Memoir: A masterclass was a two-day intensive for writers with existing life-writing projects. Held in Castlemaine in summer 2025, the masterclass combined generative prompts and draft workshopping. Read on for an excerpt of poetic memoir that resulted from the event.
Stephanie Holt
Except from A quickening (on learning of a long past death in a favourite city)
i.
Did you really glide across a near-empty nightclub
in a carefully just-a-little-tight 60s suit?
Shiny with wear, cheap fabric worn
just right
— lustrous.
A lesson in self-assurance.
A lesson in semiotics.
A lesson in sardonic postpunk glamour.
While I, your target,
swathed in polished cotton,
leaned on the bar.
Or less louche, more likely,
perched beside it,
chatting to the barman.
They rise now unexpected,
grieftossed, fragments …
I close my eyes chest tightening —
make out your words but cannot catch
your voice. Instead
my own breath catches
and the pictures follow
the words
fraught blurry
backformations.
I wonder, now, why you were there so early, fret
I can’t be sure which club it was —
I thought Hurrah, but Privates maybe?
Perhaps you came with one of the bands, with muso mates,
or like me grew easy with
the work, the purposeful before,
the moving parts exposed
as busyness echoes sharp in stale mute spaces
… cool competence … hot promise … slow build …
the imminence of empty nightclubs
as yet unwarmed by bodies massing,
the imminence of empty dancefloors
as yet unblurred by heat and heave and flow.
Getting my bearings.
This much I know: I was new to all of this.
In Melbourne I knew the pubs and clubs. I knew their free nights, their free food, where friends would sling me drinks. I knew the trams rattling past, how late they ran, when they’d get me back to the suburbs. I knew the inner-city streets to reach my twin brother’s sharehouse and how to get safely, drunk, to a spare couch. I knew where we gathered. I knew where we lingered. I knew when the bands came on.
But this was New York and I
just arrived
at nineteen, eager, shy and gloriously alone
knew very little
knew no one in the city
and had arrived that night way too early
advised — misled —
by a gig ad advising only when
“doors open”.