Stories with Spice with Anne Freeman

Join award-winning contemporary fiction writer Anne Freeman in a spirited exploration of what makes a successful spicy scene and how to craft one. During this ninety-minute, interactive workshop, participants will gain an increased understanding of their ideal reader and how to cater to their desires using the fundamentals of good writing.  

Learning outcomes:

1. Establish and understand your ideal reader
2. Explore what a spicy scene can add to your narrative
3. Ethical considerations of sex-scene writing
4. Embracing the power of Show Don't Tell
5. Discover the antidote to cringey cliche

This program is proudly presented by MARION, and supported by Smith’s Alternative Canberra.

Anne Freeman writes contemporary fiction about women who are stuck in life and the extraordinary ways they shake themselves loose. Her stories are always engaging and sometimes funny with reluctant adventures, sexy escapades and friendships that uplift.

Anne’s novels and short stories have been recognised in many literary competitions including the Romance Writers of Australia Valerie Parv Award, the Hawkeye Publishing Manuscript Development Prize, the Boroondara Open Short Story Competition, the Grindstone Literary International Novel Prize, the Queensland Writers' Centre Adaptable Program, the CYA Writers & Illustrators Competition, and the Somerset Book Awards for Literary & Contemporary Fiction. 

This workshop will share a playful model of generative writing that an international group of poets has been using now for the better part of a decade. Using the prose poem form, these poets, in a practice sometimes called ‘authorised theft’,  share drafts of poems via group email and borrow each other’s phrasing and images to create their own prose poems. This workshop will briefly review the prose poem form, but mostly it will be an invitation to play with writing it using other poets’ poems as a starting point. Come to this workshop ready to share, play, and cavort!

Jen Webb is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Creative Practice at the University of Canberra. She is the holder of the inaugural ACT Poet of the Year Award, as well as many other literary awards. She was the ACT editor for the Australian Book Review's States of Poetry mini-anthologies (2015–2017), chair of the NSW Premier's Literary Award (Kenneth Slessor Award for Poetry, 2017–2018), and is co-editor of the Australasian Association of Writing Program's literary journal, Meniscus, and of the scholarly journal Axon: Creative Explorations.

Jen's recent works include the scholarly volumes Gender and the Creative Labour Market (with Scott Brook et al., Palgrave 2022); Art and Human Rights: Contemporary Asian Contexts (with Caroline Turner; Manchester UP, 2016); Researching Creative Writing (Frontinus, 2015); and the Oxford University Press bibliography entry for Pierre Bourdieu (2017). Her recent volumes of poetry include The Daily News (Recent Work Press 2024, shortlisted for the ACT Book of the Year 2025); Moving Targets (RWP 2018); and Stolen Stories, Borrowed Lines (Mark Time Press, 2015).  

Kimberly K. Williams is a Lecturer at Central Queensland University and an award-winning poet and is the author of three books of poetry. Her second book, Sometimes a Woman (Recent Work Press 2021), about the madams and prostitutes who helped to settle the US “Wild West,” won the 2022 WILLA Literary Award for Poetry (USA). Her third book, Still Lives (Gazebo Books 2022), won a Canberra Critics Award in 2023 and was short-listed for the ACT Poetry Book of the Year. She has a fourth book of poems forthcoming in July 2026 from Liquid Amber Press. 

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