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
February 17, 2014
