Workshop update: Creative Writing, Book Making and Computer Gaming

I've been really enjoying my workshops at the Taylors Hill Youth and Community Centre, Taylors Hill Neighbourhood House and Twilight School at the Rupertswood Mansion in Sunbury. It's been great meeting so many interesting, creative and productive residents of Melbourne's outer western suburbs - my home town. We've shared a lot of laughs and learnt a ton from each other. 

While I've felt confident instructing and engaging workshop groups for some time now, I'm still astonished at the quality and amount of work many of the participants produce after only the first few weeks. Quite often, after I explain a few general principles, talk about common ways to approach a given task, answer a couple of questions and encourage the group to unleash their creativity, the group produces inspirational bodies of work.

If you've been in any of my workshops, thank you for your support and encouragement. Seeing you develop new skills and explore your creative sides has given me the confidence to offer workshops to a number of new community-based organisations. I can't say much about some of the initiatives at the moment apart from *cough* sessional teaching for Victoria University in 2014 *cough* watch this space!

In the mean time, 12-25 year olds can join my FREE creative writing and book making workshop next Saturday (26 October) without missing much from the first few weeks. We will spend the next three weeks making our hand-bound journals, befire the creative writing side of the program begins. While participants are welcome to join any week, they will get the most out of the workshop if they join on the 26th of October, or 16th of November.

If you or someone you know have any questions, or would like to book a place in this program, please call Kat on (03) 9747 5421, or send an email to her @ katrionag@melton.vic.gov.au. I'll most likely return your call or email myself.

Another program I'm currently running is Pro GamerS [PGS], a weekly computer gaming group for 12-18 year olds based at the Taylors Hill Youth Services Centre.

We are playing the most popular PC games (League of Legends, Planetside 2, Starcraft 2: HoTS, Minecraft, Terraria, FTL: Faster Than Light, Civilization V, Tropico 4, Game Dev Tycoon, Magic the Gathering: Duels of the Plainswalkers 2014, Don't Starve) on a bunch of super-fast, top-of-the-line gaming rigs.

If the list of games doesn't impress you, how about a room full of 22inch HD LCD screens and PCs with 2gig graphics cards, Quad-Core AMD processors, 12gigs of RAM and a super-duper fast internet connection.

Still not convinced? We've also got XBoxs, Playstation 3s, and Wiis, not to mention free refreshments and an awesome workshop facilitator: me!

And that's not all! Group members will choose which games feature in our quarterly tournaments and be able to enter for the chance to become the Pro-est Gamer and win a swag of awesome prizes.

If we attract enough members, we can buy even more games and go on excursions to the Melbourne gaming conventions.

Join Pro GamerS NOW by calling Melton Youth Services on 9747 5421!

*Pro GamerS look away!* Parents and guardians can be confident knowing their teens are having fun in a safe setting outside of their bedrooms. The participants will be socialising with like-minded people and becoming aware of the importance of ergonomics, healthy eating, balancing thier gaming with regular exercise and a homework-first attitude.


Thanks for visiting and I hope to see you or someone you know in one of my workshops.
Emanuel

it's all about the first extract - 'Talking in Tongues'

This first extract is from Craig Henderson’s short story Talking in Tounges, which won one of six joint first prizes in the 2012 National Year of Reading’s ‘It’s never too late … to learn to read’ writing competition. Without further ado…

YOU LEARN TO READ one word at a time, just as you learn to walk one step at a time. But walking is easier, once you get the hang of it. You just lean forward and put one foot in front of the other. While learning to read is a constantly evolving challenge. Words change, as do meanings. The trick is to read between the lines, to go beyond the words and immerse yourself in the story.

I’m Ben, by the way. At fifteen, I’m already hooked on words and the strange hold they have over people. Take my family—please someone, anyone. Sorry, that’s an old joke and not a very good one. Maybe I should just tell the story and let you decide what to do with them.

It all began about a year ago when Dad started talking Italian.

Dad is not Italian. He’s as Aussie as Vegemite … er, Blundstone boots … I mean, Bundaberg Rum. I know those aren’t good examples, but you get what I mean. At the footy, Dad could balance a stubby and a meat pie in one hand, while tearing out his hair with the other and hurled obscenities at the umpire at the same time. Dad is the only person I know who could say, ‘fair dinkum’, ‘struth’ and ‘bugger me’, all in the one sentence.

Everything changed one day, when he sat down to breakfast.

He turned to me, winked and said, ‘Buon giorno.’

I almost choked on my Cornflakes. I might have thought he was joking, if it hadn’t rolled off his tongue like he was the Pope.

Mum was on another of her religious charades—full on Catholic, I think—so she just rolled out a Hail Mary and went back to scraping the burnt bits off the toast.

My younger brother, who is thirteen, has ADHD and OCD—doctors seem quite fond of acronyms—along with Tourette’s syndrome. Mum reasons it is God’s will that Joey was born with these afflictions and only the will of God can take them away. And that is Mum’s great dilemma, since being denied a miracle by her own Lutheran God.

Rather than lose her faith, Mum decided she must be barking up the wrong tree. She converted to Buddhism, Hinduism and Masochism, before doing the rounds of the other Christian faiths; the Seventh Day Adventists, Mormons, Presbyterians and finally the Catholics.

But Buddha, Ganesha, and Jesus, Joseph and Mary had failed to deliver the goods, and Mum was ripe to test the waters of less mainstream religions. I guess Dad’s ‘renaissance period’ pushed her closer to those Gods who occupied the fringes of the religious pecking order. She started doing voluntary work at the library just to get out of the house, I think.

