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