Helen Hagemann’s Prose class on Friday, 3rd May @ Fremantle Arts Centre

Helen Hagemann’s Prose class on Friday, 3^rd May continues with Worldwide Short Fiction, looking at Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez. The class will read two short stories “The Ghosts of August” & “Light is Like Water” from Strange Pilgrims. Writing exercises and discussion will revolve around “magic realism”.

Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez born March 6, 1927 is a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo throughout Latin America. Considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century, he was awarded the 1972 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature, and is the earliest remaining living recipient. He pursued a self-directed education that resulted in his leaving law school for a career in journalism. From early on, he showed no inhibitions in his criticism of Colombian and foreign politics. In 1958, he married Mercedes Barcha; they have two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo.

He started as a journalist, and has written many acclaimed non-fiction works and short stories, but is best known for his novels, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985). His works have achieved significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success, most notably for popularizing a literary style labeled as magic realism, which uses magical elements and events in otherwise ordinary and realistic situations. Some of his works are set in a fictional village called Macondo (the town mainly inspired by his birthplace Aracataca), and most of them express the theme of solitude.

Strange Pilgrims is a collection of twelve loosely-related short stories published in 1992, although the stories that make up this collection were originally written during the seventies and eighties. Each of the stories touches on the theme of dislocation, and the strangeness of life in a foreign land, although quite what "foreign" means is one of Márquez's central questions in this book. He spent some years as a virtual exile from his native Colombia.

Novels: In Evil Hour (1962),  One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975)

Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), The General in His Labyrinth (1989), Of Love and Other Demons (1994) – Novellas:    Leaf Storm (1955),  No One Writes to the Colonel (1961),  Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004). - Short story collections: Eyes of a Blue Dog (1962), Big Mama's Funeral (1962), the Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother (1978), Collected Stories (1984) & Strange Pilgrims (1993) - Non-fiction: The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor (1970), The Solitude of Latin America (1982), The Fragrance of Guava (1982, with Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza), Clandestine in Chile (1986),  News of a Kidnapping (1996), A Country for Children (1998),  Living to Tell the Tale (2002)

The Ghosts of August

A family vacationing in Tuscany decides to spend the night in a castle owned by a friend. The builder of the castle, Ludovico, a renaissance nobleman, killed his bride in bed, before setting his dogs upon himself. The family, disregarding this as a ghost tale, goes to sleep in a guest room, only to awake in bedchamber of Ludovico, with fresh blood on the sheets and a scent of fresh strawberries in the air.

Light is Like Water

Two young boys ask for a boat in return for their good grades. When their parents finally buy them the rowboat, they break the light bulbs in their home and the light comes flowing out like water. They use the light to navigate around their home every Wednesday, and invite their friends to go sailing with them as well. The boys friends end up drowning in the light.

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Monday Poetry with Helen Hagemann @ the Grove Friday 29th April.

Monday Poetry with Helen Hagemann will be held at the Grove Library on Monday 29th April. This workshop “Writing Duality / Contradictions / Opposing Images in Poetry” will show how writing two or more opposing images will give a poem power & energy.  Poets cited Emily Dickinson, Billy Collins, Jane Hirshfield, MTC Cronin, Jane Kenyon and Fleda Brown.  1.00pm start. Coffee & chat after in the Grove Library cafe. All welcome!

Venue:  The Grove Library, 1 Leake Street, Cottesloe. (Cnr Napolean St) & close to Cottesloe train station.

Date: Monday 29th April

Time: 1.00pm-3.00pm
Cost:  $15 OOTA - $20 Other

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Prose Class with Helen Hagemann, Friday 19th April at the Fremantle Arts Centre

Prose Class with Helen Hagemann on Friday, 19th April, will look at British author Fay Weldon. Class will read her story Run and Ask Daddy if He Has Any More Money from her popular short story collection "Wicked Women".

