August at the Memoir Club: PROGRAM CHANGE!!                  Tuesday  25 August 2014  6.00—9.00PM at Randwick Literary Institute 60 Clovelly Road, Randwick 2031 RSVP by 23 August: MemoirClubSydney@gmail.com Donation: $30/$25* (to cover teaching component)

Rosada’s delicious menu:  Chickpea curry. Spinach and potato curry with tomato, coconut and coriander. Brown rice and basmati rice. ($15, please book by texting: 0450 907 422)

News flash: Sadly, we have to postpone Rosie Scott’s session in August for personal reasons. We wish Rosie and family all the best and we’ll let you know asap the new date for her session. Instead, join our Memoir Club Writing Masterclass with  Barbara Brooks and Alison Lyssa

This masterclass was hugely successful when we ran it in 2014, helping participants to grapple with writing craft particular to memoir. Once again, you are invited to fire your writerly imagination and gather crafty writing advice with fabulous writing teachers Barbara Brooks and Alison Lyssa. The focus is on generating new writing - helping you get started on a project you have in mind - or delving into your own writing and memoir project. Not to be missed!

Alison and Barbara will introduce you to a page from the award-winning memoir H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald, revealing the way she achieves, with unflinching honesty and intensity of emotion, a sense of momentum in brilliant descriptive writing.  Then some writing exercises to fire your imagination, stimulate memories and generate new writing. After a break and Rosada's delicious vegetarian meal, we’ll divide into small groups to discuss your writing exercises and insights.

For the writing exercises please bring:

• writing materials and
• your sense of adventure and your imagination  

(The extract from H is for Hawk that we'll talk about is from pp85-86 of the Vintage paperback; when you rsvp we'll send you scanned pages.) 

*PLEASE NOTE: the donation for the masterclass session this meeting will be $30, to cover the teaching component.

Barbara Brooks  is a writer & teacher of writing. She has taught at the University of Technology, Sydney & other universities, and runs her own Masterclasses in memoir & fiction – see her blog at http://bbwritinglife.blogspot.com.au/. She has published Leaving Queensland, & Eleanor Dark: a writer’s life. Her latest work, Verandahs, is memoir/fiction. To read published extracts, go to http://uts.academia.edu/BarbaraBrooks.

Alison Lyssa is a playwright, editor and writing mentor. She has published plays, poetry, short fiction & essays. She has mentored documentary film-makers at AFTRS, run community theatre projects, & taught Writing at UTS, UWS & Macquarie University. Her new play, Hurricane Eye was written as her doctorate in creative writing. Pinball, first performed at Sydney’s Nimrod Theatre in 1981, was revived for the 2015 Mardi Gras, to acclaim.

 

Randwick Literary Institute, 60 Clovelly Rd Randwick. Street parking available. Clovelly bus 339 on the doorstep. For how to get there, see: http://randwickliteraryinstitute.com.au/faqs/

This month the Memoir Club presents award-winning author Rosie Scott in conversation with Beth Yahp about Rosie’s latest book: The Intervention: An Anthology, co-edited with Anita Heiss. The book is a compelling challenge to the 2007 NT Intervention by the Howard Government and its ongoing breach of human rights. In fiction, memoir, essays, poetry and communiqués, the dramatic story of the Intervention and the despair, anguish and anger of our First Nations peoples comes alive through the work of twenty of Australia’s finest

writers, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, together with powerful statements from Northern Territory Elders. Many of these stories are about how people’s lives are lived and their experiences determined by forces beyond their control, usually out of sight of mainstream Australia.

Randwick Literary Institute

60 Clovelly Road, Randwick 2031

Tuesday 25 August 2015, 6.00-9.00PM

$15/10 – RSVP: memoirclubsydney@gmail.com

Rosie Scott, a writer, teacher, mentor and activist, has long experience in listening to and enabling the telling of such life stories, through her own writing and the anthologies she co-edited with Tom Keneally, AnotherCountry (2005) and A Country Too Far: Writings on Asylum Seekers (2013).

‘The Intervention to us was like Australia declaring war on us and in the process

they demonised and dehumanized Aboriginal men women and children.’

Rosalie Kunoth-Monks

Dr Rosie Scott has published six novels, short stories,

poems, essays, a play and three anthologies. Well known and

admired for her commitment to social justice, she was nominated

with Tom Keneally for the Human Rights Medal, and awarded the

2015 STARTTS Humanitarian Award for her work with refugees.

She was co-founder of Women for Wik in 2007.

‘My writing is fuelled by me as a totality, but also by my political feelings,’ Rosie writes. ‘I’m particularly interested in writing about the outsiders of society, people way outside my own experience.’  Join us for a discussion of Rosie Scott’s new anthology of moving, impassioned, spiritual, angry and authoritative documentation of a most controversial event, as well as the way her own‘totality’ and ‘political feelings’ have influenced the writing life and work of this committed and inspirational author.

Beth Yahp is an award winnning novelist who has also published nonfiction and lyrics for opera. She is a highlt regarded teacher of writing, currently teaching the writing program at Sydney University. Her memoir, Eat First, Talk Later, will be published by Random House in September.

For a delicious vegetarian supper ($15), please book by texting

Rosada at 0450 907 422 before Sunday 23 August.

Barbara Brooks

http://bbwritinglife.blogspot.com.au/

http://uts.academia.edu/BarbaraBrooks