Sunday, 26 April 2015

The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger, Prose Class with Helen Hagemann @ FAC, 1st May

Prose with Helen Hagemann at the Fremantle Arts Centre

Catcher in the Rye by J. D Salinger, 1^st May @ 1pm. We will be reading an extract from the novel. Writing exercises and discussion will revolve around the elements of YA.

Cost: $20 OOTA $25 NON-OOTA

Room 3, Upstairs - Fremantle Arts Centre

The Catcher in the Rye is a 1951 novel by J. D. Salinger. A controversial novel originally published for adults, it has since become popular with adolescent readers for its themes of teenage angst and alienation. It has been translated into almost all of the world's major languag.es. Around 250,000 copies are sold each year with total sales of more than 65 million books.The novel's protagonist Holden Caulfield has become an icon for teenage rebellion. The novel also deals with complex issues of identity, belonging, loss, connection, and alienation.
The novel was included on Time‍ 's 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923 and it was named by Modern Library and its readers as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. In 2003, it was listed at #15 on the BBC's survey The Big Read. The success of The Catcher in the Rye led to public attention and scrutiny. Salinger became reclusive, publishing new work less frequently. He followed Catcher with a short story collection, Nine Stories (1953); a volume containing a novella and a short story, Franny and Zooey (1961); and a volume containing two novellas, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963). His last published work, a novella entitled "Hapworth 16, 1924", appeared in The New Yorker on June 19, 1965.

Salinger working on The Catcher in the Rye

Born on January 1, 1919, in New York, J.D. Salinger was a literary giant despite his slim body of work and reclusive lifestyle. His landmark novel, The Catcher in the Rye, set a new course for literature in post-WWII America and vaulted Salinger to the heights of literary fame. In 1953, Salinger moved from New York City and led a secluded life, only publishing limited work before his death in 2010.

References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._D._Salinger

May Newsletter

Dear writers
Our Prose newsletter for May 2015 is now up! We have three classes this month, as well we are introducing your tutors for June 2015 while I'm away in England. They are Laurie Steed and Guy Salvidge. Laurie has been an OOTA member for a few years, and most probably this is the first time he has conducted a class for us at the Fremantle Arts Centre. The new committee at OOTA are introducing new classes, so hopefully there will be more opportunity for our members to run classes. Download our May newsletter by clicking on the Newsletter tab and the drop-down link.
Your stories are here

Happy reading!
Helen

Our Poetry Tutor Shane McCauley announces the launch of tRICKSTER: a new poetry collection

OOTA Writers Group Inc.

invites you to the launch party of

tRICKSTER by Shane McCauley

Walleah Press (Tasmania)

To be launched by Andrew Lansdown

Saturday, 6 June 2015 @ 2pm

Pavlich Room

Fremantle Arts Centre

Please RSVP by 29 May

shnmccly@gmail.com

SMS- 0432983310

Book sales $ 20 (no credit card facilities)

Drinks, finger foods & a trick or two

** The launch will be concluded with raffle and door prize draws.**

Launch of Cuttlefish by Sunline Press: New WA journal for writers

Sunline Press invites you to the launch of

Cuttlefish

Gallows Gallery

53 Glyde Street

Mosman Park

Saturday 2nd May 5pm to 7pm

RSVP: rleach@plc.wa.edu.au

before 28th April 2015

Fifty Shades of Grey: Prose Class at the FAC, 17th April @ 1pm

Prose Workshop for April

Fifty Shades of Grey – 17^th April @ 1pm – Room 3, @ FAC

We will be looking at possibly two extracts from the novel by British author E.L. James. James originally self-published Fifty Shades as an e-book and a print-on-demand, until the publishing rights were acquired by Vintage Books in March 2012. Writing exercises and discussion will revolve around “What Makes Successful Writing”.

Fifty Shades of Grey is a 2011 erotic romance novel by British author E. L. James. It is the first installment in the Fifty Shades trilogy that traces the deepening relationship between a college graduate, Anastasia Steele, and a young business magnate, Christian Grey. It is notable for its explicitly erotic scenes featuring elements of sexual practices involving bondage/discipline, dominance/submission, and sadism/masochism (BDSM). Originally self-published as an ebook and a print-on-demand, publishing rights were acquired by Vintage Books in March 2012.
The second and third volumes, Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed, were published in 2012. Fifty Shades of Grey has topped best-seller lists around the world, including those of the United Kingdom and the United States. The series has sold over 100 million copies worldwide and been translated into 52 languages, and set a record in the United Kingdom as the fastest-selling paperback of all time.Critical reception of the book, however, has tended toward the negative, with the quality of its prose generally seen as poor. Universal Pictures and Focus Features produced a film adaptation, which was released on 13 February 2015 and also received generally unfavorable reviews.

