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.

Our Memoir Club's next meeting is Tuesday 30 June, 6.00pm, at Randwick Literary Institute. Do join us to hear Anne Gorman in conversation with Julie Bail about Anne's memoir, The Country Wife, which Prof. Edmund Campion described as 'a triumph'. RSVP to Betty O'Neill: MemoirClubSydney@gmail.com Book your plate of yummy vegetarian food ($15, payable on the night). Text or phone our wonderful caterer Rosada by Sun. 28 June: 0450 907 422. Specify if you want gluten-free. Help needed to set up and pack away: Set up is from 5.30pm. We're usually packed up by 9pm. Please email Bindu Narula if you can volunteer: bindunarula@hotmail.com  Much appreciated! Entry donation: $15 / $10. Extra gifts welcomed too for a much needed PA system! Please broadcast the invitation to all who might be interested. Cheers, Barbara Brooks, Emily Chantiri, Josephine Grieve, Jessica Kirkness, Alison Lyssa, Nasrin Mahoutchi, Bindu Narula, Betty O'Neill and Beth Yahp (Memoir Club Committee).

Invitation to our next Memoir Club meeting: Tuesday 30 June 2015        6.00—9.00pm Randwick Literary Institute 60 Clovelly Road, Randwick 2031 RSVP by 28 May: memoirclubsydney@gmail.com Anne Gorman in conversation with Julie Bail

'Anne’s book is a triumph…. I kept admiring the way she did not attempt to jerk the readers’ emotions but told the story straight and honest and left readers to add their own emotions. Again and again I noticed how swiftly she delivered her narrative and admired the spare prose style that made this possible. It’s a big book but not a lengthy one.'   - Professor Edmund Campion. Join us and Anne Gorman, as she discusses her memoir The Country Wife, and the challenges of re-creating for the reader the intimate often grief-stricken and always deeply moving experiences of her girlhood, student life and marriage, while at the same time crafting an insightful wider context for her personal story.   Anne Gorman was born in Mudgee NSW, into a house of grief following the loss of her seventeen year old sister. Anne’s birth would be her mother’s eleventh but not the last.  When she was five, her mother’s nervous breakdown and her father’s death, events which coincided with the beginning of  World War 11, made for an unstable childhood.  Anne grew up in Sydney, and was educated at Kincoppal-Rose Bay, and for five glorious years at Sydney University, gaining degrees in Arts and Social Work. At  23 Anne found herself living in the Riverina on a sheep and wheat property, married and  pregnant, living a life she could never have imagined. When her husband became gravely ill, an illness lasting over 10 years, Anne found the courage to keep the farm and her family of five children afloat. Later as a widow and single mother, she grew into a woman of substance, taking an active part in the big issues of the day, within a much wider landscape. The Japanese had bombed the US fleet in Hawaii and then gone on to invade the Philippines, Northern Malaya and Hong Kong. Although I had no idea where those places were, everyone said this was a calamity and would have big consequences…… In Sydney there was a movement to arm the population. People trained as guerrillas, air–raid shelters were built and mass evacuations to the mountains took place. Children, especially, were being sent away from the coast to protect them from the unthinkable. Would we be among those to be shipped out? Please God make my mother look the other way! - Anne Gorman, The Country Wife. About the Memoir Club: a meeting place for readers and writers When: last Tuesday of the month (30 June, 28 July, etc., through to 24 Nov.) Time: 6.00 - 9.00pm. Come for a cuppa and chat from 5.45pm before the program starts at 6.00pm sharp. Help setting & clearing up: If you can help set up at 5.30pm, and/or stay at the end to help clear up, please email Bindu Narula who is co-ordinating volunteers: bindunarula@hotmail.com  Much appreciated!! Where: The Randwick Literary Institute (RLI), 60 Clovelly Road, Randwick NSW 2031. Street parking available. Clovelly bus 339 on the doorstep. For info on the venue and directions, see: http://randwickliteraryinstitute.com.au/faqs/ What: A communal space to meet other writers and readers and converse about all things to do with reading and writing memoir. We are interested in all kinds of life stories and in different ways of telling them. The genre of life writing and the possibilities of expanding and reworking the genre is exciting to us. Therefore we have a somewhat open and inclusive approach to what makes a memoir, and we hope you do too! Here is a space to connect with others and share ideas, questions and just hang out. Each meeting will start off with a talk, conversation or discussion about a particular topic or book, sometimes with a guest speaker or facilitator, then we move to an informal gathering and catch up. Donation: $15/$10 at the door for hall hire, refreshments and guest speakers. Food: $15 for a plate of delicious vegan food from Rosada's Kitchen. Please text or phone your order to Rosada on 0450 907 422 by Saturday 27 June, if possible, or by Sunday 28 June at the latest, to give Rosada time to prepare. Specify if you'd like the gluten-free option. Forthcoming Meetings: 30 June: Anne Gorman in conversation with Julie Bail. 28 July: Rosie Scott in conversation with Beth Yahp. 25 August: Writing Family History - Betty O'Neill. RSVP: to Betty O'Neill at memoirclubsydney@gmail.com We look forward to seeing you there! Please do pass the invitation on to anyone who might be interested.

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: 

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame them for not achieving what they did not attempt.
2. 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.
3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.
4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.
5. 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?

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. 

Photo from Bang2write.com

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.

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

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

RSVP Betty by 22 June: learn@bigpond.net.au 

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.). 

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

Tel: 02-9398 5203 (for directions and venue info) Street parking available. Clovelly bus 339 on the doorstep. For how to get there, see: http://randwickliteraryinstitute.com.au/faqs/

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/).