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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Creative Writing with Helen Hagemann @ Fremantle Arts Centre

WORKSHOP:  Caribbean/Trinidad Noir, Lisa Allen-Agostini

20^th September @ the FAC is Prose with Helen Hagemann : 10am-noon, Room 2, Upstairs, North Wing.

Continuing on with World Wide Short Fiction, this workshop will focus on Caribbean work and the class will  read the short story Pot Luck by Lisa Allen-Agostini from the short story collection Trinidad Noir. Writing exercises and discussion on L’Homme Fatale and the doomed male character.

Since discussing the "Femme Fatale" in literature (Gothic Literature) in a previous workshop, I actually expected these terms to have equal opposites as well as the same amount of abundance. We also looked at the  "doomed female/woman" in the Gothic genre.  The discovery, therefore, has been rather surprising. In my vast library of books, esp. short story collections, and other known works, I failed to find the equivalent L'Homme Fatale to that of the Femme Fatale,(contemporary Angela Carter eg), unless we go back to Hamlet or Oedipus.

    As Irina Aleksander states in her article Beware L'Homme Fatale! in the New York Observer, this type of guy happens in real life and is only now resurfacing in films and TV series such as The Pickup Artist (Molly Ringwald & TV Series) and Gossip Girl (TV teen drama). Aleksander describes the L'Homme Fatale,  "often the creative type, he projects a deceptive vulnerability, while maintaining an appealing confidence. He's usually not the best-looking guy in the room, but he is the smartest, he turns these traits to his advantage, playing up the contrast with the typical hot guy or womanizer (physical inferiority, emotional evolvement. His courtship begins with a rushed sense of intimacy and, yet, a disarming lack of forward physical advances; a first date might involve a game of Scrabble or perhaps a cup of tea, his target usually leave wondering if in fact it was a date a all. And yet the story always has the same ending - he grows distance, stops calling and eventually disappears with little explanation, if any." 
  Researching, however, I did find this little gem above Trinidad Noir.  "These stories attempt radical revisions to the noir genre, to mixed degrees of success. We have some potentially entertaining variations on the femme fatale, such as an homme fatale in Reena Andrea Manickchand’s “Dougla”, in which the male protagonist’s boyfriend betrays him in a climatic courtroom scene. The concept of the femme fatale as the tangential woman character on the fringes of the narrative, serving as a sex object and plot device, is turned on its head in Elisha Efua Bartels’s “Woman Is Boss”, a tale of ratiocination featuring a female journalist who juggles lovers as effectively as the archetypal male private eye. Ramabai Espinet also reaches for an intriguing bi-sexual homme fatale twist in her “Nowarian Blues” (Caribbean Review of Books). 
     Lisa Allen-Agostini's short story called Pot Luck tackles the drug and weed-growing underworld in the Caribbean. There's a slight inclusion of the Femme Fatale in the character of Tasha, yet it is the main protagonist Trey we look to and discover as the bumbling Rastafarian guy caught up in the trade. It's black comedy with a slight twist at the end. L'Homme Fatale aspect arises with Garvin who has shacked up with Trey's ex-girlfriend. He is the victim, the doomed male!
   One reviewer wrote, "Trinidad Noir is edited by Lisa Allen-Agostini and Jeanne Mason. Here is an anthology set on a Caribbean island and you might be forgiven for thinking that despite the rum-and-Coca-Cola, white sandy beach atmosphere, that there would be noir aplenty. Criminals, prostitutes, corrupt officials would form a perfect setting. Each of these stories is new to print, and Allen-Agostini has said that she has worked with the authors to produce a noir story. And therein lies the rub. She admits she has assisted the writers because there is no noir tradition in Trinidad and she had to keep reminding the writers to "show me the body". It is hard to explain noir, if you haven't encountered it before. Growing out of the film noir genre, with its emphasis on moral ambiguity and sexual motivation, noir is said to be strange, erotic, ambivalent, cruel and dream-like. The protagonist is not a detective, rather a victim or a suspect. In the noir novel, the writing style is lean, direct and gritty. Not all these stories conform to those rules of thumb."

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Prose with Helen Hagemann @ Fremantle Arts Centre

Prose with Helen Hagemann Friday, 6th September. 10.00am-noon. Room 2, Upstairs, North Wing, Fremantle Arts Centre, 1 Finnerty Street, Fremantle.  $20 OOTA  $25 Non-OOTA .
Continuing the study of "World-wide short fiction", the class will read excepts from Angela Carter's The Fall River Axe Murders from Black Venus. This workshop includes writing exercises and discussions on Carter's gothic techniques, including modernising the "femme fatale". 


Angela Carter (7 May 1940 – 16 February 1992) was a British novelist and journalist, known for her feminist, magical realism, and picaresque works. In 2008, The Times ranked Carter tenth in their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". In 2012, Nights at the Circus was selected as the best ever winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
As well as being a prolific writer of fiction, Carter contributed many articles to The Guardian, The Independent and New Statesman, collected in Shaking a Leg. She adapted a number of her short stories for radio and wrote two original radio dramas on Richard Dadd and Ronald Firbank. Two of her fictions have been adapted for the silver screen: The Company of Wolves (1984) and The Magic Toyshop (1987). She was actively involved in both film adaptations, her screenplays are published in the collected dramatic writings, The Curious Room, together with her radio scripts, a libretto for an opera of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, an unproduced screenplay entitled The Christchurch Murders (based on the same true story as Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures) and other works. These neglected works, as well as her controversial television documentary, The Holy Family Album, are discussed in Charlotte Crofts' book, Anagrams of Desire (2003). Her novel Nights at the Circus won the 1984 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for literature.
At the time of her death, Carter had started work on a sequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre based on the later life of Jane's stepdaughter, Adèle Varens; only a synopsis survives.
Angela Carter died aged 51 in 1992 at her home in London after developing lung cancer.

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