Memoir Club: Fiona McGregor in conversation with Guy Davidson

 

Tuesday, 25 November 2014
6.00 - 9.00 PM

The Randwick Literary Institute,
60 Clovelly Road, Randwick 2031
RSVP: memoirclubsydney@gmail.com

The dictum goes: "Go to the bars of a place to understand its living. Go to the museums to understand its dead.”

Next Tuesday’s Memoir Club presents acclaimed and iconoclastic writer and performance artist Fiona McGregor, whose memoir Strange Museums takes us to both the bars and the museums of Poland, where she travelled as part of the performance duo senVoodoo in 2006. 

“Fiona McGregor is an Australian artist and author with the sharp eye of a crowmagpie. She took an unusual tour of Poland in 2006, to destinations determined by her life with senVoodoo... whose work evolved from 90s club culture in Sydney. They were invited to perform at a number of festivals. This takes her far off the tourist track to towns hardly worthy of a postcard, where the people are alive and hungry for art.”—Anna Hedigan, ABC RN’s The Book Show, 2009.

senVoodoo: AñA Wojak & Fiona McGregor 
(Photo: Waded, from RealTime Arts)

As critic Keith Gallasch writes in RealTime Arts magazine: “Strange Museums is no mere travel book where the lone adventurer loses herself in a foreign land at our leisure, for our pleasure in the exotic; perhaps disturbing our usual sense of self, possibly revealing the transformation or emotional growth of the writer, maybe not, Strange Museums is more driven than that: a quest to understand an unfamiliar, often evasive and sometimes hostile culture and an attempt to place the encounter in the context of being woman, lesbian, queer, Australian and artist."

Come join this extraordinary journey with Fiona McGregor, in conversation with Guy Davidson about the crafting of her challenge to traditional definitions of adventure. 

Fiona McGregor is a Sydney author and performance artist. She writes novels, essays, articles and critiques, and is a regular reviewer of performance for RealTime. Since 1993, she has published 5 books. The latest, Indelible Ink, was published by Scribe in 2010 and won the Age Book of the Year in 2011. 

Fiona has been working solo as a performance artist since 2007, creating work in galleries, at festivals, as interventions, and in nature. Her more recent works include Vertigo, which culminated in a major show at Artspace in November 2011 and You Have the Body, a meditation on unlawful detention. For more info, see: http://www.fionamcgregor.com/home

Guy Davidson is Discipline Leader of English and Writing, and Senior Lecturer at the University of Wollongong. He has published widely on gender and sexuality in literature. His book Queer Commodities: Contemporary US Fiction, Consumer Capitalism, and Gay and Lesbian Subcultures was published in 2012.

When: last Tuesday of every month. The Memoir Club goes into recess over the summer, and will recommence in March 2015.

Time: 6.00 - 9.00 PM (come for a cuppa and help us set up at 5.30 PM - please remember to bring your own cup!)

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/

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: $10 at the door for hall hire, refreshments and speakers.

Food: $15 for a plate of delicious vegetarian finger food (different each meeting). Ring or text to book a plate: 0450 907 422.

Future Speakers: the program is currently being developed and will be announced at the beginning of 2015. We'll keep you posted!

Look forward to seeing you there! Please do pass information on to anyone who might be interested in this community gathering.

mem·oir /ˈmemˌwär/
Noun. A historical account or biography written from personal knowledge. An autobiography or a written account of one's memory of certain events or people.

