Pages

Join us and meet other writers!

In the leafy grounds and hibiscus shade of the Fremantle Arts Centre Café.

Flame Trees in the Courtyard

Take your time to feel the energy of leaf power.

Friendly Fauna

Oh good, a bunch of writers with food!

Always be on the lookout for strange characters

They will make an interesting plot.

Haiku for Joyce

concrete two-seater
come, come, all writers sit on
my hard art

Thursday, December 25, 2014

Season's Greetings to all Members


Wishing members Season's Greetings. We hope to see you back again at the Fremantle Arts Centre for classes, readings, lunch and coffee, every Friday.

Classes for 2015 commence on Friday, 16th January - poetry with Shane McCauley.
Helen Hagemann's Prose class commences on Friday, 6th February.

Venue:  FAC Room 3, upstairs North Wing 
Day/ Time:  Fridays 1.00pm - 3.00pm

Lunch venue for readings is in the Fremantle Arts Centre Cafe.

Wednesday, November 5, 2014

OOTA 2015 Management Committee Announced

We are proud to publish the new OOTA Management
Committee for 2014-2015


President – Julie Watts

Vice President – Carolyn Abbs

Secretary – Liz Hearnden

Treasurer/Membership Coordinator – Leanne Searle

Ordinary members: Renée Pettit-Schipp

Ross Jackson

Josephine Clarke

Barry Cassidy

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Spilt Ink Winners Announced

CONGRATULATIONS TO:

Poetry
1st- Mags Webster – Ded Reckoning  (both Mags and I can spell ‘dead’)
2nd – Mags Webster – Second Language
3rd Shey Marque – Twilight
Commended – Shey Marque – Woman in the Waters of Lethe

Prose
1st – Richard Regan – The Bush Undertaker Makes Amends
2nd - Mary Jarzabkowski (big applause!!) - A Sweater for Alex
3rd- Alison Davis – The Bus Trip

Monday, September 22, 2014

Writers needed for Bimblebox 153 Birds!

Calling Poets, Writers, Scientists, Academics! Bimblebox 153 Birds is calling for approx 80 writers to contribute to this art project which describes the bird species that have been officially recorded at the Bimblebox Nature Refuge. We need a myriad of voices to tell us something about the following bird species that are currently wild and free avian residents or seasonal visitors to the Bimblebox Nature Refuge.

WHY? Because the Bimblebox Nature Refuge is under threat from massive coal mining projects both directly over and under the refuge plus all around it, throughout the Galilee Basin. This means that the myriad life that thrives on Bimblebox is under threat, including the birds.

Look for more information on their website

Monday, September 1, 2014

The Josephine Ulrick Poetry/ Short Story Competition


Enter for the chance to win a share in one of the largest creative writing competition prize pools worldwide.

Among the richest poetry and short story prizes in the world, the Griffith University Josephine Ulrick prizes in 2015 are worth $30,000 in total prize money.
  • First Prize: $10,000
  • Second Prize: $5,000

How to enter the Josephine Ulrick Prize:

Literature prize 2015:
  • Submit an original work up to 2,000 words
  • Terms and Conditions of Entry for the Literature Prize
Poetry prize 2015:
  • Submit a poem up to 100 lines
  • Terms and Conditions of Entry for the Poetry Prize

More information on the Griffith University Website

Tuesday, August 26, 2014

Submissions Open for the Cincinnati Review


Cincinnati Review Reading Period on now

The editors of The Cincinnati Review (est. 2003) have opened their yearly reading period and are now reviewing submissions for upcoming issues. The semiannual literary journal is edited and published by students and faculty of the University of Cincinnati. Both aspiring and experienced writers are encouraged to submit their work. Poetry: submit up to 10 pages of poetry. Prose (fiction/nonfiction): not to exceed 40 (double-spaced) pages. Long-form narratives (prose/poetry): submit 10-plus pages of poetry; 10K-35K words for prose. Book reviews: submit a single review of a book, up to 1500 words. Payment: $25/page for prose; and $30/page for poetry. The Cincinnati Review buys FNASR, plus electronic rights. Authors retain All Rights after publication. Reading period: August 15, 2014-April 15, 2015 -
http://www.cincinnatireview.com/#/submissions/guidelines

Sunday, August 17, 2014

Novella Opportunity


Viva has officially launched once more. Continuing on from the success of the last two years, manuscript submissions are now open for Viva La Novella 3. We’ve published five terrific authors so far — want to join the pack?

