Friday, April 28, 2017
Thursday, October 15, 2015
Special message from the Memoir Club: October session cancelled
Randwick Literary Institute
60 Clovelly Road
Randwick 2031
We’re very sorry to say that at this late date we have to cancel our October session. Due to unfortunate circumstances, Rosie Scott is unable to be our guest this month. We send our warm wishes to Rosie and her family.
Change of date for next session: Patti Miller in conversation with Beth Yahp on Tuesday Dec 1st
The good news is that our next meeting, the last for the year, will be Patti Miller in conversation with Beth Yahp about Beth’s memoir, Eat First, Talk Later. It’s a treat – a memoir of family, feasting, and the travelling self, evoking life in Malaysia and telling some of its diverse history. Patti Miller writes memoir and nonfiction - her latest book is Ransacking Paris - and is a much admired teacher of life writing. It’s the last Memoir Club meeting for the year, so we’ll make it a celebration! The date has been changed to Tuesday 1 December, put it in your diary now.
The not-so-good news is that it may be the final meeting of the Memoir Club. We’ve been going for three years now, with the support of our guest speakers and our members (you!), and much hard work behind the scenes from Beth, initially with Brent, Alison and Barbara. This year the sessions have been organised and run by members of our committee. But life is unstoppable and work commitments, family commitments, and illness have made it impossible for some to contribute and difficult for others to continue. If you can commit to helping us, come along in December and hear more.
Memoir Club Committee: Alison Lyssa, Bindu Narula, Beth Yahp, Barbara Brooks, Josephine Grieve, Jessica Kirkness, Betty O’Neill, Emily Chantiri and Nasrin Mahoutchi
“What could be simpler to understand than the act of people
writing about what they know best, their own lives? But his apparently simple
act is anything but simple, for the writer becomes, in the act of writing, both
the observing subject and the object of investigation, remembrance, and
contemplation.”
Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson
Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson
For more news see Memoir Club Sydney on Facebook, or http://bethyahpwritingworks.blogspot.com.au/
Barbara Brooks
Tuesday, September 15, 2015
Thursday, August 20, 2015
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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)
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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)
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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
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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/
Friday, August 7, 2015
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
Thursday, June 25, 2015
what we're reading
I'm reading Griffith Review's 'great reads' emails, and the latest put me onto Chart Collective.
Chart Collective is a not-for-profit publishing venture from Melbourne, started under the auspices of The Lifted Brow. Chart Collective looks beyond the idea that people are separate to nature, to explore the ways our stories are woven into the Australian environment. Our publishing model incorporates online and printed publication of text, image and sound, as well as in situ events, affording us the freedom to explore ideas in whichever format best suits a concept, a community or a contributor.
Within our malleable model we invite people from across disciplines and Australian communities to consider and respond to the ways their own and others’ experiences are mapped in place and time; the ways these places inform our belief systems and sense of self; the ways we influence ecological systems, and the ways they influence us. In doing this, we want to uncover and strengthen the connections we have to our places, in order to better understand, respect and nourish the ecosystems that we, as people, are embedded in.
http://www.chartcollective.org/project/the-longer-light-series
It's just past the winter solstice, so I'm including the link to the 'Longer Light" series.
Wednesday, June 17, 2015
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Sunday, December 14, 2014
Writing book reviews
Book reviewing is another way for new writers to get into print and practice skills in another area of writing.
here are John Updike's 5 rules for reviewers:
- Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame them for not achieving what they did not attempt.
- Give them enough direct quotation – at least one extended passage – of the book’s prose so the reader can form their own impression, can get their own taste.
- Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.
- Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.
- If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author’s oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s theirs and not yours?
Thursday, August 21, 2014
a Masterclass at the Memoir Club
The Memoir Club: August Memoir Writing Masterclass with Barbara Brooks & Alison Lyssa
Tuesday, 26 August 2014, 6.00 - 9.00 PM
The Randwick Literary Institute,
60 Clovelly Road, Randwick 2031
RSVP: MemoirClubSydney@gmail.com
Our next Memoir Club meeting is an opportunity to fire your writerly imagination and garner crafty writing advice from two popular, highly regarded and extremely experienced writers and teachers of creative writing.