Erika Mitchell (born 7 March 1963), better known by her pen name E. L. James, is a British author. She wrote the bestselling erotic romance novels trilogy Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker, and Fifty Shades Freed. The combined novels have sold over 70 million copies worldwide, over 35 million copies in the United States and set the record in the United Kingdom as the fastest selling paperback of all time. In 2012, Time magazine named her one of "The World's 100 Most Influential People."

Reference: Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifty_Shades_of_Grey

Our Newsletter for April 2015

Dear writers
Our Prose newsletter for April 2015 is now up! Also some of the stories (although not all uploaded) can be read on the publication page. It was a very interesting exercise that evoked some really good ideas and good writing. Basic writing such as this can often be a springboard to other works, or ideas.
Download our newsletter by clicking on the Newsletter tab and the drop-down link.
Your stories are here

Writing Animals with Helen Hagemann @ the Fremantle Arts Centre: Friday 20th March

Writing Animals – 20th March @ 1pm with Helen Hagemann. Class will read two short stories from this collection "Only the Animals" by Ceridwen Dovey. Writing exercises and discussion will revolve around allegory and fables. $20 OOTA, $25 NON-OOTA.

Dovey appeared at the Perth Writers Festival (February, 2015)
She will also feature at Adelaide Writers' Week (March, 2015)
Only the Animals won the inaugural Readings New Australian Writing Award and the Steele Rudd Award (Short Story Collection) at the 2014 Queensland Literary Awards

Only the Animals

Extract

My twin sister and I, like all young elephants in our herd, were raised on a feast of stories about our ancestors, whose souls glowed at us from constellations in the sky. On certain summer evenings, the elders would point out identifying features among the stars: the tip of a trunk, or the triangular ends of an ear spread out in preparation for a charge, the same shape as the continent of Africa. They would tell us the story of one of these hallowed forebears looking down on us. My sister and I liked to reenact what we had heard, living out an ancestor’s great moments on earth and imagining what it might feel like to die and be transmuted into a soul that sparkles forever, wheeling about on an invisible axis.

Description

The souls of ten animals, each killed in a human conflict of the past century or so, tell the story of their deaths in turn. There is the camel killed in colonial Australia and the blue mussel killed in Pearl Harbour; the cat who died in the trenches in World War I and the bear who starved to death during the siege of Sarajevo; the dog who lost his life on the Eastern Front in World War II and the parrot killed during the 2006 bombing of Beirut; the ape who died in Germany during World War I and the Russian tortoise lost in space during the Cold War; the elephant killed in the civil war in Mozambique and the dolphin who chose to die during the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.
    Each of the animals also pays homage to a human writer who has written imaginatively about animals during much the same time span, from Henry Lawson to Ted Hughes, from Kafka to J.M. Coetzee, from Colette to Virginia Woolf, from Tolstoy to José Saramago, from Günter Grass to Jack Kerouac, from Tom Stoppard to Julian Barnes. As the soul of the tortoise explains, borrowing the words of the poet Czeslaw Milosz, ‘So little of the total suffering, human or animal, can ever make its way into literature in the end. When it does, we should pay attention, and pay our respects.’
    A tribute both to authors and to animals, this is a book that asks some difficult questions and doesn’t pretend to know the answers. Why do animals sometimes shock us into feeling things we can’t seem to feel for other humans? Why do animals allow authors to say the unsayable? Can we become intimate with an author by understanding his or her symbolic use of animals? Is it still possible to feel something authentic for other living beings caught up in fatal conflict in a time of compassion fatigue? Is a different relationship with animals possible if we no longer make them marginal to our lives and deaths? Can fiction really help us to find meaning, or even morality? And as the soul of the dolphin wonders in her narrative, why do we sometimes treat humans as animals, and sometimes treat animals as humans?
    Only The Animals asks us to find our way back to empathy not only for animals, but for other human beings, and to believe again – just for a moment – in the redemptive power of reading and writing fiction.

