joanne burns

in conversation with Barbara Brooks

Renowned as an experimental poet and writer whose "seemingly contradictory hybrid of yarn and the vision" is "time and again made manifest through a rather laconic, sceptical and straight-talking voice", joanne burns joins the Memoir Club this month to discuss how memoir and autobiographical moments sometimes influence and infiltrate her writing. 

Her "distinctive stance towards the world" has been described as "humorous, unsentimental, never pompous or prophetic, immersed in fleeting experiences..." and her poems are said to illustrate "the idea of poems being built out of the detritus of existence". 

Can poems be considered a form of memoir? And, as Robert Frost claimed, can they "make you remember what you didn't know you knew"?

joanne burns writes poetry (including prose poems), monologues, and short futurist fictions or farables. Since 1972 many collections of her work have been published, the most recent being 'footnotes of a hammock' (Five Islands Press, 2004), 'an illustrated history of dairies' (Giramondo, 2007) and 'amphora' (Giramondo, 2011). 'kept busy', a CD of joanne burns reading a selection of her work, was released in 2007 (River Road Publishing). She is currently working on assembling a Selected poems collection, and on a new poetry collection, 'brush'. The ironic, satiric, the ludic and absurd feature strongly in her work. 

Barbara Brooks is a Sydney writer, independent scholar and teacher of writing. She has published short stories, essays and a biography, Eleanor Dark: A Writer's Life. Her memoir Verandahs, which crosses into fiction, won the UTS Chancellors Award as an outstanding thesis. 

Tel: 02-9398 5203 (for directions and venue info). Street parking available. Clovelly bus 339 on the doorstep: http://randwickliteraryinstitute.com.au/faqs/

Memoir Club is a communal space to meet other writers and readers and converse about all things to do with reading and writing memoir. We are interested in all kinds of life stories and in different ways of telling them. The genre of life writing and the possibilities of expanding and reworking the genre is exciting to us. Therefore we have a somewhat open and inclusive approach to what makes a memoir, and we hope you do too! Connect with others and share ideas, questions and just hang out. Each meeting starts off with a talk, conversation or discussion about a particular topic or book, sometimes with a guest speaker or facilitator, then we move to an informal gathering and catch up.

 $10 at the door.

 $15 for a plate of delicious vegan finger food.