“A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us."
                                                                                                          —John Steinbeck

“What is one supposed to say in response to prejudice against one’s own, in a foreign place, in the house of such gracious hosts? Nothing unless you feel there is a sympathetic opening. And the alacrity alone with which this old chestnut has plopped onto the table is a warning in itself. My queer radar advises me: keep quiet. Protect yourself. The writer takes advantage, as writers do. Listen up, she whispers. Bear witness."
                                                                                                          —Fiona McGregor

“You can close your eyes to reality, but not to memories."
                                                                                                         —Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

Memoir Club Lunchtime Panel at the Randwick Literary Institute's Annual Arts Festival 2014

When: Sunday, 16 November 2014, 1.00 - 3.00 PM

The Randwick Literary Institute,
60 Clovelly Road, Randwick 2031
RSVP: MemoirClubSydney@gmail.com

Beth Spencer, Beth Yahp and Jessica Kirkness in conversation about the challenges and pleasures of writing their recent memoirs

The Memoir Club is honoured to be part of the Randwick Literary Institute's Annual Arts Festival in 2014 with this special event. 

Do come and join in the conversation as these three writers discuss the challenges and pleasures of writing their "work of memory", read from their memoirs and present practical advice for other writers who are engaged in the same process to get started or keep going, including a writing exercise or two.  There will also be an "open reading" section for members and guests who may like to share their work on the day (if you'd like to participate, do contact memoirclubsydney@gmail.com, as there are limited spots).

Beth Spencer’s verse memoir, Vagabondage, has just been released by the University of Western Australia Press; Beth Yahp’s travel-memoir, Eat First, Talk Later is due to be published by Random House in 2015; and Jessica Kirkness has just completed her Masters of Research, which included a creative nonfiction work of memoir, titled A Symphony.

 

Beth Spencer: 'Vagabondage traces my journey from when I decided to sell my house and garden in Creswick, a small town in country Victoria, through to buying a van and going on the road, and wanders back and forth through parts of my childhood as the physical journey very rapidly also became an interior one.'

Beth Yahp: 'The narrator of my memoir, who is both me and not-me, drags her septuagenarian parents on a road trip around their former homeland, Malaysia, attempting to retrace their honeymoon trip of 45 years ago. Around them, corruption, censorship of the media and all forms of expression, detentions without trial and deaths in custody continue, and street protests are violently put down by riot police. Only the family mantra, “Eat first, talk later”, keeps the family (and perhaps the country) from falling apart.'

 

Jessica Kirkness: 'My memoir, A Symphony, is an invitation into the particular world of deafness belonging to my grandparents. It weaves together a number of stories—of my Grandfather's boyhood illness and subsequent deafness, of my Grandmother's elocution lessons where she learned to speak with chalk-dust and mirrors. It explores both the intimacies and distances in my relationship with my grandparents as we negotiate "the hearing line"—the invisible boundary between the the deaf and the hearing.'

 

Beth Spencer is an Australian author of poetry, fiction, essays and much in between. Her first book of fiction, How to Conceive of a Girl, was runner up for the Steele Rudd award. It was originally published by Vintage/ Random House Australia, and is now available as a Kindle ebook. Her book of poetry — Things in a Glass Box —  was published as a part of the SCARP/Five Islands New Poets series, and selections were broadcast as a feature on Radio National’s Poetica. She’s also published essays, academic articles, and newspaper columns; won the Age short story award; and written and produced work for ABC Radio National.

Beth Yahp currently lectures in the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Sydney, as well as teaches intensive Memoir/ Fiction/ Travel Writing masterclasses for writers who want to focus on a specific writing project. She is one of the organisers and founding members of The Memoir Club, Sydney, and her travel-memoir Eat First, Talk Later is forthcoming in 2015 (Random House Australia).

Jessica Kirkness is a young writer who lives and works in Sydney. She has just completed her Masters of Research at Macquarie University, and is hoping to begin her PhD next year. Her thesis, which is part creative, part theoretical, looks at the intersection of disability and deafness with nonfiction literature, and is informed by her experiences growing up with deaf grandparents. Jessica's memoir titled ‘A Symphony’ discusses her grandparents experiences of being deaf, and attempts to narrate their unique ways of engaging sensorially with the world. In her writing, Jessica discusses her grandparents’ love of music and explores the surprising and counter-intuitive ways her familial relationships are informed by music.