Reference: http://www.ceridwendovey.com/only-the-animals/

Ceridwen Dovey was born in South Africa and raised between South Africa and Australia. While studying social anthropology at Harvard as an undergraduate, she made a documentary about South African wine farm workers, Aftertaste. She wrote her first novel, Blood Kin, while living in Cape Town, then returned to the U.S. for graduate studies in social anthropology at New York University.

She now lives with her husband and son in Sydney, Australia.

Westerly Stories with Helen Hagemann: Friday 6th March @ the Fremantle Arts Centre

Westerly Stories – 6^th March @ 1pm.

We will be looking at two short stories published in your membership copy of Westerly #59.2 (Rosie Barter’s & Rashida Murphy’s). It would be great if you could bring your copy to class.

Class will include reading of extracts from Not Sweet, No Sweet at all by Rosie Barter & from The Moon Still Speaks by Rashida Murphy. Writing exercises and discussion will revolve around folk tales, legends and folklore.

Room 3, 1.00pm-3.00pm, Fremantle Arts Centre: OOTA $20.00: Non-OOTA $25

Rosie Barter
Before turning her hand to writing, Rosie Barter was a senior lecturer in graphic design at Curtin University for 24 years. She has been widely published in literary magazines and anthologies.
Her story Not Sweet, Not Sweet at all won 2nd prize in the Lyndall Hadow/Donald Stuart Short story competition 2014.
from the judge's report...
This amazing piece of writing is not steeped in traditional literature at all. In fact it’s avant-garde in the extreme. But it is no less worthy of recognition for all that. It’s beautifully written in a Gothic and disturbing way that both moved and chilled me. The story’s gradual revelation of a really peculiar (and disturbing) madness is delicious and, while my prerequisite ending appears missing, I think I can just see its ghost over there... Piglets as pincushions.”

Rashida Murphy is a writer of short stories, poems and one novella. Her short stories and poetry has been published in literary magazines and anthologies since 1990. Her work explores the relationships between fathers, mothers and daughters and the impact of physical dislocation on those relationships. Murphy holds two Masters degrees, one in English Literature, the other in Creative Writing. Currently she is undertaking a Phd at Edith Cowan University.

First Dog on the Moon and the Fair Australia Prize

First Dog on the Moon and the Fair Australia Prize

We're very pleased to announce that First Dog on the Moon will be a judge of the graphics and cartoons section of the Fair Australia Prize.

The Fair Australia Prize is actually four prizes of $5000 each: graphics and cartoons, poetry, essays and fiction. Supported by the National Union of Workers the prize engages with issues of working conditions, fairness and equality and changing Australia. Entries close 1 April.

https://overland.org.au/2015/01/the-overland-nuw-fair-australia-prize/

Writers at Writers' Festivals and their Books: Prose Class 20th February, 2015

Friday, 20th February is Prose with Helen Hagemann
Fremantle Arts Centre: Helen’s start will be directly after lunch in Room 3, 1.00pm-3.00pm
Class to read an excerpt from Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. Writing Exercises and discussion will revolve around writers at writers' festivals. In particular we will look at Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and her sudden switch of POV mid-paragraph. Do we make or like that leap as readers and do we follow suit as writers?
OOTA $20.00: Non-OOTA $25

Dame Hilary Mary Mantel, DBE FRSL (born Thompson on 6 July 1952), is an English writer whose work ranges in subject from personal memoir and short story to historical fiction and essay. She has twice been awarded the Booker Prize. She won her first Booker Prize for the 2009 novel Wolf Hall, a fictional account of Thomas Cromwell's rise to power in the court of Henry VIII. She won her second Booker Prize for the 2012 novel Bring Up the Bodies, the second installment of the Thomas Cromwell trilogy. Mantel was the first woman to receive the award twice, following in the footsteps of J. M. Coetzee, Peter Carey and J. G. Farrell (who posthumously won the Lost Man Booker Prize). The third installment to the Thomas Cromwell trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, is set to be published in 2015.

Wolf Hall
Tudor England. Henry VIII is on the throne, but has no heir. Cardinal Wolsey is charged with securing his divorce. Into this atmosphere of distrust comes Thomas Cromwell - a man as ruthlessly ambitious in his wider politics as he is for himself. His reforming agenda is carried out in the grip of a self-interested parliament and a king who fluctuates between romantic passions and murderous rages.

Currently, Hilary Mantel is a guest author at this year's Perth Writers Festival.

References: Goodreads & Wikipedia.

