Novel Writing with Helen Hagemann at the Fremantle Arts Centre

Helen Hagemann’s Prose class resumes on Friday 2^nd May.  The class will read Chapter 2 of Burial Rites by Hannah Kent. Writing exercises and discussion will revolve around the placement and story perspective of different characters within the one chapter. For the short story writer the aim will be to practice two points-of-view within the one narrative.  10.00am til noon.  All welcome!

 

In northern Iceland, 1829, Agnes Magnusdóttir is condemned to death for her part in the brutal murder of two men. Agnes is sent to wait on the farm of District Officer Jon Jonsson and his family, who are horrified about having Agnes living with them. Only Tóti, the young assistant Reverend appointed as Agnes's spiritual guardian, is compelled to try to understand her. As the summer months fall away to winter, Agnes's story begins to emerge. And as the days to her execution draw closer, the question burns: did she or didn't she? This novel is based on a true story, and portrayed by Hannah Kent in her first novel published in 2013 by Pan MacMillan.

Hannah Kent writes: 

I first heard the story of Agnes in 2003, when I was living as an exchange student in northern Iceland. At the time I was intensely lonely, troubled by the social isolation I was experiencing as a non-Icelandic outsider in a tightly knit community. One day, driving past a particularly striking northern valley, I asked my host family about the strange hills that lined its mouth. Three were then pointed out to me as the site of the last execution in Iceland, and I was told about Agnes's crime.
Who can truly understand why certain stories come to us at crucial points in our lives? Why do some engage us but are soon forgotten, and then others – simply in the timing of their telling – send an arrow into our hearts in such a way that we are transfigured by them? Perhaps I saw a fragment of my own alienation mirrored back to me in Agnes's story of ostracism. Questions about Agnes were persistently and disturbingly present in my mind from that day and for many years afterwards. Who was this woman, and why was her community so vitriolic in their condemnation of her? It wasn't her guilt that unsettled me, but the way she had been stripped of her humanity and reduced to a gross stereotype in the sources and retelling of the murders. I wanted to return to Agnes the ambiguity and complexity she surely possessed, but also banish her presence from my imagination. In this way, the writing of Burial Rites was both an act of restoration and an exorcism.

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Nandi Chinna's "Swamp" Book Launch

Nandi Chinna Invites You to   

Swamp

walking the wetlands of the Swan Coastal Plain

poems by Nandi Chinna

published by Fremantle Press 2014

Launched by John Mateer

with performances by Danna Checksfield - Viola

and Mei Saraswati - Swamp Gospel

Sat May 10

2pm for short wetland walk (depending on weather) 3pm – 5pm launch.

at the Cockburn Wetlands Education Centre

                             184 Hope Road Bibra Lake

Transport options: for car pooling contact chinnanandi@hotmail.com

By bus from Fremantle catch the 99 to Barry Marshall Pde Fiona Stanley Hospital A (Stop No: 26647) then 320 m walk to centre, or the 520 from Fremantle to Gwilliam Dr After North Lake Rd (Stop No: 20349) then 15 min walk around Bibra Lake to Centre

By train alight at Murdoch station and catch 514 to Bibra Dr after Farrington Rd (Stop No: 20360) then 360 m walk to Centre.

Hope to see you there!
Dr Nandi Chinna
Independent Researcher
PoetSwamp; Walking the Wetlands of the Swan Coastal Plain
http://www.fremantlepress.com.au/books/newreleases/1397http://

Chinna uncovers the lost places that exist beneath the townscape of Perth. For the last four years the poet has walked the wetlands of the Swan Coastal Plain – and she has walked the paths and streets where the wetlands once were.

Chinna writes with great poignancy and beauty of our inability to return, and the ways in which we can use the dual practice of writing and walking to reclaim what we have lost. Her poems speak with urgency about wetlands that are under threat from development today.

Praise for the book

‘I found reading this sequence of poems moving, exciting, engaging, often sad and melancholic. It left me wanting to know more.’ Susan Hawthorne, James Cook University

‘This body of poetry differs significantly from other bodies of poetry which deal with nature in that the poems are not produced within the nature/culture binary. I am not aware of any other body of work that is located within an urban space and actually works across this binary opposition. These poems do this with exquisite care and attention and in doing so, achieve their goal, not so much of learning to take care of our small patches, although that is an important practical outcome, but in developing a language that does not negate the very thing it wishes to preserve.’ Margaret Somerville, University of Sydney

 

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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.

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PROSE CLASS AT THE FREMANTLE ARTS CENTRE

HELEN HAGEMANN’S PROSE CLASS

This coming Friday 21st March@ 10.00am the prose class is in Room 3 and also on 4th April.

