Novel Writing at the Fremantle Arts Centre with Helen Hagemann

 HELEN HAGEMANN’S NOVEL WRITING CLASS

This coming Friday 4^th April @ 10.00am the prose class will possibly be in Room 3, if not Room 2.  Class will read 6 short chapters from Larry Brown’s novel Father and Son. Writing exercises and discussion will revolve around the inclusion of an opening and end “hook” in chapter writing. And for the short story writer, how this is comparable in short fiction.
This week we have included some of Brown’s great writing with the courtesy of Bomb Magazine.

Venue: Fremantle Arts Centre, 1 Finnerty St. Fremantle
Room: 2 - Upstairs in the north wing
Starts: Friday (fortnightly) on 7th February, 2014
Time: 10.00am til noon
Cost: $20 (OOTA members), $25 (non-OOTA members)

Larry Brown (July 9, 1951 – November 24, 2004) was an American novelist, non-fiction and short story writer. He was a winner of numerous awards including the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters award for fiction, the Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Award, and Mississippi's Governor's Award For Excellence in the Arts. He was also the first two-time winner of the Southern Book Award for Fiction. His notable works include Dirty Work, Father and Son, Joe and Big Bad Love. A film of the latter, starring Debra Winger and Arliss Howard was released in 2001.
Independent filmmaker Gary Hawkins has directed an award winning documentary of Brown's life and work in The Rough South of Larry Brown.  [Wikipedia resource.]

 An Excerpt from Father and Son, Page 35-36

In his sleep, his father looked like some huge broken mannequin. Glen studied the gun in his hands and remembered when it used to hang above the kitchen door. It had been in canebrakes and the deep jungle woods of coons on steaming nights with spotted dogs leaping and howling and trying to climb the trees with their toenails, men standing in water amid cypress knees, men with flashlights in their hands searching in the vine-choked growth of leaves and poison ivy above for two red eyes. It had been in river bottoms on mornings when ice cracked underfoot and the sudden yammering of dogs came through the woods gaining decibels and the deer broke free from the cover and rocketed 40 feet in a second. It had been held beneath beech trees on foggy mornings when the squirrels moved and shook the dew from the branches or paused in profile to hull a hickory nut with their rasping teeth, little showers of shredded matter pattering softly down through the leaves to scatter on the forest floor. Or mornings when nothing came and the cold was a vivid pain that held him shivering in its grip and the gun was an ache in his naked hands where he sat huddled with misery in some gloomy copse of hardwood timber.
He cocked the hammer now and swung the barrel up to his father’s head and held the black and yawning muzzle of it an inch away. He tightened his fingers on the checkered pistol grip. The old man slept on, father and son. Some sense of foreboding told him to pull back and undo all of this before it was done. Yet he put his finger on the trigger, just touched it. He already knew what it would look like.