Writing and Literature Track

Filmmaking

Instructor: Helen Kaplan

At the heart of every movie is its story. In this immersive workshop, you will develop your visual storytelling skills to create a short screenplay – the DNA of a winning film.

You will learn how to grab viewers by their collective shirt collar and more importantly, hold their attention until the final credits roll. Emphasis will be placed on the classic three-act structure, plot, character development, conflict, and dialogue. Through notes and discussion of your work, we will help pick the lock on the stories only you can tell. While the world you create on the page may be fictional, you will get at the emotional truth of the characters’ lives through specifics. Perhaps paradoxical and even a bit counterintuitive, Greta Gerwig said it best, “The more particular you make something, the more universal it becomes.” 

Since the script illuminates the story for everyone who helps bring your vision to the screen, you’ll also discover how best to collaborate with actors, directors, cinematographers, and designers. And in short exercises, you’ll get a chance to experience the many aspects of filmmaking – including acting, storyboarding, shooting, production designing, and location scouting. While sharing work will be the focus of the course, we’ll also take full advantage of New York City as both a set and source of inspiration. After all, this is a fantastic place to eavesdrop, people watch, and capture the magic for all to see.

Time: Mon, Tues, Wed, and Thurs 9:30 AM- 12:00 PM EST

Thurs afternoons from 2:00- 4:30 PM EST.

Flash Forms

Instructor: Alexandra Watson

"For sale: baby shoes, never worn." In six words, the unidentified writer (sometimes attributed as Ernest Hemingway) prompts the reader to imagine a whole story. Who are the parents? What happened to the baby? Where are the parents selling the shoes? Who will buy them? A work of flash fiction or nonfiction gives us just enough information to suggest narrative and character, while leaving us to fill in the gaps with our imagination. In this workshop, we'll practice writing very short essays, stories, and prose poems, assessing what makes them evocative and memorable. We'll read very short works by Jamaica Kincaid, John Edgar Wideman, Lydia Davis, George Saunders, and others, with attention to how these writers create meaning through very few words, while gesturing towards context off the page. We'll practice writing flash with prompts given in class. Writers will come away with not only a toolbox for crafting this short form, but also with strategies for crafting vivid scenes and dynamic characters in fiction more broadly.

Time: Mon, Tues, Wed, and Thurs 9:30 AM- 12:00 PM EST

Thurs afternoons from 2:00- 4:30 PM EST.

Writing Harlem: Identity, Image, and Ideology in the Capital of Black America

Instructor: Jonathan Gill

This course uses a diverse variety of materials, from poetry and fiction to music, art, and film, to manifestoes, sermons, and political speeches, as well as walking tours, to offer a broad and deep introduction to the cultural history of Uptown Manhattan. While African-American Harlem forms the focal point of our investigation, the wide varieties of identities that have left their mark on Northern Manhattan, from the Native American, Dutch, British, and early American periods, to the rise of German, Irish, Italian, Jewish, and Latinx Harlem, to the controversial "New Renaissance" currently underway, are also of interest.

Time: Mon, Tues, Wed, and Thurs 9:30 AM- 12:00 PM EST

Thurs afternoons from 2:00- 4:30 PM EST.

Poetry on Page and Stage: Spoken Word Poetics

Instructor: Quincy Scott Jones

Poetry on Page and Stage offers students an introduction to the craft of poetry with a focus on the transition from textual performance to oral performance.  As a hybrid of creative writing and performance workshops, students will spend half the semester focusing on the written word.  Students will perform weekly exercises to practice and explore traditional forms, discuss predecessors of American performance poetry, and offer critical exegesis on each other’s work.  The second half of the class will be spent in performance.  We will study current spoken word performances, voice training techniques, and intersections between acting and poetic theories.  Students will critique each other’s individual deliveries, collaborate on group performances, and ultimately construct a performance synthesizing a semester’s worth of work.  Readings will include such authors as Sonia Sanchez, Bushra Rehman, Franny Choi, Morgan Parker, and Ntosake Shange.

Time: Mon, Tues, Wed, and Thurs 9:30 AM- 12:00 PM EST

Thurs afternoons from 2:00- 4:30 PM EST.

The Perzine Is Political: Critical Thinking With Casual Texts 

Instructor: Jenna Freedman

The Perzine Is Political, will use zines in the Barnard Library's extensive collection of creative nonfiction texts written by authors holding a wide range of identities, along with excerpts from the book Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism, scholarly articles, and lay publications The class will include a digital element, doing textual analysis with the zine corpus, and will explore how critical making challenges the research paper as the default or only way of demonstrating knowledge.

