Kathleen Jennings: Australian Gothic Stories

Duration: 180 minutes

Do you love the creepy and strange, the howling and mysterious, the disturbing and shadowed (or sun-bleached)? Do you want to distil and brew your own range of Gothic tales? Writer and illustrator Kathleen Jennings teaches a crash course on harnessing the delights and terrors of the Australian Gothic. You will mine the visuals and themes of the Gothic for ideas, twist them into new shapes, experiment with shifting place and motif, and begin outlining short stories. 
This workshop is suitable for new and emerging writers who want to try writing Australian Gothic stories, and also for established writers who would like to try some rapid idea generation and variation in the Gothic mode. This version of the workshop focusses on writing techniques; however illustrator-artists are welcome to attend and draw their notes and stories. 
  
Learning outcomes 
Attendees will learn: 

• a quick way to capture the feeling of a genre 
• an overview of Gothic motifs and themes 
• a process for generating ideas within the Gothic mode 
• [creating a sense of place] 
• an approach to rapid story outlining 
• Attendees: Aspiring writers, and good-humoured established writers who want to play a bit with the Gothic. (Artist-illustrators are welcome to attend and draw their notes, although the workshop will focus on narrative and written description.) I adapt this to the age group, adult or all-ages (9+).