Memoir Club Special Night of Readings

Next meeting: Tuesday, 28 October 2014, 6.00 - 9.00 PM

The Randwick Literary Institute,   

60 Clovelly Road, Randwick 2031

RSVP: MemoirClubSydney@gmail.com 

 
A Special Night of Readings 

by Members and Guests

Image: journals by Barry Silver ex Flickr Creative Commons

Adam Aitken

Lizzie Cahill

Nola Farman

Josephine Grieve

Hilary Hewitt

Siobhan Moylan

Julie Rado

Bronwyn Rennex

Tan Truong

Nicola Walker

This month we celebrate works-in-progress by ten of our Memoir Club members and guests in a series of short showcase readings. Come share in the wealth of “spaced flashes”—the stories, experiences and perspectives that speak of “the bright blocks of perception” that result from an examined life.

As Vladimir Nabokov describes it in Speak, Memory: “I see the awakening of consciousness as a series of spaced flashes, with the intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed, affording memory and a slippery hold.”

Come share in a constellation of these "bright blocks of perception” at our next meeting! From Saigon to Sydney, via Maputo, the ‘Elderly Express' and Bob Marley, our readers invite us to enter into their remembered and imagined worlds.

From seasoned performers to readers who have never read in public before, our readers offer us their unique views. Please come and support this night of sharing and celebration!

Adam Aitken used to teach Creative Writing at UTS. His published work includes four books of poetry, a few smaller chapbooks, a thesis on representation of Asians in Australian fiction and non-fiction, and narrative pieces in Picador New Writing, Life Writing, HEAT and Griffith Review.

Lizzie Cahill was a model in the 1960's, when she developed a fascination for the rag trade. She started designing and selling her own line at the Paddington Markets in the 70's and opened her first Lizzie Collins store in Double bay in 1980. For the last decade she been acting in TV commercials, TV series and movies. This is her first attempt at writing short stories. 

Nola Farman is an interdisciplinary artist and writer - trained as a sculptor, making large and small public artworks and installations in a variety of situations using various materials and technologies. PhD title: Fugitive Practices: the contemporary artists book.

Josephine Grieve has written for publications including Harper's Bazaar, Elle, Rolling Stone, The Australian and ABC Radio National. Her chapter, 'Renaissance of the Imagination' was published in Germany in 1999. She is doing a Master's in creative writing at UTS and writing a memoir of her pilgrimage across Spain with her young daughters, Luna and Rosa.

Hilary Hewitt lives and works in Sydney’s inner west. She was runner up in the 2013 joanne burns microlit award and shortlisted in the 2012 Overland Victoria University Short Story Prize for New and Emerging Writers and the Margaret River Short Story Competition 2013.

Siobhan Moylan is a health journalist—formerly at the ABC, and now work at a neuroscience institute. She has produced radio both at the ABC and in commercial land for 15 years. Her love of radio and sound is now practiced at Eastside radio in Paddington where she hosts Monday Drive. Siobhan is a storyteller who would like to write more.

Julie Rado was born in Australia in 1963. Her love of music has given her a freedom of expression: in poetry, dance, and songs. She has written songs & poetry & has recently self published her memoir- Breath to Consciousness. She held an executive position in a worldwide Rastafarian organization. Julie also worked for an online website for five years, where she interviewed many of the great reggae artists.

Bronwyn Rennex is Director of Stills Gallery in Paddington. Her art practice involves words and photos. She is working (very slowly) on a collection of short essays/creative non-fiction pieces about memory and family and getting to know your parents long after they are gone.

Nicola Walker worked for the Times Literary Supplement for a decade, ten years ago. She has spent the past decade struggling to write a book about visiting her sister in Mozambique, discovering during this struggle that she needed to discard much of what she'd learned during her decade at the TLS. 

