Caroline Reid Writes

I'm thrilled to be invited back to Mockingbird Lounge to teach the Creative Writing classes. There are two classes: 1. Casual Writing Group (first Tuesday of each month, 7-9pm) Casual and low pressure, this group is all about generating new work. I'll guide you through two hours of writing and you'll walk away with a whole lot of new stuff plus exercises to practice at home by yourself (or with a writing buddy). Surprise yourself at how much you can get done in 120 minutes. 2. Short Story Writing Course (Closed Group) If you're ready for a more immersive writing experience, then this one is for you. Held over 3 months (6 fortnightly sessions), you'll be guided through the fundamentals of storytelling such as characterisation, point of view, dialogue and metaphor. By the time you finish the course you'll have completed a polished piece of fiction, gained a deeper understanding of the writing process and learnt how to critique the work of others.  T...

Do you ever get to the end of a year and find you've run out of words? I'm feeling a bit that way today. It's been a day of doing, not thinking or writing. I was at the beach before 8am, the sky gloriously high and blue, the dog racing through cool salty water. At home I made French toast thick with egg, slathered it with honey, washed it down with strong Lavazza coffee. I've washed sheets and jumpers. I've cleaned the floors. Set my house in order. These are some of the things I love to do. Later tonight, my love and I will have a drink at the Earl of Leicester before heading to Namaste, our third new year's eve visit to this Nepalese restaurant in a leafy inner suburub of Adelaide. The food is exquisite, the service impeccable. We'll be home before 9pm so we can hang with the dog out the back under newly installed fairy lights. We'll unscrew an old coffee jar which I've decorated with coloured paper, and is  crammed with scraps of notepaper. On...

Walking with my dog in our local park on a clear November morning, I was thinking about space: How much space we occupy; how we m ove through space; what kind of energy we leave in a space.  Individual trees were visible on the Adelaide hills against a fantastically blue sky. An old-timer with a walking stick was the only other person in the park. He wore a pair of faded blue tracky pants and a checked jacket that seemed to hang on him like an animal fur. He lurched awkwardly from side to side through space, and was limping toward us when he stopped to pick something off the grass.     ‘Good morning,’ I said.     He held up a piece of bark and looked at me over the rim of his specs. ‘Good thing about this is it doesn’t bark,’ he said.      I’m slow with jokes so it took me a few seconds to get it, and he didn’t wait.       ‘You’ve got to get this stuff now,’ he said.  It only drops once a year.’...

Specialising in Story: The teacher 'Caroline's guidance allowed me to discover depth and structure that I didn’t even realise was threaded throughout my work. She reads subtext, recognises quality and applies structured technique in order to allow the true meaning of the work to shine through.'  Here's the thing: On September 9th something new is happening in the Adelaide writing scene. For the first time, a small group of  writers are going to meet in one of the cosy rooms at the Mockingbird Lounge in South Glenelg. They're going to explore and play while upgrading their writing skills; connect with like-minded people while deepening their story-writing ability; and they're going to be encouraged by a teacher who invests in people. They're also going to explore the fundamentals of storytelling such as characterisation, point of view, dialogue and setting; how to harness Stanislavski's seven questions when a story doesn't seem to b...

Snowman, chalk on concrete I've recently been spending my Sundays with some wonderful folk in a park in Berri, South Australia. You can read details about the Manifold Project here and here,   but in a nutshell it's spearheaded by the innovative and enthusiastic Alysha, Hermann, and is an invitation for local residents to tell their stories in collaboration with professional artists (I'm one of those). Alysha sees this project as long term (as in, years) so we're only just scratching the surface. What I want to do in this blog is demonstrate how I harness that power of observation I've talked in previous blogs to create new work as part of a project. In this case, the new work is poetry. But first, a little context ... Berri is in South Australia's Riverland, and like everything else in the Riverland, Rotary Park on Manifold Crescent has been affected by the recent, severe drought. Water restrictions meant the council stopped watering the park. Tree...