Our Newsletter

Starting from March 2015, Writing at the Centre plans to keep our Prose writers informed of upcoming classes, opportunities and events that would be of interest. This is a separate newsletter to the Out of the Asylum Network Tuesday and hopefully you will enjoy this little effort that we'll put together from time to time. The newsletter will be available on this site for download (Just click 'newsletter' tab). Your choice is to view it in your browser or to download and print. You can receive it via email or as a class handout. Also this newsletter hopes to be as brief as possible.

We aim to advertise future classes, although not the poetry class by Shane McCauley as he is quite popular by word of mouth, from years of expertise and experience, and working in the writing community. If there is any local or national poetry news we will post here as a separate blog entry.

If you are interested in attending our classes, send us an email to writingatthecentre@gmail.com

Many thanks,
Helen Hagemann

News for writers in the Fremantle Community, Perth & Surrounds

Writing at the Centre, an independent writing group in affiliation with Out of the Asylum Writers Group, offers alternate prose and poetry classes each Friday afternoon @ 1pm in Room 3 of the Fremantle Arts Centre. We originally emerged from a grass-roots writing class as early as in the days when Elizabeth Jolley taught at the lovely old heritage building, Fremantle Arts Centre. Susan Hayes, the State Literature Officer, held office in the building and organised and supported creative writing classes. From there it grew into a non-profit organisation known as OOTA (Out of the Asylum Inc.) and classes now flourish with the attendance of OOTA writers, encouraged by tutors Shane McCauley and Helen Hagemann. Our aims are to nurture writers, to encourage the craft of writing and to promote our writing-base for those writers interested in furthering their skills, their publications and career.

The Centre provides a a fortnightly course in poetry from January to December in the capable hands of Shane McCauley. Helen Hagemann conducts the prose class and offers a variety of studies, readings, writing exercises, and critiquing sessions that also run fortnightly from February to December.


The grounds at the Fremantle Arts Centre

In the coming months, we will be posting writing news, events, local workshops, and advertising our own independent class news. This may develop into a newsletter page, as well as an A5 printed sheet for prospective new members who attend the class for the first time. It is envisaged that we will also have a publication page where you can read our writers' work. This will be mainly prose, however we will not exclude poetry. We hope to promote our existing class members as well as reach as many beginners of writing as possible.

Helen Hagemann's First Class for 2015 @ the FAC

Flash Fiction: Introducing Angela Meyer, Lydia Davis & Girija Tropp

Helen Hagemann's first class for 2015 at the FAC on Friday 6th February @ 1pm looks at Flash Fiction. This workshop introduces three exponents of the form, Angela Meyer, Lydia Davis and Girija Tropp.

“For Sale: Baby shoes, Never worn” is a short-short story by Ernest Hemingway, and in its brilliance conveys more than it says in 6 words.

Nowadays we call this micro- or flash fiction. However, the general rule for flash fiction is a word count of a maximum of 250 to 500 words; although many might argue with this. Seizure publishes prose between 50 and 500 words. Cuttlefish (WA’s new journal from Roland Leach) requires up to 250 words. Spineless Wonders assembles prose poetry and micro-fiction together routinely – often without signalling a difference between the forms.

-o-

Girija Tropp is a winner of the Boston Review Prize and the Josephine Ulrick Literature Award 2006. She has been published in AGNI, Best Australian Stories 2005 and 2006, Fiction International, Mississippi Review, Denver Quarterly, and other magazines. Her Twitter handle is @girijawrites. (updated 11/2013)

Angela Meyer, is a writer, editor, professional reader, Melburnian, whisky-drinker, Bowie nut, movie-lover, vintage fan, absurdist, aesthete, and blogs at Literary Minded. She is the author of a book of flash fiction, Captives (Inkerman & Blunt), and the editor of an anthology of spooky Australian stories, The Great Unknown (Spineless Wonders).

Lydia Davis, award-winning fiction writer and translator, was born in Northampton (Massachusetts) in 1947. She is famous in literary circles for her extremely brief and brilliantly inventive short stories. In 2013, she was the winner of the Man Booker International prize. Her recent collection, “Varieties of Disturbance” (May 2007), was featured on the front cover of the “Los Angeles Times Book Review”. Her “Samuel Johnson Is Indignant” (2001) was praised by “Elle” magazine for its “Highly intelligent, wildly entertaining stories, bound by visionary, philosophical, comic prose—part Gertrude Stein, part Simone Weil, and pure Lydia Davis.”