Tan Truong is a single parent with two teenage children. She was a social worker but now runs a homestay business catering for international and local students. Tan, her parents, and seven other siblings came to Australia in 1979 as Vietnamese refugees.  She was ten then.  Tan is currently working on stories from her childhood memories both from Vietnam and in Sydney.

When: last Tuesday of every month (25 November; then the Memoir Club goes into recess over the summer, and resumes in March 2015)

Time: 6.00 - 9.00 PM (come for a cuppa and help us set up at 5.30 PM - please remember to bring your own cup!)

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/

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: $10 at the door for hall hire, refreshments and to pay our speakers.

Food: $15 for a plate of delicious vegetarian finger food (different each meeting). Ring or text to book a plate: 0450 907 422.

Future Speakers: Fiona McGregor (November)

Look forward to seeing you there! Please do pass information on to anyone who might be interested in this community gathering.

mem·oir /ˈmemˌwär/
Noun. A historical account or biography written from personal knowledge. An autobiography or a written account of one's memory of certain events or people.

"I felt as if I was being bundled through the turnstiles to board the ‘ELDERLY EXPRESS’. I was inwardly kicking and screaming. ‘NO…! I'm not ready yet.' I knew that once I boarded that train, disembarking would be out of the question."

                                    —Lizzie Cahill

                 
"When I was about eight years old, I fell into a fish pond at our farm in Lai Thieu. I swear I swallowed a fish. I was wearing a beautiful bright orange crocheted top with a skirt. It turned orange-brown after this incident and I couldn’t ever wear it again."

                                       —Tan Truong

"She pointed at the grey of my shirt with her bent arthritic finger and said, tapping slowly on it, ‘That’s exactly the colour of your father’s face when I went to see him after he died.’ Great, I thought. I’m wearing a corpse coloured shirt. Or more to the point, it was now wearing me."

                                —Bronwyn Rennex

Ross Gibson at The Memoir Club for Readers and Writers

Next meeting: Tuesday, 30 September 2014, 6.00 - 9.00 PM

The Randwick Literary Institute,
60 Clovelly Road, Randwick 2031
RSVP: MemoirClubSydney@gmail.com

Memoir Classic with Ross Gibson, speaking about James Agee’s  
Knoxville: Summer of 1915

'We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the time I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.’—James Agee, Knoxville: Summer of 1915

 

James Agee

Originally written in 1935 and published three years later in The Paris Review, James Agee's brief, lyrical evocation of life in Knoxville, Tennessee, over a long summer evening in 1915—a year before the author's own father's death in an automobile accident—has become a classic of American literature. Capturing a ‘marvel of dailiness’ from a five-year-old boy’s perspective, Agee’s prose has been described as ‘wondrous’—‘unabashedly poetic, sacramental in its embrace of reality, and rhythmical as rain on a Tennessee tin roof’ (Will Blythe, The New York Times Sunday Book Review).  

 Legend has it that Agee wrote Knoxville in one 90-minute sitting and never touched it again until it was stitched in, posthumously, to the start of A Death in the Family, his autobiographical novel which was published two years after Agee’s death in 1955, to great acclaim and a Pulitzer Prize in 1958. Despite or perhaps because of the improvised nature of the writing, the voice of Agee’s text seems to vacillate seamlessly between that of the child-narrator living out a seemingly endless summer evening of his childhood, in safety and domestic bliss, and an adult-narrator remembering with nostalgia and wistfulness those summer evenings long-gone.

This month the Memoir Club is delighted to present Ross Gibson as the guest speaker for our annual Memoir Classic meeting, in which we focus on a work of memoir that has had a profound and continuing effect upon the evolution of the genre.

Ross Gibson is renowned for the ’speculative brilliance’ of his work, that combines imagination with recorded history, and ’seeks out the ghosts’ that haunt a particular moment—say, Sydney Town after WW2, or a stretch of Queensland highway where bad things happen. 

