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

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.