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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