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.