Creative Writing at the Fremantle Arts Centre with Helen Hagemann, Friday, 31st May.

Creative Writing at the Fremantle Arts Centre

Prose with Helen Hagemann on Friday, 31st May, 10-midday.   

Helen’s workshop continues with World- wide fiction looking at a contemporary Dominican writer Junot Díaz (a Pulitzer Prize winner for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao). Class will read two short stories; Flaca & Alma from This is How You Lose Her. Writing exercises & discussion will revolve around micro-cultures.

Venue:  Room 2, Upstairs North Wing, 1 Finnerty St.

Day:       Friday, 31st May

Time:     10.00am - noon

Cost:      $20  OOTA   :   $25  Non-OOTA

Junot Díaz 

Born 1968, Díaz is a Dominican-American writer, creative writing professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and fiction editor at Boston Review. He also serves on the board of advisers for Freedom University, a volunteer organization in Georgia that provides post-secondary instruction to undocumented immigrants. Central to Díaz's work is the immigrant experience.He received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, in 2008. He is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow.

His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker magazine, which listed him as one of the 20 top writers for the 21st century. He has also been published in Story, The Paris Review, and in the anthologies The Best American Short Stories four times (1996, 1997, 1999, 2000), The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories (2009), and African Voices. He is best known for his two major works: the short story collection Drown (1996) and the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). Both were published to critical acclaim. Diaz himself has described his writing style as "[...] a disobedient child of New Jersey and the Dominican Republic if that can be possibly imagined with way too much education."

Of writing and the arts, Diaz has said "Art is what matters most, and if you’re not contextualizing for a larger push for the arts, what does it matter? What’s really relevant, important, and exigent is that all of us are under pressure to spend less time with art, and we’ve got to figure out a way to talk and encourage each other to do the opposite."With regard to his own writing, Diaz has said “There are two types of writers: those who write for other writers, and those who write for readers,”and that he prefers to keep his readers in mind when writing, as they’ll be more likely to gloss over his mistakes and act as willing participants in a story, rather than actively looking to criticize his writing.

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Creative Writing at the Fremantle Arts Centre with Helen Hagemann

Prose Workshop with Helen Hagemann on Friday, 17^th May, 10-midday.    

Helen’s workshop continues with World- wide fiction looking at author Virginia Woolf. Class will read her short story Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street from The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Writing exercises & discussion will revolve around internal realism.

Venue: Room 2, Upstairs, Fremantle Arts Centre
Day/time:  Friday @ 10,00a til noon
Cost:  OOTA $20:  Non-OOTA $25

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."
     Woolf began writing professionally in 1900, initially for the Times Literary Supplement with a journalistic piece about Haworth, home of the Brontë family. Her first novel, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915 by her half-brother's imprint Gerald Duckworth and Co. Ltd. This novel was originally titled Melymbrosia, but Woolf repeatedly changed the draft. An earlier version of The Voyage Out has been reconstructed by Woolf scholar Louise DeSalvo and is now available to the public under the intended title. DeSalvo argues that many of the changes Woolf made in the text were in response to changes in her own life.

Woolf went on to publish novels and essays as a public intellectual to both critical and popular success. Much of her work was self-published through Hogarth Press.  She is seen as a major twentieth century novelist and one of the foremost modernists.
Woolf is considered a major innovator in the English language. In her works she experimented with stream-of-consciousness and the underlying psychological as well as emotional motives of characters. Woolf's reputation declined sharply after World War II, but her importance was re-established with the growth of  Feminist criticism in the 1970s.
   
Lytton Strachey and Woolf at Garsington, 1923.

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