Writing exercises and discussion on "Ways of enhancing the Narrative using Metaphor."
Venue:  Fremantle Arts Centre
            Room 2, Upstairs, North Wing
            1 Finnerty Street, Fremantle.
Day:     Friday, 19th April
Time:    10.00am til noon
Cost:    $20 (OOTA member) $25 (Non-OOTA member)

“A bristling collection of stories . . . Weldon has become one of the most cunning moral satirists of our time.”—The New York Times Book Review

With 21 novels and three story collections, Fay Weldon has reigned as the champion of the discarded wife, the embryonic woman who grows up by default and becomes shrewd by suffering. Her genius is to portray all this heroic self-discovery not with sermonizing but with deft satire.
In ''Wicked Women,'' Weldon's bristling collection of stories, she broadens her targets. Attuned to the deeper currents of family and sexual unrest, this satire is so stinging that reading it is like seeing someone stripped of clothing in a public place. Yes, Weldon's heroines still deal with cheating spouses and struggle to protect the family nest. But now they also use a bit of wickedness to contend with insecure househusbands who punish their wives for surpassing them, self-absorbed adult children who can't see beyond their own muddled lives, and the culture's communal hand wringing over sexual identity.
Throughout the book there is a sense that apocalyptic winds are gathering force all over Weldon's England: shadowy ''market forces'' are leveling picturesque villages to build ''development complexes'' infested with social dry rot; woozy New Age shrinks and astrologers are subverting the national discourse; rumors are swirling about a potion called Red Mercury that has shadowy origins in the Russian Mafia and the potential to polish off the world.
Weldon is a worthy adversary for these post-modern devils. Delivering a knockout blow to those old punching bags, touchy-feely therapists, she blames them for the casual shattering of marriages and for the delusive idea that family loyalties and relationships can be paved over or efficiently rerouted like England's M1 highway. In ''Santa Claus's New Clothes,'' the children and the grandchildren have their first Christmas dinner with Dr. Hetty Grainger, their father's former therapist and new wife, who ''murmured rather than spoke.'' Hetty hadn't thought twice about taking over Mum's house; she paused only in the master bedroom to ''perform some kind of ceremony with candles and incense which would, she said, deconsecrate the bed'' and ''free the material object from its person-past.'' Her mistake is to murmur over dinner about the ''civilized'' way the divorce and remarriage have proceeded. The remark elicits from her new 9-year-old stepson the fatal question, ''What's civilized?'' Hetty's fatuous answer opens up a hilariously deadpan inquisition by the other children that peels away her soothing earth-mother disguise to reveal the baby-eater underneath.
In the riotous and startlingly timely ''Not Even a Blood Relation,'' Weldon draws on some frisky revisionist science to help her protagonist defend hearth and home. Beverley Cowarth, 61, is the widow of Hughie, a recently deceased and bankrupt earl, and the mother of three angry adult daughters. And no wonder: the oldest, Edwina, was meant to be Edwin, the Cowarth male heir, and when she arrived, her parents ''just added on an 'a' and ignored her thereafter'' -- as they did with her sisters, Thomasina and Davida. Now the three plan to sell the ancestral home out from under their mother, who, in terms of the Cowarth family line, is ''not even a blood relation'' -- and far too old to produce a male heir, even if Hughie were still alive. But by enlisting the help of a much younger, adoring Australian fiance and the services of a very good Roman gynecologist, Beverley outwits them all -- making for a few delectable twists best left for Weldon fans to gloat over.
Other stories end in devastation, lost humanity and profound sadness. The graceful ''In The Great War (II)'' tells of a careless love triangle that exacts the suicide of two women and the death of a 6-year-old child. ''Web Central,'' one of the few heavy-handed stories here, takes on the terrors of futuristic isolation. It pictures a society whose privileged classes are sealed in solitary rooms, their moods regulated by drip feeds and their intercourse with the world conducted entirely on computer screens. And the powerful ''Heat Haze'' annihilates the idea that a child's agony over her parents' messy life can be managed and explained away like a nasty case of flu, with no one taking any blame. Deciding that someone must pay for the fallout from her father's admission of homosexuality and her mother's subsequent death, a young ballet dancer offers herself up -- refusing food and intimacy, and bartering her body -- to protect the remnants of family she has left.
With the year 2000 and its tidy string of zeroes reawakening our eternal longing for conclusive endings, Weldon's wrap-ups are eloquent and absolute. They are born of her belief in the dogged persistence of genetic bonds and in an uncompromising universe of clear rights and wrongs with their own inevitable consequences. With ''Wicked Women,'' Weldon has become one of the most cunning moral satirists of our time. In her rueful stories, justice is done -- whether we like it or not.