For the first time this year we’re extending our pool to include our New Zealand pals too. Take note, you guys!

As always, Seizure is looking for the very best new writing around. Stories that can be read in the time it takes you to miss your train station and double back via platform 6. Entries close 2 Dec. Full submission details here.

If you think I am done talking about novellas, Sir or Madam, you are wrong. For all you sci fi and fantasy buffs out there, Tor.com has recently announced that they will now be accepting submissions for novellas over 17,500 words. The project, Imprint, will be headed by Senior Editor Lee Harris, formerly of Angry Robot. He had some nice things to say about novellas and genre over at The Washington Post. Science Fiction and Fantasy works will be accepted until the end of August, guidelines can be found here.

More at http://seisureonline.com

Tuesday, August 5, 2014

CRITIQUING CLASS AT SWANBOURNE BOOKCAFFE


Critiquing Class 15th August at the Swanbourne Bookcaffe with Helen Hagemann @ 10.00am
This class is for prose writers who wish to brush up on their stories prior to the OOTA Spilt Ink Competition. There is no cost, however purchase of coffee, etc. is required as per usual.  If any new members wish to join us, Helen would appreciate notification in order to book a bigger table!! Mobile: 0404666156 or hagemann.helen@gmail.com    -   Many thanks!

Saturday, August 2, 2014

WRITING AT THE CENTRE NEWS

Shane McCauley and Helen Hagemann wish to advise OOTA members that due to regular interim increases of rent at the Fremantle Arts Centre, we have no alternative but to increase class fees to $25 OOTA and $30 Non-OOTA.  This new fee commences on Friday, 8th August. We also add that we are reluctant to do this, and do begrudge the fact that we often sit in a cold room in winter and stuffy hot premises in summer. However, the FAC is our home, our base, and both Shane and Helen hope you understand that the increase is unavoidable.

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Helen Hagemann, Performance Poet at the Monday Supper Club. Dome Cafe, Maylands

OUR NEXT EVENT!
Monday 18th August, brought to you by Jane Cornes and Flora Smith
Music from Rapt, spoken word from Helen Hagemann
Monday Supper Club is a not-for-profit event that supports independent musicians and wordsmiths.
Booked performers are fed amd paid a reasonable fee. If you'd like to be notified as new events
are announced, please join our email list using the link above right.
It's an intimate event, with just 40 seats available.

Tickets to MSC must be booked and paid for in advance online via the
link below. You pay a 30c booking fee and we pay the credit card charges.
There are no door sales. Full details of menu and how to book can be found on their website

http://www.summersupperclub.com/

Helen Hagemann has two collections of poetry, Evangelyne & Other Poems (APC, Melbourne 2009) and of Arc & Shadow (Sunline Press, 2013). Helen is currently working on a children's collection titled Miniscule.
RAPT - Freewheeling jazzfolk RAPT roam through fields of folk, Celtic, bluegrass, blues, jazz and originals with diverse instrumentation and great harmonies. Their music is uplifting,colourful and exciting. RAPT combine the many musical loves of the band members. Classically trained but with a jazz/ improv bent, Paul Laszlo plays double bass and banjo and has a rich baritone voice. Paul's virtuosic playing adds great depth to RAPT. Multi talented songstress, Ann Palumbo on acoustic and classical guitar, mandolin and double bass is a jazz chanteuse with a penchant for Tango as well as classical music but with her roots in folk music as well as the improvised independent music scene. MusicOz award winning songwriter Rosie McDonald (acoustic guitar, bouzouki, percussion) - has a strong rhythmic drive with her instruments and a rich alto voice to lead us into the stories from the folk and blues traditions as well as providing harmonic interplay with Ann's vocals on the jazz influenced songs.

Monday, July 28, 2014

One Copy of Westerly for OOTA Members

OOTA advises that membership renewal is now due for July-June 2015. You can download the form @ http://www.members.iinet.net.au/~helen.hagemann/OOTAMembershipForm.pdf

We are also pleased to announce that our new membership journal is WESTERLY.
Latest Issue 59.1 (June 2014)
Here is a notice from Delys Bird - Managing Editor..... 
Westerly is planning a special second (November) issue in 2014, to celebrate 6 decades of Westerly publishing. We hope to feature strong West Australian writing in this issue, so are seeking submissions from both established and new WA writers. All submissions will go through the usual competitive process of selection by our independent poetry and fiction editors, but we do encourage all WA writers to submit work to this issue.  Submissions will close by the end of August, latest.

