Level 4, room 403 function space, Centenary Building, University of Tasmania Grosvenor Street Sandy Bay
Summary:Hedberg Writer in Residence 2023 - Fiction Workshop : MASTERCLASS
Presenter(s):
- Michelle Cahill
Hedberg Writer in Residence 2023 - Fiction Workshop
MASTERCLASS
With Michelle Cahill, Hedberg Writer-in-Residence
Lived Experience: Writing in Hybrid Genres
This workshop draws from selected work by Nam Le, Toni Morrison, and my auto fictional story 'Letter to Virginia Woolf’ exploring how the writing of lived experience can open new possibilities for narrative structure, temporal order and hybridity. Can this benefit writers who do not feel politically or aesthetically confined to structurally stable narratives? What is the aesthetics of the fragment and the role of metafiction in the novelisation of lived experiences of pleasure, trauma, absurdity?
The goals for learning are to consider some of the principles of narrative structure and craft, to consider approaches to writer’s block, & to consider memory, metatextuality, fiction and autofiction. I give an overview of my work as a writer interested in minority experience, as well as more general comments on the writing life, and publishing.
Reading Materials
- Story: Letter to Virginia Woolf , Michelle Cahill
- Story: Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice, Nam Lee
- Essay by Toni Morrison: Memory Creation and Writing.
Goals
- Consider some of the elements of narrative structure in these two texts.
- Consider approaches to writer’s block
- Consider memory, metatextuality, fiction and autofiction.
Hedberg Writer in Residence Program
Michelle Cahill is the third Hedberg Writer in Residence with the residency open to all established writers with professional publication record, in any field or genre, and being resident in Australia.
The residency is offered by the College of Arts, Law and Education and the School of Humanities at the University of Tasmania. The project is supported by the Copyright Agency's Cultural Fund.
The successful writer devotes three months to writing in a quiet but stimulating environment, in the University of Tasmania's campuses. During the residency, as well as working on an original piece, the winner will engage with the University's creative writing students, emerging Tasmanian authors, and the broader Tasmanian creative community through a small number of workshops, masterclasses, and public talks in the state.
Michelle Cahill
Michelle Cahill is an Australian novelist and poet of Indian heritage. Her short story collection, Letter to Pessoa (Giramondo) was awarded the NSW Premier's Literary Award for New Writing, shortlisted in the Steele Rudd Award and longlisted in the ALS Gold Medal. Her novel Daisy & Woolf is longlisted in the ALS Gold Medal. She has been shortlisted in the Elizabeth Jolley Prize, the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, and received the Val Vallis Award and a Red Room Poetry Fellowship. In 2023 she takes up the Hedberg Writer-in-Residence at the University of Tasmania.