---

Deborah Mason is a critic and writer who lives in New York.

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Creative Writing @ FAC with Helen Hagemann: Fay Weldon: Fri, 19th April

Wicked Women

 

Revisiting this short story collection by Fay Weldon has been very enjoyable. This will be the text for Friday's class at the Fremantle Arts Centre. I'm remembering stories like the Pardoner, Love Amongst the Artists and how Weldon pays tribute, especially to her own ilk. Leda and the Swan is a satirical take on the story of Leda & the Swan, also a poem by William Butler Yeats. (origin Da Vinci's painting). Of course, Weldon's story is not about humans & swans, but more like creatures with the same names who swim, dive, compete & more!

Fay Weldon was born (1931 -) in Worcester, England, where her father was a physician and her mother a writer. She was educated at the University of St. Andrews, from which she received her M.A. in 1954. Six years later, she married Ronald Weldon. Weldon worked as a propaganda writer for the British Foreign Office and then as an advertising copywriter for various firms in London before making writing a full-time career. Since the mid-1960's she has written novels, short stories, and radio and television plays. The central subject of all Weldon's writing is the experience of women, especially their relationships with men. According to Weldon, "Women must ask themselves: What is it that will give me fulfillment? That's the serious question I'm attempting to answer." Despite her concern with women, Weldon has been criticized by some feminist groups for apparently presenting fictional women with very limited options. Weldon's style is marked by a careful attention to detail, vivid images, a sharp wit, and a wry sense of humour. Although most of her male characters are disagreeable, they are not the true villains of her novels. Her villains are, in fact, the traditional roles that men and women play. Weldon looks at women in many different circumstances - at work, at home, at play, in politics, and especially in love - and shows not only how they are manipulated by men, but also how they allow themselves to be manipulated. Weldon's novel The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983) has been made into a popular movie. It was formerly a successful television miniseries. Her latest novel (2012) is Habits of the House - a lightweight novel of Edwardian life above and below stairs.

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Prose with Helen Hagemann @ FAC Friday 5th April

Creative Writing @ Fremantle Arts Centre

This week is Prose with Helen Hagemann on Friday, 5th April. Continuing with world-wide short fiction, this week writers will look at the short story The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield from her collection The Garden Party & other stories.  Writing exercises & discussion on “clichés”. Recognising, avoiding & how to write away from the traps. 

Venue: Room 2, Upstairs, North Wing, Fremantle Arts Centre

Friday: 5th April

Time: 10am-noon

Cost:  $20 OOTA, $25 Non-OOTA

     

 Katherine Mansfield was born in Wellington as the daughter of a successful businessman. Her family was wealthy enough to afford to send her to Queen's College, London for her education. She then returned to New Zealand for two years, before going back to London to pursue a literary career.

She quickly fell into the bohemian way of life lived by many artists of that era. With little money, she met, married and left her first husband, George Bowden, all within just three weeks. She then found herself pregnant (not by her husband) and was forced to stay in a Bavarian hotel by her concerned mother. She miscarried the child, but the whole sequence of events and experiences gave her the impetus to publish her first collection of Short stories The German Pension (1911). In that same year she met the critic and essayist John Middleton Murray. Their tempestuous relationship together brought Katherine Mansfield into contact with many of leading lights of English literature of that era. Most notably, she came to the attention of D. H. Lawrence. This attention is most obvious in his depiction of Mansfield and Murry as Gudrun and Gerald in Woman in Love (1917).

Her life and work were changed forever with the death of her brother during The Great War. She was shocked and traumatised by the experience, so much so that her work began to take refuge in the nostalgic reminscences of their childhood in New Zealand. For the imperial historian, it is this body of work that is the most interesting: Prelude (1917), Bliss, and Other Stories (1920) and The Garden party and Other Stories. (1922) She could evoke stunning mental images of the natural beauty of New Zealand as well as showing a keen ear for the oddities of Upper Class English and Colonial society.

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