Workshop Details
The next Clarion South Workshop will take place January/February 2012 in Brisbane, Australia.
Tutors
The instructors for next workshop will be announced late 2010.
Tuition & Costs
Tuition for the next workshop will be announced when applications next open in February 2011. As a guide, however, the 2009 workshop fee was AUD$2800 which covered both tuition and accommodation for the full six weeks. If you apply before the earlybird deadline and are successful $100 will be deducted from your tuition.
Financial Aid
Clarion South has a scholarships and bursaries program and we encourage you to submit a Financial Aid Questionnaire with your application in case you are eligible for funding. Last workshop, a total of 9 students received some financial assistance from the Clarion South Committee. We were also able to assist some students to secure an individual grant or bursary from various government funds or employer schemes. The amount of financial aid ranged from a few hundred dollars for the costs of childcare or travel all the way to full scholarships.
Accommodation
The accommodation is located at a Brisbane university student dormitory. This standard of accommodation is clean but basic. You will have your own secure room which contains bed, study desk, chair, cupboard space etc. Students are clustered into apartment groups. There will be 4-6 rooms per apartment. Each apartment has a kitchen, plus shared bathrooms & living room area.
Living Expenses
The arrangements for food are up to you and your fellow flatmates, but each year we find most participants share the cost of food and prepare group meals.
University Facilities
If you wish to use the university’s facilities for printing or photocopying, standard charges apply and can be found on the Griffith University website.
Materials
There are no additional charges for material to do with the teaching of the workshop, such as texts or photocopied material. Electronic copies of all stories for critiques will be provided to you each day. If you wish to read the work of the tutors before the workshop that is recommended and is entirely up to you but we will not be requiring you to purchase any texts.
Other Expenses
Other than tuition and accommodation, participants are responsible for other living expenses. This may include, where applicable, the cost of bringing a computer to the workshop (bring your own, borrow or hire), daily food expenses, parking permit if you are bringing your own car, phone account in your room (if you choose to activate it) etc.
Application Process & Guidelines
Applications will close at the end of June 2008. Applications submitted by the Earlybird Date of Wednesday, April 30th may be eligible for a $100 discount if you are accepted to the workshop.
There is a maximum of seventeen places available for Clarion South 2009. Participants will be selected by a panel of industry professionals based on the quality of their written submissions.
The first item that we require is a sample of your writing. You may submit up to 6000 words of your fiction – either one or more completed short stories, or the beginning of a longer work, accompanied by a synopsis. The synopsis must be counted as part of the 6000 words, so make it short. Note that although novel fragments will be accepted as part of the application process, Clarion South is a short story workshop and you will not be able to submit novel extracts to critique sessions.
Send us your best work. We don’t care if it’s magic realism, sword and sorcery, gothic horror or hard science fiction as long as it fits beneath the broad umbrella of speculative fiction. This is a fiction workshop, with the focus on short stories. Don’t send us poetry, plays or screenplays, and don’t send us something that’s not speculative fiction. If you send only the beginning of a longer work, make it clear that it is speculative fiction.
Send three copies, printed or typed in a clear font, double-spaced, on one side of the page with adequate margins. The page number and title of the story or novel should appear on every page. Please attach a contents page to the front of each manuscript, listing the titles of each story, novel fragment or synopsis included. This is to ensure that if your stories or chapters become separated by accident during the selection process, we’ll be able to figure out who wrote them. Your name must not appear on any manuscript, including the contents page.
Your application should include:
Selection Process
The manuscripts will be distributed to three readers drawn from a pool of industry professionals: writers, editors, academics, Clarion South tutors and convenors. They read and evaluate the manuscript without knowing the identity of the author, then give it a score from one to ten, based on guidelines set by the convenors. These scores are collated by the application co-ordinator and, together with the additional written information supplied by each applicatiion, used by the convenors to determine who is offered a place at the workshop.
We are sometimes in a position to offer early entry to outstanding applicants. The benefit of early entry is more time to save, plan and fundraise for your Clarion South experience. It is in your best interests to apply as early as possible.
Clarion South Team
Clarion South is a non-profit initiative run entirely by volunteers. Four convenors currently administer the workshop – Robert Dobson, Kate Eltham, Heather Gammage and Robert Hoge. If you’d like to get in touch with Claron South, email us at info (AT) clarionsouth.org