Creative Writing at the Fremantle Arts Centre with Helen Hagemann

Prose with Helen Hagemann Friday, 23^rd August. 10.00am-noon. Room 2, Upstairs, North Wing, Fremantle Arts Centre, 1 Finnerty Street, Fremantle.  $20 OOTA  $25 Non-OOTA

Helen brings you more on the study of "World-wide short fiction", reading Ray Bradbury’s The Veldt from The Illustrated Man. The class includes writing exercises and looking at Bradbury’s short story techniques including Dystopian fiction.  

Ray Douglas Bradbury (August 22, 1920 – June 5, 2012) was an American fantasy, science fiction, horror and mystery fiction writer. Best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and for the science fiction and horror stories gathered together as The Martian Chronicles (1950) and The Illustrated Man (1951), Bradbury was one of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers. Many of Bradbury's works have been adapted into comic books, television shows and films. Bradbury claimed a wide variety of influences, and described discussions he might have with his favorite poets and writers, Robert Frost, William Shakespeare, John Steinbeck, Aldous Huxley, and Thomas Wolfe. From Steinbeck, he said he learned "how to write objectively and yet insert all of the insights without too much extra comment." He studied Eudora Welty for her "remarkable ability to give you atmosphere, character, and motion in a single line."

    Bradbury resisted the categorization of being a science fiction writer. ‘First of all, I don't write science fiction. I've only done one science fiction book and that's Fahrenheit 451, based on reality. It was named so to represent the temperature at which paper ignites. Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal. So Martian Chronicles is not science fiction, it's fantasy. It couldn't happen, you see? That's the reason it's going to be around a long time — because it's a Greek myth, and myths have staying power.’

"The Veldt" is a short story written by Ray Bradbury that was published originally as "The World the Children Made" in the September 23, 1950 issue of The Saturday Evening Post, later republished in the anthology The Illustrated Man in 1951. The anthology is a collection of short stories that were mostly published individually in magazines beforehand. The rise in the popularity of television had a direct influence on Bradbury’s story “The Veldt.” 

At the time the story was written, many American families were acquiring their first television sets, and no one was sure exactly how this new technology would impact the relationships among family members. Some people were afraid that watching too much television would lead to the total breakdown of the family unit.

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Prose Class at the Fremantle Arts Centre with Helen Hagemann

Helen Hagemann returns from an extended leave to bring you more on the study of "World-wide short fiction". The class will focus on "FLASH FICTION" - looking at one of the world's greatest exponents, Franz Kafka. Class will read 4-5 micro-stories from one of the many publications of Metamorphosis and Other Stories (A Penguin Modern Classic) translated by Michael Hofmann. Writing exercises and discussions on the term "Kafkaesque", Kafka's word pictures and the explorations in his very, short prose.

Venue:  Fremantle Arts Centre, Room 2 Upstairs North Wing
Date:    Friday 9th August,  10.00am - noon
Cost:    $20 OOTA  -  $25 Non-OOTA 

Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a German-language writer of novels and short stories, regarded by critics as one of the most influential authors of the 20th century. Kafka strongly influenced genres such as existentialism. Most of his works, such as "Die Verwandlung" ("The Metamorphosis"), Der Process (The Trial), and Das Schloss (The Castle), are filled with the themes and archetypes of alienation, physical and psychological brutality, parent–child conflict, characters on a terrifying quest, labyrinths of bureaucracy, and mystical transformations.
Kafka was born into a middle-class, German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. At his lifetime, most of Prague population spoke Czech and the division between Czech and German speaking people was a tangible reality, as both groups were strengthening their national identity. Jewish community often found itself in between the two sentiments, naturally raising questions about a place to which one belongs. Kafka himself was fluent in both languages, considering German his mother tongue.
Kafka trained as a lawyer and, after completing his legal education, obtained employment with an insurance company. He began to write short stories in his spare time. For the rest of his life, he complained about the little time he had to devote to what he came to regard as his calling. He regretted having to devote so much attention to his Brotberuf ("day job", literally "bread job"). Kafka preferred to communicate by letter; he wrote hundreds of letters to family and close female friends, including his father, his fiancée Felice Bauer, and his youngest sister Ottla. He had a complicated and troubled relationship with his father that had a major effect on his writing. He also suffered conflict over being Jewish, feeling that it had little to do with him, although critics argue that it influenced his writing.
Only a few of Kafka's works were published during his lifetime: the story collections Betrachtung (Contemplation) and Ein Landarzt (A Country Doctor), and individual stories (such as "Die Verwandlung") in literary magazines. He prepared the story collection Ein Hungerkünstler (A Hunger Artist) for print, but it was not published until after his death. Kafka's unfinished works, including his novels Der Process, Das Schloss and Amerika (also known as Der Verschollene, The Man Who Disappeared), were published posthumously, mostly by his friend Max Brod, who ignored Kafka's wish to have the manuscripts destroyed. Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre are among the writers influenced by Kafka's work; the term Kafkaesque has entered the English language to describe surreal situations like those in his writing.

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Creative Writing at the Fremantle Arts Centre with Helen Hagemann, Friday, 31st May.

Creative Writing at the Fremantle Arts Centre

Prose with Helen Hagemann on Friday, 31st May, 10-midday.   

Helen’s workshop continues with World- wide fiction looking at a contemporary Dominican writer Junot Díaz (a Pulitzer Prize winner for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao). Class will read two short stories; Flaca & Alma from This is How You Lose Her. Writing exercises & discussion will revolve around micro-cultures.

Venue:  Room 2, Upstairs North Wing, 1 Finnerty St.

