We Have a Visitor! - Thursday (22/07/10)

Hey hey!

So, as you are all aware, novelist Andrew Croome will be coming in to speak to both Lit classes tomorrow (22/07/10). Period 2 for Lit B and Period 3 for Lit A.

Andrew won the Australian/Vogel Award in 2008 for his novel, Document Z. He also won the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing in the recent NSW Premier's Literary Awards, coming in ahead of The Age Book-of-the-Year Winner (2009), Steven Amsterdam (Things We Didn't See Coming) and 2010 Miles Franklin Award-Shortlisted, Craig Silvey (Jasper Jones). He was named 2010 Best Young Australian Novelist by the Sydney Morning Herald and was shortlisted for the

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Andrew will be speaking to us about the process of writing fiction and the conversion of historical data and records into compelling literary fiction. There will be time for a bit of Q & A at the end. Exciting!

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What else?

We're going to do some close text analysis on the Hemingway and Chekhov stories. There will be some blog time. More writing. We'll be checking the homework. We'll be giving you some more of it, too. It's important. Unfortunately there's no oral exam for Lit. Therefore we're going to have to turn those in-class epiphanies into coherent, well-written, high-VCE-standard essays. We'll have fun doing it, though. Promise.

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Thanks to Isabelle for adding a (great) photo (taken by her friend, Sally-Anne) to the last post. Would you like to add a photo/picture to this photo? That would be great. Do it!

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Loving the insights into the stories we're doing. Keep it up. Remember how alien Richard III was when we first started and how expert you all were by the end of it? Same thing will happen with the stories. We need to study them inside-out. Pull them apart. Start asking ourselves why the authors used particular words and phrases over other ones. Why certain details were included / excluded. The key word is 'deliberate'. These guys are craftsmen. Nothing is left to chance. Nothing is in there by accident. Everything-for-a-reason DOES apply here.

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Ok. See you tomorrow. I'm looking forward to it. I hope you are, too!

Simon
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Image added (again) by Isabelle, with kind permission from Sally-Anne J.

Tuesday (20/07/10)

Hi all.

Came across this in The Age today. It may be of interest to some of you - despite our having moved past Richard III. The psychology of evil is an important theme in all literature, particularly when looking at the neutral, unemotional method of dealing with morality which some authors employ in the short story.

Here's the link

In tomorrow's class we're going to work on some writing. You've all contributed impressively to class discussions, however we need to do some serious work on transferring those ideas and opinions to paper.

To clarify the point made about selection of texts for the SAC, we'll be doing about 5 authors (a few stories each). You can then pick an author to do the SAC on and we'll supply extracts from each author's work. Make sense? Hope so.

See you tomorrow arvo.

Simon

Ps. Want to add a picture to this post? Do!
P.p.s - Photo added by Isabelle, taken by Sally-Anne J.

Thursday (15/07/10)

Hey hey!

So, on Thursday we're going to be going through the stories many of you have written. Barry & I will be available for one-on-one discussion/analysis of your work throughout the double period.

The rest of the class will be reading short stories and discussing them much in the same way as was done on Tuesday - except with a bit more structure and most probably an introduction to / reading of the stories by myself or Barry. There will also be an opportunity to use the blog in class. And . . . we'll leave plenty of time for discussion and a Q&A session toward the end. Busy busy!

If anybody has any questions - email me.

If anybody has any thoughts about the stories you read in class on Tuesday, feel free to post them to the blog. Remember to sign off with your first name so I know who you are. I'll get around to organising the posts into sections for each story, once we have some actual posts.

Avanti!

Simon :-)

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Welcome Year 11 Lit.

Hi all.

This is a welcome post. Welcome.

We'll hopefully use this blog to share links, ideas, stories and essays throughout the rest of the year. I'll be giving you all the email address and password to access it.

You'll have to put your name to any posts you make. Any posts without names get wiped.

Everybody has access. People may comment on each other's posts, links, essays, etc . . . Please keep the comments clean and constructive. Any negative rubbish gets wiped.

Feel free to post photos and videos, too. Same rules apply.

There is a section for links and a section for literary quotes. You can add to these areas, too.

I'm not sure how it'll all pan out . . . but you're all pretty great, so I expect something good will come of it.

Keep reading.

Cheers,

Simon