Describing his own work as in a ‘composting’ phase at the moment, Ross will also share with us the processes and ways in which his own voice always eventually finds a way to push through the ‘traditions’ that he works with.

James Agee (1909-1955) was an American author, editor, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic. He was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, but lived most of his adult life in New York. His best known works include Knoxville: Summer of 1915, which was set to music for voice by Samuel Barber in 1947; a novel, A Death in the Family (1957), and as screenwriter, the screenplays for The African Queen (1951) and The Night of the Hunter (1954). He was also well known for his work of film criticism for The Nation, which was gathered into collections, Agee on Film I & II.

Ross Gibson is Centenary Professor of Creative & Cultural Research at the University of Canberra. As part of his research he works collaboratively to produce books, films and artworks, and over recent years has focussed on investigating the use of narrative and private ritual in the comprehension of everyday experience. Selected works include the books Seven Versions of an Australian Badland (2002), The Summer Exercises (2009) and 26 Views of the Starburst World (2012), the video installation Street X-Rays (2005), the interactive audiovisual environment BYSTANDER (a collaboration with Kate Richards) (2007) and the durational work Conversations II for the 2008 Biennale of Sydney. His more recent work has included the serialised photographic poem, AccidentMusic, published online weekly in partnership with the Justice & Police Museum in Sydney (2010-2013).

When: last Tuesday of every month (28 October, 25 November; then the Memoir Club goes into recess over the summer, and resumes in March 2015)

Time: 6.00 - 9.00 PM (come for a cuppa and help us set up at 5.30 PM - please remember to bring your own cup!)

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/

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: $10 at the door for hall hire, refreshments and speakers.

Food: $15 for a plate of delicious vegetarian finger food (different each meeting). Ring or text to book a plate: 0450 907 422.

Future Speakers: Members Night of Readings (October); Fiona McGregor (November)

Look forward to seeing you there! Please do pass information on to anyone who might be interested in this community gathering.

mem·oir /ˈmemˌwär/
Noun. A historical account or biography written from personal knowledge. An autobiography or a written account of one's memory of certain events or people.

“Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.”
                                                                                                          —Julian Barnes

“What happens when we remember? The word itself is telling. Re-member. It stems from two Latin roots: (a) memor: ’to be mindful’, and (b) membrum: ‘a limb’. When we remember, we bring something back to mind, and we also re-join the separate portions or limbs of a body of knowledge so that the cuts or dismemberments caused by amnesia can be overridden and so that a cohesive vision of past experience can come together momentarily. Furthermore, ’to remember’ is closely related to another organic verb: ’to record’, which means ’to bring back to the heart’."
                                                                                                          —Ross Gibson

“I was greatly interested in improvisatory writing, as against carefully composed, multiple-draft writing: i.e. with a kind of parallel to improvisation in jazz, to a certain kind of ‘genuine’ lyric which I thought should be purely improvised… It took possibly an hour and a half; on revision, I stayed about 98 per cent faithful to my rule for these ‘improvised’ experiments, against any revision whatever.”
                                                                                                          —James Agee

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: learn@bigpond.net.au

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.

PLEASE NOTE THAT THE DONATION FOR THE MASTERCLASS SESSION THIS MEETING WILL BE $20, to cover the teaching component.

Barbara Brooks is a writer and teacher of writing. She has taught at the University of Technology, Sydney and other universities, and runs her own BB Writinglife Masterclasses in memoir & fiction http://bbwritinglife.blogspot.com.au/. She has published a collection of short stories, Leaving Queensland, and a biography, Eleanor Dark: a writer’s life. Her latest work, Verandahs, is a memoir that crosses into fiction. Extracts have been published in magazines and anthologies. See http://uts.academia.edu/BarbaraBrooks.