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 – class will read an action scene from Nicholas Evans’The Horse Whisperer. A writing exercise and discussion will revolve around the inclusion of action scenes within the narrative of your novel or short story.

A forty-ton truck hurtles out of control on a snowy country road, a teenage girl on horseback in its path. In a few terrible seconds the life of a family is shattered. And a mother’s quest begins–to save her maimed daughter and a horse driven mad by pain. It is an odyssey that will bring her to the Horse Whisperer.
He is the stuff of legend. His voice can calm wild horses and his touch heal broken spirits. For secrets uttered softly into pricked and troubled ears, such men were once called Whisperers. Now Tom Booker, the inheritor of this ancient gift, is to meet his greatest challenge.
Annie Graves has traveled across a continent with her daughter, Grace, and their wounded horse, Pilgrim, to the Booker ranch in Montana. Annie has risked everything–her career, her marriage, her comfortable life–in her desperate belief that the Whisperer can help them. The accident has turned Pilgrim savage. He is now so demented and dangerous that everyone says he should be destroyed. But Annie won’t give up on him, for she feels his fate is inextricably entwined with that of her daughter, who has retreated into a heartrending, hostile silence. Annie knows that if the horse dies, something in Grace will die too.

http://www.nicholasevans.com/books/the-horse-whisperer/description/ 

This Scene is Huge on Action
The book begins with the frightful accident: teenage Grace Maclean, daughter of nice-guy lawyer Robert and tough, English-born magazine editor Annie, is out riding near their country home in upstate New York on a snowy day, and she and her beautiful horse Pilgrim are hit by a skidding tractor-trailer. Grace is crippled, Pilgrim desperately injured and mentally shattered.

On the Action Scene

“This scene type will certainly drive the reader forward, but be warned that people have a tendency to skim action scenes, driven forward with their urgency, so you will want to balance them with other types of scenes,” says Jordan E. Rosenfeld.

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)

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Novel Writing at the Fremantle Arts Centre

Novel Writing with Helen Hagemann

Friday’s Prose Class, 7^th March continues with writing novel chapters or the short story form / stand-alone piece. The Sweet Hereafter by Russell Banks is featured in this workshop and writers will look at the way Banks creates scenes. Class will read part of two chapters, there will be two writing exercises and discussion will revolve around the techniques of writing “scenes”. 

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)

The Sweet Hereafter

is a multiple first person narrative depicting life in a small town in Upstate New York in the wake of a terrible school bus accident in which numerous local children are killed. Hardly able to cope with the loss, their grieving parents are approached by a slick city lawyer who wants them to sue for damages. At first the parents are reluctant to do so, but eventually they are persuaded by the lawyer that filing a class action lawsuit would ease their minds and also be the right thing to do.
As most of the children are dead, the case now depends on the few surviving witnesses to say the right things in court. In particular, it is 14 year-old Nichole Burnell, who was sitting at the front of the bus and is now paralyzed from the waist down, and whose deposition is all-important. However, she unexpectedly accuses Dolores Driscoll, the driver, of speeding and thus causing the accident. When she does so, all hopes of ever receiving money are thwarted. All the people involved know that Nichole is lying but cannot do anything about it. Only her father knows why, but he is unable to publicly reveal his daughter's motives.The novel captures the atmosphere in a small town suddenly shaken by catastrophe.  [Ref:  Wikipedia]
The Movie

The Sweet Hereafter is a 1997 Canadian film written and directed by Atom Egoyan. It is an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Russell Banks. The film documents the effects of a tragic bus accident on the population of a small town. It took home a Special Grand Jury Prize at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival and scored a pair of Academy Award nominations, including Best Director and best adapted screenplay.

“But really, it was reading that lead me to writing.

And in particular reading the American classics
like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art.”      —     Russell Banks

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Novel Writing with Helen Hagemann at the Fremantle Arts Centre

Helen Hagemann’s prose class on Friday 21^st February @ 10.00am is in Room 2.

On 21^st March & 4^th April we will be in Room 3.

The class will read 2 small chapters from The Bride Stripped Bare by anonymous (really it’s Nikki Gemmel!). Writers will gain insights into how Gemmel sustains a novel written wholly in the 2nd person point-of-view. There will be a quick quiz and a writing exercise on the 2^nd person POV. This will help writers decide their voice for either a short story or novel chapter. All members are welcome to listen to our prose writers for the 1^st hour. Free!

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

Venue: Fremantle Arts Centre, 1 Finnerty St. Fremantle
Room: 2 - Upstairs in the north wing
Day: Friday, 21st February, 2014
Time: 10.00am til noon
Cost: $20 (OOTA members), $25 (non-OOTA members) 

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