The Masterclass will focus on strategies, ideas and techniques to aid your writing project. Part of the evening will be a conversation between Barbara and Alison on the scope memoir offers for you to explore your story and your role as the ‘eye’ of that story – the ‘eye’ that is at once participant, narrator and interpreter of the thought, feeling and experience that your story illuminates.
Given memoir’s brilliant power of bricolage and its freedom to borrow from fiction, poetry and drama, we’ll be discussing such techniques as: the vivid depiction of place and people; the creation of scenes; and the writing of dialogue. And, there’s memoir’s power to use language: its clarity, its rhythms and its delight in metaphor. Important too – well, actually, crucial – is your participation. Your questions and input will be welcomed.
For part of the evening we will divide into two groups for writing exercises and discussion. For the writing exercises please bring:
Writing materials and your sense of adventure; and,
An object or photograph that connects you with a theme, person or place vital to your writing project.
60 Clovelly Road, Randwick 2031
RSVP: MemoirClubSydney@gmail.com
Our next Memoir Club meeting is an opportunity to fire your writerly imagination and garner crafty writing advice from two popular, highly regarded and extremely experienced writers and teachers of creative writing.
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| Photo from Bang2write.com |
Given memoir’s brilliant power of bricolage and its freedom to borrow from fiction, poetry and drama, we’ll be discussing such techniques as: the vivid depiction of place and people; the creation of scenes; and the writing of dialogue. And, there’s memoir’s power to use language: its clarity, its rhythms and its delight in metaphor. Important too – well, actually, crucial – is your participation. Your questions and input will be welcomed.
For part of the evening we will divide into two groups for writing exercises and discussion. For the writing exercises please bring:
Writing materials and your sense of adventure; and,
An object or photograph that connects you with a theme, person or place vital to your writing project.
Sunday, June 29, 2014
A new series of four masterclass workshops
I'm running a new series of four masterclass workshops on writing memoir - fictional memoirs and novels included. These workshops will run from September to December and will be four hours sessions on Saturday afternoons.
If you're interested contact me at bbwritinglife@gmail.com
Monday, June 23, 2014
Next
Tuesday’s Memoir Club presents a new talent that will change Australia’s contemporary
literary landscape. Come be among the first to share in the stories of Michael
Mohammed Ahmad, a young Lebanese writer from Western Sydney, whose work of
autobiographical fiction offers insight into the life and customs of The
Tribe, members of a small Muslim sect who fled to Australia just
before the civil war in Lebanon in 1975. Young Bani offers a child’s
unflinching yet wise view of the lives of three generations of an extended
family who live in Alexandria, The House of Adam:
“I
was only seven when this happened but it always feels like right now. My Tayta
raises her blouse and shows me her stomach. It’s so big it rests on her large
thighs. Her skin is golden and soft, and sometimes, when she holds me close and
kisses me, her body feels like a plastic bag filled with warm water. She only
has a few teeth left and she smiles between them. Tayta’s hands are like wood
because she has arthritis. They’re thick and brown and dry and she can hardly
move them, except for when she’s preparing aa-jeen, which is
what we call dough. Tayta places both her hands under the base of her stomach
and she lifts. She reveals to me eleven scars that look like train tracks
running in different directions just below her belly button. She points to one
and she says in Arabic, ‘This is your father, Jibreel.” Then she points to
another and says, ‘Here is your Uncle Ehud.’ Then she points to another and
another and another, and she lists her other three sons; ‘Osama, Ibrahim, and
the youngest, Ali.’ Then my Tayta points at two more scars and says, ‘Here are
the girls, Amina and Yasmine…’ She hesitates before she names the scar that
belongs to the third daughter. She says, ‘This is Mariam.’ Then my
grandmother’s smile withers and her few teeth look like they might fall out when
she points at the final three scars and says, ‘Here are Firaz, Khalil and
Shahrazat… they died before we left Lebanon.’"
Tuesday 24
June 2014
6.00—9.00PM
Randwick
Literary Institute
Michael Mohammed Ahmad
in conversation with Beth Yahp
Michael Mohammed Ahmad is proudly
from Western Sydney and has been engaged in nurturing and producing writing and
media from and about Western Sydney via Westside Publications and the Sweatshop
Western Sydney Literacy Movement. He is a Lebanese-Australian from a
Muslim-Alawite background and his first book, The Tribe (Giramondo,
2014), is an incredibly detailed, memoir novel based on the familial world
of his Western Sydney childhood.