Alison Lyssa is a playwright editor and writing mentor. She has published plays, poetry, short fiction and essays. She has mentored documentary film-makers at AFTRS, run community theatre projects in Western Sydney, and taught Writing for Performance and Creative Writing at UTS, UWS and Macquarie University. She recently gained a doctorate in creative writing with a new play, Hurricane Eye: A Masque for the Twenty-first Century.  Her play, Pinball, first performed at Sydney’s Nimrod Theatre in 1981, was revived for this year’s Mardi Gras, to acclaim.

When: last Tuesday of every month (30 Sept, 25 Oct etc.)

Time: 6.00 - 9.00 PM (come for a cuppa and help us set up at 5.30 PM - please remember to bring your own cup!)

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/

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: This month for the Memoir Writing Masterclass only: $20 at the door for hall hire, refreshments and speakers/ teachers.

Food: $15 for a plate of delicious vegetarian finger food (different each meeting). Ring or text to book a plate: 0450 907 422.

Future Speakers: Ross Gibson (Sept), Memoir Club Members Night (Oct).

Look forward to seeing you there! Please do pass information on to anyone who might be interested in this community gathering.

mem·oir /ˈmemˌwär/
Noun. A historical account or biography written from personal knowledge. An autobiography or a written account of one's memory of certain events or people.

“A memoir is a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by the idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver wisdom. Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events, it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense the writer is able to make of what happened. For that the power of a writing imagination is required.”                                                                                                                                      —Vivian Gornick

“I don’t know where the idea originated that memoir writing is cathartic. For me, it’s always felt like playing my own neurosurgeon, sans anesthesia. As a memoirist, you have to crack your head open and examine every uncomfortable thing in there."
                                                                                                                                     —Koren Zailckas

“Non-fiction, and in particular the literary memoir, the stylised recollection of personal experience, is often as much about character and story and emotion as fiction is."
                                                                                                                —Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

PLACES STILL AVAILABLE: Inviting the Muse: Creativity and Craft for Writers course at the NSW Writers Centre, starting 24 August 2014

“In order to create, we draw from our inner well. This inner well, an artistic reservoir, is ideally like a well-stocked trout pond. We’ve got big fish, little fish, fat fish, skinny fish—an abundance of artistic fish to fry. As artists, we must realise that we have to maintain this artistic ecosystem.”

                                                               —Julia Cameron

How do we nourish our inner wells of creativity amid busy and demanding lives? Do we have a story to tell, a novel, travel narrative or memoir that we're supposedly writing, but find ourselves constantly stalled? How do we keep the creative juices flowing?  

Over four Sunday mornings, author and creative writing teacher Beth Yahp shares practical, inspiring and fun ways to re-energise our creative selves—to invite the Muse back into our daily lives. The emphasis is on beginning a creative writing practice in order to keep your artistic reservoir well-stocked, whether you’re beginning a new writing project or looking to nourish an existing one on its journey towards completion.

As well as tending to creativity (making room for the Muse), this course for beginners and the more advanced also focuses on writing craft skills: using language effectively to “make things new”, creating believable characters, bringing places to life for the reader, and mapping our stories on the page. There will be in-class writing exercises, readings and discussion of students’ work.

As Helen Garner writes: “Curiosity is a muscle. Patience is a muscle. What begins as a necessary exercise gradually becomes natural. And then immense landscapes open up in front of you.” This course is for those who want to explore their creativity while honing their writing craft; to access and explore the “immense landscapes” of a more creative writing life.

Inviting the Muse: Creativity for Writers

To book: Online: http://www.nswwc.org.au/products-page/fiction/inviting-the-muse-creativity-for-writers/ or ring: (02) 9555 9757

When: 4 x Sunday mornings: 24, 31 August; 7 14 September, 10am-1pm
 
Cost: Full price: $440; Member: $310; Conc Member: $265
This course is for people who are interested in writing fiction, travel or life stories. It is for those who have a story to tell and have been wondering how to get that story going—to access the creative energy and writing craft practices that bring stories alive on the page. The course imparts ways to entice creativity back into our writing and daily lives, through a combination of short presentations, discussion of selected readings, writing exercises and workshopping to explore new ways of seeing and ‘making things new’ as writers. We explore meditation techniques, drama and drawing to access the parts of us where the muse lives.

