November 26, 2004 in The New York Times

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Short Story Writing with Helen Hagemann @ Fremantle Arts Centre

Friday 4^th October @ the FAC is Prose with Helen Hagemann : 10am-noon

This class will look at Anton Chekhov and read two of his short stories, Ninochka: a love story & Heartache. Writing exercises and discussion on Chekhov’s profound observations of quotidian things.

Venue:  Room 2, Upstairs, Fremantle Arts Centre

$20 OOTA :  $25 NON-OOTA 

No Booking needed.  All welcome!

Chekhov’s Heartache is a sad little tale about one moment in life. No one has any time or wants to listen to Iona’s sad news that his son has just died. He tries to talk to people about it, but somehow he is resigned to them not listening. He appears as a miserable person and yet, he is not. There is something sweet, delicate and profound about the soul of the man who is resigned to his station in life. 

    

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in the small seaport of Taganrog, Ukraine on 29th January 1860. Today he is remembered as a playwright and one of the masters of the modern short story. He was the son of a grocer and the grandson of a serf who had bought his freedom, that and that his sons, 19 years earlier. Chekhov spent his early years under the shadow of his father's religious fanaticism while working long hours in his store. Chekhov attended a school for Greek boys in his hometown from 1867-1868 and later he attended the local grammar school from 1868-1876 when his father went bankrupt and moved the family to Moscow. Chekhov, only 16 at the time, decided to remain in his hometown and supported himself by tutoring as he continued his schooling for 3 more years.

   After he finished grammar school Chekhov enrolled in the Moscow University Medical School, where he would eventually become a doctor. Chekhov's medical and science experience is evident in much of his work as evidenced by the apathy many of his characters show towards tragic events. While attending medical school Chekhov began to publish comic short stories and used the money to support himself and his family and by 1886 he had gained wide fame as a writer. 
   Chekhov's works were published in various St. Petersburg papers, including Peterburskaia gazeta from 1885, and Novoe vremia from 1886. Chekhov also published 2 full-length novels during this time, one of which, "The Shooting Party," was translated into English in 1926. The lack of critical social commentary in Chekhov's works netted him some detractors, but it gained him the praise of such authors as Leo Tolstoy and Nikolai Leskov. Chekhov was awarded the Pushkin Prize in 1888. The next year he was elected a member of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature. However after the failure of his play The Wood Demon (1889) he withdrew from literature for a while. Instead he turned back to medicine and science in his trip to the penal colony of Sakhalin, north of Siberia. While there he surveyed 10,000 convicts sentenced to life on the island as part of his doctoral research. He traveled extensively, including places like East Asia, the Indian Subcontinent, and the Middle East. In 1892 Chekhov bought an estate in the country village of Melikhove and became a full time writer. 
   It was during this time that he published some of his most memorable stories including 'Neighbors' (1892), 'Ward Number Six' (1892), 'The Black Monk' (1894), 'The Murder' (1895), and 'Ariadne' (1895). In 1897 he fell ill with tuberculosis, moved to Yalta, and while there he wrote his famous stories 'The Man in a Shell,' 'Gooseberries,' 'About Love,' 'Lady with the Dog,' and 'In the Ravine.' In 1901 Chekhov finally married to an actress, Olga Knipper, who had performed in his plays. But their bliss would be short lived, Chekhov died on July 15, 1904, in Badenweiler, Germany. He is buried in the cemetery of the Novodeviche Monastery in Moscow. (source: Wikipedia)

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