Kicking off the Symposium for 2024

November Symposium

• 10:00 AM 12:30 PM

• Sea Acres Rainforest Centre (map)

There is a widespread belief in the power of imagination and creativity to unmake loneliness. To transform our reality to something new, to play with words and paint and ideas to relieve, re-imagine or revitalise the future and the past. What remains of a society is often only the art, the stories that were written down, the marks that were painted.

When children play they are doing exactly what this workshop asks the creative writing student to do. To not judge the prose that is created by rules that they have learned in any other context; to start with just a pen, a page and a desire to reflect on your own individual experience. Your own point of view and experience of something will always be true and unique and what readers crave. A story in which a character takes an idiosyncratic attitude to the Port Macquarie rainforest is always going to be much more interesting than one that appears in a glossy travel brochure.

This writing workshop will encourage you to find a way to play with words and generate your own stories. Expect to spend two hours liberating your self from the ideas of rules within creative writing and experiencing the joy of word play.

TUTOR

Teresa Bell is a writer and teacher based in Port Macquarie. Teresa has a Doctorate in Creative Writing and has published three books, her novel; LUNATION was shortlisted for the 2018 Dorothy Hewett Award and will be released in January.

Wedderburn - Performance and Book Launch.

To The Lighthouse

Sunday, December 16, 2018

6:00 PM 8:00 PM

king island australia (map)

TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

Performing: Teresa Bell

Painting: Caroline Kininmonth

Playing: Charles Pearce

Bring your supper to the boathouse & immerse yourself in this premiere showing of a new work developed on the island, featuring talented locals who will paint and play in response.

Based on Virginia Woolf’s famous novel set on the Isle of Skye, To the Lighthouse is a spoken word performance with music that will premiere on King Island under it’s own lighthouse.

In this performance piece characters, thoughts and time merge and move, just as the light from the lighthouse takes in moments and illuminates sections of the landscape. Mrs Ramsay is a beautiful fifty-year-old woman with eight children and a brilliant, but needy, philosopher husband. Mrs Ramsay is consumed by her social interactions on the island as a way of making her life meaningful and she longs to marry off Lily Briscoe, a single woman in her thirties who is upsetting the social order on the island. Lily Briscoe, however, is committed to her painting and cannot understand societies obsession with hedges and houses and mothers and children.

Woolf’s brilliant reflection on the dynamic between the sexes, love, art and mortality uniquely captures the way humans depend on each other. In a world destined to change, as it was in the period between the two world wars when Woolf wrote her Modernist classic, art is, perhaps, the only hope of surety. As Lily mourns while painting; “Nothing stays, all changes; but not words, not paint”.

To the Lighthouse takes place in one house over ten years looking out to the lighthouse. It is a meditation on the enormity of the human inner experience, and the way our inner lives are affected by those near us and the places we choose to live.