With Joey and Mum caught up in their own worlds, I suppose I was the only one that noticed Dad’s slide into an ethnicity that didn’t belong to him. My older sister, Melanie, had turned goth two years ago and was seldom seen during daylight. Mum had given up trying to save Mel’s soul. I think it was the tongue piercing that finally threw her, or perhaps Mel’s I do it with the devil tattoo.

Either way, it was up to me to work out what was happening to Dad and, more worryingly, just what the hell he was talking about. I tried the library first, only to find all the Italian phrasebooks had been checked out, along with the How to Learn Italian CDs. I should have put two and two together right then, but hey, I’m fifteen and there’s a lot going on in my life. Since we didn’t own a computer, I had to book internet time at the library after school and trawl through sites searching for translations to Dad’s latest utterings.

To begin with, Dad spoke a mixture of English and Italian, with the odd colloquialism thrown in. His native tongue gradually slipped away, though, sliding into pigeon English and then full blown Italian. By then Mum had taken up Hare Krishna, so our house resembled a backpacker’s lodge.

Dad would walk into the lounge after work—and God knows (sorry Mum) what language he spoke at the council depot—saying, ‘Ciao, Angelo. Ciao, Beniamino. Ciao, Elena.’

‘Buon giorno,’ I’d reply, the only Italian I knew at that stage.

From the kitchen would come Mum’s mantra, breathed over the latest variation of lentil soup. ‘Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare, Hare.’

Joey was busy killing aliens on the PlayStation, muttering a ceaseless line of obscenities, head jerking to one side and his body twitched in time.

‘Non piu,’ no more, Dad would say. ‘Di niente,’ not at all. But Joey just kept ploughing those two-headed freaks into the ground…

About the Author

Craig Henderson has written several prize-winning short stories, notably the joint winner of the 2012 Trung Sisters Creative Arts Competition, one of six winners in the 2012 National Year of Reading Learn to Read Writing Competition, and highly commended in the 2012 Ada Cambridge Prize for a Biographical Short Story and the Melton Short Story competitions for 2010, 2011 and 2012. His work has also been published in Offset magazine and various other magazines and websites. He has always been fascinated by the power of the written word to explain what common sense cannot, is studying Professional Writing and Editing part-time and is a full-time child wrangler.

READ the entire short story for free as part of the sample available on Amazon.com www.amazon.com/dp/B00AVS9AR0/ref=cm_sw_su_dp.

PURCHASE this story and fifteen others for US$2.99 www.amazon.com/dp/B00AVS9AR0/ref=cm_sw_su_dp.

ORDER your hard copy for $15 including worldwide postage by emailing me – payable via PayPal, bank transfer, money order or bank cheque.

Check back tomorrow for an extract of my award-winning short story, Time and Time Again.

Thanks for visiting,

Emanuel

Review: 'Sektion 20' by Paul Dowswell





November, 1972: Germany is in the middle of the Cold War, pitting people in the country’s East against those in the West. Teenager Alex lives in East Berlin during a time when it was illegal to read books, paint, sing and do anything else creative that isn’t seen as benefiting the governing dictatorship. Sick of the oppression and the way everyone suspects their friends and neighbours of being spies, he decides to speak out against what he believes is a pointless war and the heavy handed Stasi—the state’s security force. But when he goes too far, a Stasi agent is sent to make Alex conform, or kill him. Alex and his family realise their only chance to survive is in West Germany, but getting close to the wall that divides the country in two, let alone over it, proves to be virtually impossible.

It’s hard to avoid clichéd descriptions like ‘coming of age story’, ‘political thriller’, ‘gritty realism’ and ‘page turner’, so I won’t try. Lovers of historical fiction, especially alternate history, will adore Sektion 20. The narrative is immediate and thrilling; the setting realistic, compelling and well-researched. The result: a piece of historical fiction I highly recommend to mature Young Adults who can stomach the unsavoury aspects of the Cold War, and those who enjoy chapters with cliff hanger endings.

(The novel for this review was supplied by Bloomsbury)

Review by Emanuel Cachia.

Review: 'Gamerunner' by B.R. Collins

GAMERUNNER

By B. R. Collins

Gamerunner follows Rick, a teenage boy living in the future where acid rain prevents people from going outdoors. Rick’s father, Daed, works for Crater—a virtual reality game developer that benefits from people spending the majority of their time, and money, in their games. Daed created the Maze as the ultimate game that can never be beaten. Rick not only tests the Maze for glitches, but also finds solace in the various activities and challenges within. And when a player comes close to completing the game, it falls to Rick to stop them.

Collins has created a detailed and believable setting where the greater population is scared of the outside world, Undone, and obsessed with the Maze. Sure the Maze isn’t real; but, it beats living in Undone.

Collins effectively uses the limited third-person point of view. At one stage, Rick eavesdrops on a conversation in another room. Although Rick can’t ‘see’ inside the room, sounds allow the reader to figure out what happens while Rick remains confused.

Whenever Rick is in the Maze, the narrator uses an awkward, repetitive sentence structure with very little punctuation. This is awkward to read at first, but after a few chapters it proves to be a great way to differentiate the Maze from the real world. Sharp, repetitive sentences remind the reader that although Rick would happily spend all his time in the Maze if he didn’t have to eat and sleep, he shouldn’t shun the real world for a game.

Corporate greed; dysfunctional father-son relationships; a dystopian future; and, humanity’s tendency to follow the status quo, rather than challenge it, are all explored in Gamerunner. While the setting, theme and plot are definitely dystopian, gamers like me will say, ‘Bring on the rain!’

The novel for this review was supplied by Bloomsbury