Friday, May 23, 2014

The Astronomer's Wife by Dick Alderson - Book Launch 7th June

Sunline Press invites you to the launch of


the astronomer’s wife

a collection of poetry by Dick Alderson


to be launched by Lucy Dougan


2.00 – 4.30 pm, Saturday 7th June 2014


The Pavlich Room  Fremantle Arts Centre
1 Finnerty Street  Fremantle 6160

by 2nd June (for catering)

Monday, May 19, 2014

OOTA Prose Workshops with Nandi Chinna

Writing at the Centre -  May/June prose workshops with Nandi Chinna


A Vast Emptiness. A Possible Book

Virginia Woolf said that ‘writing a novel is like walking through a dark room, holding a lantern which lights up what is already in the room anyway’. Another writer says that writing is like having to rearrange the furniture in a dark room, and then when it was all rearranged the light will come on. Still another writer comments that writing is like being in an empty room which is nevertheless filled with unspoken words, with a sort of whispering.

In this series of three prose workshops we will practice exercises and techniques which will allow us to enter these seemingly dark or empty rooms in our imaginations. We will rearrange, stumble upon, and illuminate what is already there, waiting to be expressed upon the page or computer screen.

Fridays 10am – 12noon, May 30th, June 13th, and 27th June at the Fremantle Arts Centre, Room 2, upstairs in the main building.

Dr Nandi Chinna is a poet, essayist, short story writer and sessional academic at ECU. Her short stories have been published as a part of the 1001 Nights text/performance project, and in various journals. Her first collection of poetry, Our Only Guide is Our Homesickness, was published by the Five Islands Press New Poets Program in 2007, followed by the chap book How to Measure Land, which was joint winner of the 2010 Picaro Press Byron Bay Writers Festival Poetry Prize.  Her poetry collection Swamp was published by Fremantle Press in 2014. She lives near Fremantle, Western Australia.

Writing at the Centre is an independent writing class conducted each Friday, 10am – 12noon, at the Fremantle Arts Centre, Room 2, upstairs in the main building.  Cost to OOTA Members $20.00: Cost to Participants NON-OOTA $25.00 (per single class). No Booking required, although Nandi would appreciate an email from interested writers.

Call Nandi for info 9331 3104, chinnanandi@hotmail.com





Monday, May 12, 2014

SWAMP - Launch Review & Pics

In the large building of the Cockburn Wetlands Education Centre, the room was crowded. Nandi and friends delighted the audience with songs by Mei Saraswati (Swamp Gospel) and poetry read to music with Danna Checksfield on Viola. Some of the gathering had previously gone for a 15 minute walk around part of Bibra Lake, and we believe the publishers Georgia Richter and Wendy Jenkins also visited this eco system on another occasion. The afternoon was a great treat and also Nandi's poetry came alive when she read several "Swamp" poems. If the wetlands disappear, her work will be an important historical document, but for now, we almost hear the cranes cry, but not the ones used on the Fiona Stanley Hospital - such irony!
Swamp by Nandi Chinna, launched by John Mateer.
Published by Fremantle Press, 2014.




Monday, May 5, 2014

OOTA Announces its Spilt Ink Competition 2014


Spilt Ink Competition 2014


Categories: Poetry and Short Story


Poetry
First Prize $200
Second Prize $100
Third Prize $50

Short Story
First Prize $200
Second Prize $100
Third Prize $50


Submissions deadline:
31 August 2014


Enquiries to:

                                                            For Members only!