Course Breakdown
 
Class 1: Inviting the Muse
  * The Child and the Critic in balance
  * Learning to play again; learning to ‘waste time’; learning to listen

Class 2: Translating the World to the Page
  * It’s All About Words: Curiosity, Vulnerability, Vocabulary
  * Creative Sources: Leap and the net will appear; the writer’s journal; memory

Class 3: Accessing Inner Lives
  * The Inner Lives of Characters
  *  The Secret Lives of Stories

Class 4: Creative Mapping of Places and Journeys
  * Mapping a place; mapping a journey
  * Which story do I tell, and how do I shape it?

Food: Tea and coffee making facilities will be provided. Course participants are advised to bring their own lunch as there are no cafes within easy walking distance.

Student Requirements: Pen and paper.

The Memoir Club: Mandy Sayer in conversation with Patti Miller

Tuesday, 29 July 2014, 6.00 - 9.00 PM

The Randwick Literary Institute,
60 Clovelly Road, Randwick 2031
RSVP: learn@bigpond.net.au 

Next Tuesday’s Memoir Club presents award-winning memoirist Mandy Sayer, whose latest work, The Poet’s Wife, begins: ‘Our marriage wasn’t always unhappy’.   

  Described as ‘a memoir of a marriage’, it is ‘a tale of passion, of love and betrayal, of jealousy and control. It is a tale of common- place cruelty; of an emotional cage the captive can only see with the benefit of hindsight. It is a compelling account of the kind of abusive relationship that leaves little physical evidence, but it is also a beacon of hope that shows escape and recovery are possible.’ (Kylie Mason, The Newtown Review of Books)
  
Mandy Sayer met Yusef Komunyakaa at Mardi Gras in New Orleans, when she was 22, and travelling around the US busking with her jazz musician father; Komunyakaa was starting out as a poet from the American South. ‘Even though we’d grown up in vastly different cultures and countries, we’d both known poverty, domestic violence and the expectation that neither one of us would ever amount to anything… That was probably what united us more than anything: our shared defiance of that prediction.’  

Mandy Sayer and American poet Yusef Komunyakaa on their wedding day in 1985.

By the end of their ten year marriage, he had become a professor of poetry and won the Pulitzer Prize; she had become a prize-winning writer and lecturer in writing herself, with his support, but things were unravelling.  Komunyakaa was ‘a fascinating poet but a puzzling husband’—‘by turns affectionate, protective, controlling, insulting and punitive’. Mandy became clinically depressed and contemplated suicide when the marriage became abusive.

‘The idea of a memoir as a “detective story by a wife about a husband” takes on a more forensic dimension when the poet’s wife begins to seek out clues…’ (Susan Sheridan, Sydney Review of Books). Yet, ‘the memoirist is creator of her personal myth’.

Mandy Sayer has had an extraordinary life, and her creative use of it has been described as the strength of her writing. Come share in both the extraordinary story of and the equally extraordinary story of her writing The Poet’s Wife. 

Mandy Sayer is a well-known writer—memoirist, novelist, poet, reviewer and columnist. She wond the Vogel award for her first novel, Mood Indigo, but is best known for her memoirs. Her first memoir, Dreamtime Alice, was about her career as a street performer with her father, tap dancing while he played jazz drums. This year she was the joint Nonfiction Writer in Residence at UTS (with her husband, Louis Nowra), and she is researching a book about the history of gypsies in Australia.