Leading anthropologist Ghassan Hage
described The Tribe as ‘a significant and astonishing
novel that takes us inside the cultural world of the Adam family, a
socio-economically disadvantaged Australian Syro-Lebanese Alawite extended
family from Sydney and Melbourne… The book is in the best tradition of
ethnographic novels: it generously offers us access to a unique cultural world
and describes to us some of its features, warts and all, with remarkable
details.'
Ground-breaking, funny, intricate
and moving, The Tribe opens up Arab-Australian lives far from
the racist abstractions dished out by mainstream media. Michael Mohammed Ahmad
is an exciting new literary talent, whom the Memoir Club is honoured to present
this month.
Do come and share in his stories of
our multi-faceted culture and city!
Michael Mohammed Ahmad
is director of
SWEATSHOP: Western Sydney Literacy Movement. He was chief editor of Westside
Publications from 2005 to 2012. His essays and stories have appeared in the
Guardian, HEAT, Seizure, SBS Online, The Lifted Brow and Coming of Age: Growing
Up Muslim in Australia (Allen & Unwin). In 2012 he received the Australia
Council Kirk Robson Award in recognition of his leadership in community arts
and cultural development He is currently a doctoral candidate in the University
of Western Sydney Writing and Society Research Centre.
Beth Yahp is the author of a novel,
various short fiction and non-fiction, and works for the stage and radio. Beth
was recently awarded a Doctorate of Creative Arts from the University of
Technology, Sydney, for a travel memoir which is due to be published by
Random House Australia in 2015. Beth currently teaches in the Masters of
Creative Writing program at the University of Sydney.
About the Memoir Club:
a meeting place for readers and writers
When: Last Tuesday of every month (29 July, 26 August etc.).
When: Last Tuesday of every month (29 July, 26 August etc.).
Time: 6.00 - 9.00 PM (come at 5.30 PM to help set up and have a cuppa before the program starts at 6.00 PM)
Where: The Randwick Literary Institute, 60 Clovelly Road, Randwick 2031
Monday, May 26, 2014
Saskia Beudel at the Memoir Club 27/5/14
The Memoir Club Presents: Saskia Beudel in conversation with Barbara Brooks
Tuesday, 27 May 2014, 6.00 - 9.00 PM
The Randwick Literary Institute,
60 Clovelly Road, Randwick 2031
RSVP: learn@bigpond.net.au
Saskia Beudel’s A Country in Mind: Memoir With Landscape “intertwines genres of memoir, travel literature, historical and ecological writing in order to reveal the complex interplay between history, memory and landscapes”.—Autumn Royal,TEXT Review
After a period of loss, and much change, Saskia began walking. Within 18 months she had walked in the Snowy Mountains, twice along the south-west coast of Tasmania, the MacDonnell Ranges west of Alice Springs, the Arnhem Land plateau in Kakadu, the Wollemi National Park in New South Wales, and in Ladakh in the Himalayas. But she kept returning to the glowing ochre gorges of central Australia.
The book that emerged tells stories from Australia’s desert heart, examines the entanglement of Aboriginal and European cultures, remembers POW camps in Indonesia during World War II, and relives childhood epiphanies in a haunting collection of landscapes while tracing family secrets across the globe.
Saskia powerfully captures the enigmas of displacement, belonging and the intricacies, often strikingly at odds with one another, of Aboriginal and settler understandings of the desert environment in her book A Country in Mind, which will be discussed at the Memoir Club.
Saskia Beudel is the author of the novel Borrowed Eyes (Picador, 2002), which was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards for fiction and the Dobbie Awards for a first manuscript. She has published widely as an essayist, with works appearing in the Iowa Review, Best Australian Essays, HEAT, Overland and the Cultural Studies Review. Her second book, A Country in Mind, was published in 2013.