                                     Download our entry form and guidelines in Word or .pdf


Saturday, April 26, 2014

"Swamp" Book Launch: a new collection of poems by Nandi Chinna

Nandi Chinna Invites OOTA Members to
Swamp
walking the wetlands of the Swan Coastal Plain
poems by Nandi Chinna
published by Fremantle Press 2014

Launched by John Mateer
with performances by Danna Checksfield - Viola
and Mei Saraswati - Swamp Gospel
Sat May 10

2pm for short wetland walk (depending on weather) 3pm – 5pm launch.

at the Cockburn Wetlands Education Centre
                             184 Hope Road Bibra Lake

Transport options: for car pooling contact chinnanandi@hotmail.com
By bus from Fremantle catch the 99 to Barry Marshall Pde Fiona Stanley Hospital A (Stop No: 26647) then 320 m walk to centre, or the 520 from Fremantle to Gwilliam Dr After North Lake Rd (Stop No: 20349) then 15 min walk around Bibra Lake to Centre
By train alight at Murdoch station and catch 514 to Bibra Dr after Farrington Rd (Stop No: 20360) then 360 m walk to Centre.
Hope to see you there!
Dr Nandi Chinna
Independent Researcher
Poet
Swamp; Walking the Wetlands of the Swan Coastal Plain
http://www.fremantlepress.com.au/books/newreleases/1397http://


Chinna uncovers the lost places that exist beneath the townscape of Perth. For the last four years the poet has walked the wetlands of the Swan Coastal Plain – and she has walked the paths and streets where the wetlands once were.

Chinna writes with great poignancy and beauty of our inability to return, and the ways in which we can use the dual practice of writing and walking to reclaim what we have lost. Her poems speak with urgency about wetlands that are under threat from development today.

Praise for the book
‘I found reading this sequence of poems moving, exciting, engaging, often sad and melancholic. It left me wanting to know more.’ Susan Hawthorne, James Cook University

‘This body of poetry differs significantly from other bodies of poetry which deal with nature in that the poems are not produced within the nature/culture binary. I am not aware of any other body of work that is located within an urban space and actually works across this binary opposition. These poems do this with exquisite care and attention and in doing so, achieve their goal, not so much of learning to take care of our small patches, although that is an important practical outcome, but in developing a language that does not negate the very thing it wishes to preserve.’ Margaret Somerville, University of Sydney
 


Sunday, March 23, 2014

Launch of The Lake's Apprentice by Annamaria Weldon

The Lake's Apprentice book launch

Please join us for the launch of:
The Lake’s Apprentice by Annamaria Weldon
thelakesapprentice_web
To be launched by Lucy Dougan
Venue: Sugar Gum Room, Building 1 (upstairs), UWA Claremont Campus, Cnr Princess & Goldsworthy Roads, Claremont WA
Date and time: Wednesday 2 April, 6.30 – 7.30pm
Free event, please RSVP by Wednesday 26 March on (08) 6488 6827 or email marketing-uwap@uwa.edu.au


Thursday, February 20, 2014

Jukebox for Sale : OOTA's Anthology of poetry, short stories and creative non-fiction



Copies of our 2013 anthology are available for purchase from the Fremantle Arts Centre on Fridays, after the Writing at the Centre workshops.
Alternatively you can transfer the $22.50 ($20 cost plus $2.50 postage) to the OOTA bank account  306-048  0462814 then send a copy of the receipt to ootawriters@gmail.com along with your postal address and they will be posted asap.
If you buy 5 copies together the postage is reduced to $8.



Please note: Book cover is size A5 and our framed pic is to
enhance white on white only.    Web

OOTA represented at the Perth Writers Festival - February 2014

Fremantle writers from OOTA (Out of the Asylum Inc. ) will be at the Perth Writers Festival
on both days, Friday 21st February, and Saturday 22nd February. We will be in the REMIDA tent; and you will find it marked on the map that is a link below. The tent is adjacent to the entrance of the Romeo Tent on a triangular section of the lawn and sits beside the FIBRANT tent.

The Festival is also providing 20 chairs and 8 x trestle tables inside this venue for our use. So please come along, we would appreciate a quick hello or a spell for a quick break for lunch or bookshop buying.   
Hope to see you there! Click on the link for the PWF Map HERE

Friday, February 14, 2014

Harper Collins Opportunity

Harper Collins Wants Your Love! SUBMIT WEDNESDAY
On Wednesday 19 February, HarperCollins Australia's online submission portal, The Wednesday Post, will be searching for fabulous Romance, Erotica and Women's Fiction manuscripts.

They're looking for charming love stories that will keep readers hooked till the beautiful, or bitter end.

Whether or not you’ve been previously published, this is the perfect opportunity to submit your work and have a chance to be published by an award-winning, international publishing house.

All entries will be considered for both print and ebook publication as well as digital-only publication.

General manuscript submissions reopen 26 February. For guidelines, click on link. http://www.wednesdaypost.com.au/

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