Workshop 8: Characters with Helen Hagemann

Workshop 8: Characters at the Fremantle Arts Centre, Friday, 1st June @ 1pm.  As part of the ongoing series - Working the Short Story - this week's workshop is designed to help you aim for the biennial OOTA Spilt Ink Competition. The class will look at characters 1. that readers bond with. 2. avoiding the author surrogate. 3. allowing characters to experience a crisis of faith. Readings of Flannery O'Connor's stories + writing exercises. OOTA $25, NON-OOTA $30 - writers are asked to pay cash only.  Venue: Print room at the Fremantle Arts Centre.

Mary Flannery O'Connor (March 25, 1925 – August 3, 1964) was an American writer and essayist. She wrote two novels and thirty-two short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries.
She was a Southern writer who often wrote in a sardonic Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on regional settings and supposedly grotesque characters, often in violent situations. The unsentimental acceptance or rejection of the limitations or imperfection or difference of these characters (whether attributed to disability, race, criminality, religion or sanity) typically underpins the drama.
Her writing reflected her Roman Catholic faith and frequently examined questions of morality and ethics. Her posthumously compiled Complete Stories won the 1972 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and has been the subject of enduring praise.