OOTA Prose Workshops with Nandi Chinna at the Fremantle Arts Centre

 

A Vast Emptiness. A Possible Book

Virginia Woolf said that ‘writing a novel is like walking through a dark room, holding a lantern which lights up what is already in the room anyway’. Another writer says that writing is like having to rearrange the furniture in a dark room, and then when it was all rearranged the light will come on. Still another writer comments that writing is like being in an empty room which is nevertheless filled with unspoken words, with a sort of whispering.

In this series of three prose workshops we will practice exercises and techniques which will allow us to enter these seemingly dark or empty rooms in our imaginations. We will rearrange, stumble upon, and illuminate what is already there, waiting to be expressed upon the page or computer screen.

Fridays 10am – 12noon, May 30^th, June 13^th, and 27^th June at the Fremantle Arts Centre, Room 2, upstairs in the main building.

Dr Nandi Chinna is a poet, essayist, short story writer and sessional academic at ECU. Her short stories have been published as a part of the 1001 Nights text/performance project, and in various journals. Her first collection of poetry, Our Only Guide is Our Homesickness, was published by the Five Islands Press New Poets Program in 2007, followed by the chap book How to Measure Land, which was joint winner of the 2010 Picaro Press Byron Bay Writers Festival Poetry Prize.  Her poetry collection Swamp was published by Fremantle Press in 2014. She lives near Fremantle, Western Australia.

Writing at the Centre is an independent writing class conducted each Friday, 10am – 12noon, at the Fremantle Arts Centre, Room 2, upstairs in the main building.  Cost to OOTA Members $20.00: Cost to Participants NON-OOTA $25.00 (per single class). No Booking required, although Nandi would appreciate an email from interested writers.

Call Nandi for info 9331 3104, chinnanandi@hotmail.com

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Novel Writing with Helen Hagemann at the Fremantle Arts Centre

Helen Hagemann’s Prose class is the last class before she heads off to her Barcelona writing residency.

Friday 16th May, at the Fremantle Arts Centre, Room 2, Upstairs North Wing. 10.00am - noon.

Our Monthly Critiquing
First hour of the class will be a critiquing session. Writers are reminded to bring a 2 page, double spaced “scene/chapter” of a novel, or 2 pages of a short story.  Please: Times New Roman, size 12!

PLEASE NOTE:  Also bring enough printed copies to distribute to your fellow writers.

Second Hour

“Writing the Ultimate Challenge” – tackling the felicities of love/sex in your writing, either novel or short story. Writing exercises, and the class will read short excerpts from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Women by Charles Bukowski, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières, and Love by Angela Carter.

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