Writing "LOVE" - Part 2 with Helen Hagemann @ Fremantle Arts Centre

29th November is Prose with Helen Hagemann 10am-noon.  Final class in the 2013 series world-wide short fiction, looks at “Writing Love – Part 2”. Class will read Baby Oil by Robert Drewe from The Bodysurfers. Writing exercises on “love’s  practices”.

Venue:  Room 2, Upstairs, Fremantle Arts Centre, 1Finnerty St. Fremantle

$20 OOTA :  $25 NON-OOTA 

No Booking needed.  All welcome!

Robert Drewe was born in Melbourne, but moved with his family to Perth, at the age of six. He was educated at Hale School, later working as a junior reporter for The West Australian. He moved to Melbourne in his twenties working for The Age and went on to be literary editor at The Australian before turning to fiction. His first book of stories, The Bodysurfers has become an Australian classic – regularly reprinted, widely translated and adapted for screen, stage and radio. His other prize-winning books include The Bay of Contented Men and novels Our Sunshine, The Drowner, Grace, Montebello (2102) & The Local Wildlife (2013). His most prominent work The Shark Net, a semi autobiographical account of Drewe's childhood and adolescence, is a memoir that has been produced as an ABC television series. The name, shark net is a metaphor for the modus operandi of a character in the story, the serial killer Eric Edgar Cooke, whom Drewe met in his childhood and who terrorized the streets of Perth during 1959 to 1963 where he committed 22 violent crimes, 8 of which resulted in death. Robert Drewe is currently working on a sequel to his memoir The Shark Net.

   The Bodysurfers, first published in 1983 by Pan Macmillan, is a collection of twelve short stories that focus on the beach, holidays and coastal living. Certain stories are set in Western Australia while others are on the Pacific Ocean side, especially the Central Coast of NSW. Although most have a coastal setting, Baby Oil (appearing to hint at a 60s tanning lotion) is set apart from the rest. This story explores the shift in relationships that occurred during the sixties with the advent of the pill and sexual freedom for women. In a middle-class Australia, it was no longer the realm of men to have many sexual partners. Anthea is the antitheses of the woman who believed her body was her own agency. As she states in the story ‘my body is mine to do with as I like.’

   In a review of The Bodysurfers, Van Ikin states that, ‘Drewe develops these concerns in more detail, exploring the conflicts and contradictions in the national character. One of the epigraphs about the loss of national values in a statement by Manning Clark was that this was a generation, stripped bare of all faith, stripped bare to lie comfortless on Bondi Beach. Times have changed, but the bedroom scene in Baby Oil supposes the same nudity (esp. with the smell of oil) as the characters slip around on satin sheets, ‘undulating like an ocean swell, rolling and curving towards shore.’

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Alice Munro: Nobel Prize Winner 2013 and study/workshop on her short story "The Office"

15th November is Prose with Helen Hagemann 10am-noon. Class will read the short story The Office by Alice Munro from the anthology Women & Fiction: Short Stories by and about Women. Writing exercises and discussion on Munro’s short stories that reveal a female character’s search for empowerment.

Venue:  Room 2, Upstairs, Fremantle Arts Centre, 1Finnerty St. Fremantle

$20 OOTA :  $25 NON-OOTA 

No Booking needed.  All welcome!

Alice Munro (born 10 July 1931) is a Canadian author writing in English. Munro's work has been described as having revolutionized the architecture of short stories, especially in its tendency to move forward and backward in time. Munro's fiction is most often set in her native Huron County in southwestern Ontario. Her stories explore human complexities in an uncomplicated prose style. Munro's writing has established her as "one of our greatest contemporary writers of fiction," or, as Cynthia Ozick put it, "our Chekhov."

    Munro was born Alice Ann Laidlaw in Wingham, Ontario. Her father, Robert Eric Laidlaw, was a fox and mink farmer, and her mother, Anne Clarke Laidlaw (née Chamney), was a schoolteacher. Munro began writing as a teenager, publishing her first story, "The Dimensions of a Shadow," in 1950 while studying English and journalism at the University of Western Ontario under a two-year scholarship. During this period she worked as a waitress, a tobacco picker, and a library clerk. In 1951, she left the university, where she had been majoring in English since 1949, to marry fellow student James Munro. They moved to Dundarave, West Vancouver, for James's job in a department store. In 1963, the couple moved to Victoria, where they opened Munro's Books, which still operates.

   Munro's highly acclaimed first collection of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), won the Governor General's Award, Canada's highest literary prize. That success was followed by Lives of Girls and Women (1971), a collection of interlinked stories sometimes erroneously described as a novel. In 1978, Munro's collection of interlinked stories Who Do You Think You Are? was published (titled The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose in the United States). This book earned Munro a second Governor General's Literary Award. From 1979 to 1982, she toured Australia, China and Scandinavia. In 1980, Munro held the position of writer in residence at both the University of British Columbia and the University of Queensland. Through the 1980s and 1990s, she published a short-story collection about once every four years.

   In 2013, Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for her work as "master of the modern short story". She is the recipient of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize, and the Nobel Prize in Literature for her lifetime body of work, however at the age of 82, Munro cites ill health as the reason for not attending the award ceremony in Sweden in December.                                                  Resource : Wikipedia 2013

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