Barbara Brooks has published fiction, essays and a biography,Eleanor Dark: a writer’s life, and co-edited Mud Map: Australian women’s experimental writing. She teaches at UTS and Masterclasses (see http://bbwritinglife.blogspot.com.au/).
60 Clovelly Road, Randwick 2031
RSVP: learn@bigpond.net.au
After a period of loss, and much change, Saskia began walking. Within 18 months she had walked in the Snowy Mountains, twice along the south-west coast of Tasmania, the MacDonnell Ranges west of Alice Springs, the Arnhem Land plateau in Kakadu, the Wollemi National Park in New South Wales, and in Ladakh in the Himalayas. But she kept returning to the glowing ochre gorges of central Australia.
The book that emerged tells stories from Australia’s desert heart, examines the entanglement of Aboriginal and European cultures, remembers POW camps in Indonesia during World War II, and relives childhood epiphanies in a haunting collection of landscapes while tracing family secrets across the globe.
Saskia powerfully captures the enigmas of displacement, belonging and the intricacies, often strikingly at odds with one another, of Aboriginal and settler understandings of the desert environment in her book A Country in Mind, which will be discussed at the Memoir Club.
Saskia Beudel is the author of the novel Borrowed Eyes (Picador, 2002), which was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards for fiction and the Dobbie Awards for a first manuscript. She has published widely as an essayist, with works appearing in the Iowa Review, Best Australian Essays, HEAT, Overland and the Cultural Studies Review. Her second book, A Country in Mind, was published in 2013.
Barbara Brooks has published fiction, essays and a biography,Eleanor Dark: a writer’s life, and co-edited Mud Map: Australian women’s experimental writing. She teaches at UTS and Masterclasses (see http://bbwritinglife.blogspot.com.au/).
Wednesday, March 5, 2014
The Wheeler Centre in Melbourne (Books Writing Ideas) has a newsletter. The feature 'Dailies' has interviews with writers or articles about writers and writing.
http://wheelercentre.com/dailies
http://wheelercentre.com/dailies
Tuesday, February 4, 2014
A new masterclass for 2014 will begin in March. Email me at bbwritinglife@gmail.com for more information.
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Today,
Peter Rose, Editor of Australian
Book Review, announced details of the Australian Book Review Dahl Trust
Fellowship, a new association for the magazine. The Fellowship will form
the cornerstone of ABR’s
first Environment issue, to be published in October 2014.
ABR seeks proposals for a cogent piece of
journalism on any aspect of eucalypts. Any Australian writer with a
significant publication record (books, creative writing, essays, or
journalism) is eligible to apply. The Fellow’s article will appear in the
print magazine and ABR
Online.
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This Fellowship is
generously supported by Bjarne K. Dahl Trust. Peter Rose commented: ‘ABR is grateful to the
Trust for this far-sighted support for Australian writers. It represents an extension of our current partnerships and our editorial range, which is a great thing for the magazine.’ The ABR Writers’ Fellowships are intended to reward outstanding Australian writers, to enhance ABR through the publication of major works of literary journalism, and to advance the magazine’s commitment to critical debate.
Eligibility and entry guidelines
Full
details about how to apply and eligibility can be found on the ABR website.
Closing date
The deadline for applications
is 31 March 2014.
Applicants are encouraged to discuss their proposals with the Editor before
submitting them.
More information
Contact Peter Rose on (03)
9699 8822 or editor@australianbookreview.com.au
ABR gratefully acknowledges the support of the Bjarne K. Dahl Trust. |
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Sunday, October 13, 2013
Wednesday, September 4, 2013
Tuesday, August 6, 2013
Thursday, July 25, 2013
joanne burns at the Memoir Club for Readers and Writers
| Poet joanne burns joins up to talk about memoir or autobiographical moments that sometimes influence her work, in conversation with Barbara Brooks. Joanne is an accomplished poet and one of the best social satirists we have, with a subtle but wicked sense of humour. She's a legend - Spineless Wonders have just named their prose-poem award after her. http://shortaustralianstories.com.au/ joanne is going to treat us to short readings from her work too. The Memoir Club is a communal space to meet other writers and readers and converse about all things to do with reading and writing memoir. Meetings on the last Tuesday of every month, at the Randwick Literary Institute. Delicious food from Rosada's Kitchen.
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