Patti Miller is the author of the bestselling autobiographical texts, Writing Your Life (1994) and The Memoir Book (2007), as well as four other books: The Last One Who Remembers (1997), Child (1998), Whatever The Gods Do (2003), and her most recent book The Mind of A Thief (2012), which won the NSW Community and Regional History Prize in 2013. Patti gives memoir workshops in Paris and Writing the Senses workshops in Ubud, as well as teaches 'True Stories' for the Faber Academy. Her new memoir, Ransacking Paris, is due in May 2015.

When: last Tuesday of every month (29 July, 26 August, 30 September etc.)

Time: 6.00 - 9.00 PM (come for a cuppa and help us set up at 5.30 PM - please remember to bring your own cup!)

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/

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: $10 at the door for hall hire, refreshments and speakers.

Food: $15 for a plate of delicious vegetarian finger food (different each meeting). Ring or text to book a plate: 0450 907 422.

Future Speakers: Beth Yahp & Barbara Brooks Memoir Masterclass (August); Ross Gibson (September); Members Night of Readings (October)

Look forward to seeing you there! Please do pass information on to anyone who might be interested in this community gathering.

mem·oir /ˈmemˌwär/
Noun. A historical account or biography written from personal knowledge. An autobiography or a written account of one's memory of certain events or people.

“The things that make you a functional citizen in society—manners, discretion, cordiality—don’t necessarily make you a good writer. Writing needs raw truth, wants your suffering and darkness on the table, revels in a cutting mind that takes no prisoners."
                                                                                                     —Natalie Goldberg

“I’m in control of the material… The good thing about being a writer is, usually the writer gets the final word."
                                                                                                          —Mandy Sayer

“To remember is to re-enter, and be riven.”
                                                                                                          —Harold Brodky

The Memoir Club: Michael Mohammed Ahmad in conversation with Beth Yahp

Tuesday, 24 June 2014, 6.00 - 9.00 PM

The Randwick Literary Institute,
60 Clovelly Road, Randwick 2031
RSVP: learn@bigpond.net.au

Next Tuesday’s Memoir Club presents a new talent that will change Australia’s contemporary literary landscape. 

 

Come share 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 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.'"

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.' (Overland Journal, Winter 2014)

Ground-breaking, funny, intricate and moving, The Tribe opens up Arab-Australian lives far from the racist abstractions dished out by the mainstream media. Michael Mohammed Ahmad is an exciting new literary talent, whom the Memoir Club is honoured to present this month. 

Michael Mohammed Ahmad 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 & Society Research Centre.

Michael Mohammed Ahmad as Billy "The Kid" Dib in I'm Your Man (Downstairs Belvoir , 2012)

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. She also runs small group masterclasses once or twice a year for writers of memoir, fiction and travel writing.

When: last Tuesday of every month (29 July, 26 August, 30 September etc.)

Time: 6.00 - 9.00 PM (come for a cuppa and help us set up at 5.30 PM - please remember to bring your own cup!)

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/

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: $10 at the door for hall hire, refreshments and speakers.

Food: $15 for a plate of delicious vegetarian finger food (different each meeting). Ring or text to book a plate: 0450 907 422.

Future Speakers: Mandy Sayer (July).

Look forward to seeing you there! Please do pass information on to anyone who might be interested in this community gathering.

mem·oir /ˈmemˌwär/
Noun. A historical account or biography written from personal knowledge. An autobiography or a written account of one's memory of certain events or people.

“Stories nurture our connection to place and to each other. They show us where we have been and where we can go. They remind us of how to be human, how to live alongside the other lives that animate this planet… When we lose stories, our understanding of the world is less rich, less true."                                                                                                           —Susan J. Tweit

“I once saw hourglasses in my grandmother’s eyes, and now I see them again, the sands of time dictating my future. But what if the desert in my grandmother’s eyes came to an end? What if it collided with the sea, somewhere, beyond the dunes?"                   —Michael Mohammed Ahmad

“When it comes to memoir, we want to catch the author in a lie. When we read fiction, we want to catch the author telling the truth.”
                                                                                                                      —Tayari Jones