Day:       Friday, 31st May

Time:     10.00am - noon

Cost:      $20  OOTA   :   $25  Non-OOTA

Junot Díaz 

Born 1968, Díaz is a Dominican-American writer, creative writing professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and fiction editor at Boston Review. He also serves on the board of advisers for Freedom University, a volunteer organization in Georgia that provides post-secondary instruction to undocumented immigrants. Central to Díaz's work is the immigrant experience.He received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, in 2008. He is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow.

His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker magazine, which listed him as one of the 20 top writers for the 21st century. He has also been published in Story, The Paris Review, and in the anthologies The Best American Short Stories four times (1996, 1997, 1999, 2000), The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories (2009), and African Voices. He is best known for his two major works: the short story collection Drown (1996) and the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). Both were published to critical acclaim. Diaz himself has described his writing style as "[...] a disobedient child of New Jersey and the Dominican Republic if that can be possibly imagined with way too much education."

Of writing and the arts, Diaz has said "Art is what matters most, and if you’re not contextualizing for a larger push for the arts, what does it matter? What’s really relevant, important, and exigent is that all of us are under pressure to spend less time with art, and we’ve got to figure out a way to talk and encourage each other to do the opposite."With regard to his own writing, Diaz has said “There are two types of writers: those who write for other writers, and those who write for readers,”and that he prefers to keep his readers in mind when writing, as they’ll be more likely to gloss over his mistakes and act as willing participants in a story, rather than actively looking to criticize his writing.

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Creative Writing at the Fremantle Arts Centre with Helen Hagemann

Prose Workshop with Helen Hagemann on Friday, 17^th May, 10-midday.    

Helen’s workshop continues with World- wide fiction looking at author Virginia Woolf. Class will read her short story Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street from The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Writing exercises & discussion will revolve around internal realism.

Venue: Room 2, Upstairs, Fremantle Arts Centre
Day/time:  Friday @ 10,00a til noon
Cost:  OOTA $20:  Non-OOTA $25

Adeline Virginia Woolf (25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English writer, and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929), with its famous dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
     Woolf began writing professionally in 1900, initially for the Times Literary Supplement with a journalistic piece about Haworth, home of the Brontë family. Her first novel, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915 by her half-brother's imprint Gerald Duckworth and Co. Ltd. This novel was originally titled Melymbrosia, but Woolf repeatedly changed the draft. An earlier version of The Voyage Out has been reconstructed by Woolf scholar Louise DeSalvo and is now available to the public under the intended title. DeSalvo argues that many of the changes Woolf made in the text were in response to changes in her own life.

Woolf went on to publish novels and essays as a public intellectual to both critical and popular success. Much of her work was self-published through Hogarth Press.  She is seen as a major twentieth century novelist and one of the foremost modernists.
Woolf is considered a major innovator in the English language. In her works she experimented with stream-of-consciousness and the underlying psychological as well as emotional motives of characters. Woolf's reputation declined sharply after World War II, but her importance was re-established with the growth of  Feminist criticism in the 1970s.
   
Lytton Strachey and Woolf at Garsington, 1923.

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Helen Hagemann’s Prose class on Friday, 3rd May @ Fremantle Arts Centre

Helen Hagemann’s Prose class on Friday, 3^rd May continues with Worldwide Short Fiction, looking at Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez. The class will read two short stories “The Ghosts of August” & “Light is Like Water” from Strange Pilgrims. Writing exercises and discussion will revolve around “magic realism”.

Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez born March 6, 1927 is a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo throughout Latin America. Considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century, he was awarded the 1972 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature, and is the earliest remaining living recipient. He pursued a self-directed education that resulted in his leaving law school for a career in journalism. From early on, he showed no inhibitions in his criticism of Colombian and foreign politics. In 1958, he married Mercedes Barcha; they have two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo.

He started as a journalist, and has written many acclaimed non-fiction works and short stories, but is best known for his novels, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985). His works have achieved significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success, most notably for popularizing a literary style labeled as magic realism, which uses magical elements and events in otherwise ordinary and realistic situations. Some of his works are set in a fictional village called Macondo (the town mainly inspired by his birthplace Aracataca), and most of them express the theme of solitude.

Strange Pilgrims is a collection of twelve loosely-related short stories published in 1992, although the stories that make up this collection were originally written during the seventies and eighties. Each of the stories touches on the theme of dislocation, and the strangeness of life in a foreign land, although quite what "foreign" means is one of Márquez's central questions in this book. He spent some years as a virtual exile from his native Colombia.

Novels: In Evil Hour (1962),  One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975)

Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), The General in His Labyrinth (1989), Of Love and Other Demons (1994) – Novellas:    Leaf Storm (1955),  No One Writes to the Colonel (1961),  Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004). - Short story collections: Eyes of a Blue Dog (1962), Big Mama's Funeral (1962), the Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother (1978), Collected Stories (1984) & Strange Pilgrims (1993) - Non-fiction: The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor (1970), The Solitude of Latin America (1982), The Fragrance of Guava (1982, with Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza), Clandestine in Chile (1986),  News of a Kidnapping (1996), A Country for Children (1998),  Living to Tell the Tale (2002)

The Ghosts of August

A family vacationing in Tuscany decides to spend the night in a castle owned by a friend. The builder of the castle, Ludovico, a renaissance nobleman, killed his bride in bed, before setting his dogs upon himself. The family, disregarding this as a ghost tale, goes to sleep in a guest room, only to awake in bedchamber of Ludovico, with fresh blood on the sheets and a scent of fresh strawberries in the air.

Light is Like Water

Two young boys ask for a boat in return for their good grades. When their parents finally buy them the rowboat, they break the light bulbs in their home and the light comes flowing out like water. They use the light to navigate around their home every Wednesday, and invite their friends to go sailing with them as well. The boys friends end up drowning in the light.

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