Time: Mon, Tues, Wed, and Thurs 9:30 AM- 12:00 PM EST

Thurs afternoons from 2:00- 4:30 PM EST.

Uses of Violence

Instructor: Annabelle Larsen

In this course, we’ll explore the use of violence in short stories and fiction. We’ll look
at how violence, be it emotional, political, or physical, can serve to develop conflict
and character in fiction. How does fictional violence serve to disrupt and unsettle
not only the narrative, but the reader as well? To explore this, we’ll move from the
philosophical exploration of violence in works by Dostoyevsky and Moravia to the
more raucous display in Cormac McCarthy’s Westerns and Highsmith and
Thompson’s noirs, from the repressed, lurking violence in short stories by writers
Such as Carver and Gaitskill to the textual violence found in postmodern writers like
Acker. Along the way, we’ll meet assassins, prisoners, skinheads, schoolgirls, and
gangsters. How and why do these characters excite or repel us? How far can we
push the characters in our own fiction, and how far should we? How can violence
illuminate the larger political or societal forces that exist in specific moments of
history? How does violence in fiction create an often unexpected, yet deeply
significant, catharsis and consequence?

Time: Mon, Tues, Wed, and Thurs 9:30 AM- 12:00 PM EST

Thurs afternoons from 2:00- 4:30 PM EST.

The Arguments in Your Head: Playwriting Workshop & Performance 

Instructor: Ella Boureau

In The Arguments in Your Head: Playwriting Workshop, we’ll explore and develop the foundational skills, techniques, and instincts that you’ll need to write a full-length play. The goal of this class is not to write a perfect play (doesn’t exist!) Rather, the goal is to let go of what you think you should be writing to impress others and instead learn to become the stewards of your own urgent questions and aesthetics principles. This workshop will be process-focused rather than outcome-focused. As your teacher, my concern is not perfection— I care about pulse. Everyone will be bringing in new, unfinished work that is a little raw and uncomfortable. No one knows what they’re doing, we’re all in the same boat! My goal for you is not to get stuck when you get lost (because if I do my job right you will get lost), but instead I hope to give you tools that help you find your way in the dark, take bold risks, and above all keep going. Every play is different and has its own rules. In order to fashion those rules autonomously we have to learn to listen deeply, follow an inarticulate hunch, and above all, be willing to fail. Be brave, playwright! This is where the wildness lives, where all the scary fun is to be had. And in the end… it’s just words on a page, ink on paper— you can always tear it up and start over. By the end of this class, you will have written a draft of a full-length play, learned how to give thoughtful feedback on the plays of your classmates, and developed a more critical eye to the plays that you read.

Time: Mon, Tues, Wed, and Thurs 9:30 AM- 12:00 PM EST

Thurs afternoons from 2:00- 4:30 PM EST.

Screenwriting: The Art of Storytelling Through Film

Instructor: Elisabeth Frankel

This course will give you the empowering tools to recognize a creative idea in your imagination, and use the medium of screenwriting to make it come to life. You will write, workshop, or refine your voice as a screenwriter, while watching films that will inspire and challenge you. We will explore the foundations of three-act structure, beat sheets, and the Young Hero’s Journey, before interrogating how to best tell stories in our own way. Throughout this course, we will explore questions like: What makes a great opening scene you can’t turn off? How can genres like science fiction or horror enhance a story about the human experience? How do we uplift our personal experiences through memoir writing? We will study almost a dozen films, widely varied in style and approach, but almost all of them exclusively made by and starring women. In addition to classroom screenings, we will make use of incredible opportunities across New York City; past field trips have included the Museum of Modern Art and the Metrograph Theater. By the end of the course, you will have written 3-4 short screenplays. Between watching, discussing, and writing, this course is an all-encompassing love letter to film and women’s place in it.

Time: Mon, Tues, Wed, and Thurs 9:30 AM- 12:00 PM EST

Thurs afternoons from 2:00- 4:30 PM EST.

Women & Comedy

Instructor: Nina Sharma

“What a language it is, the laughter of women,

high-flying and subversive.

Long before law and scripture

we heard the laughter, we understood freedom.”

-Lisel Mueller

“I’m not funny, what I am is brave.” - Lucille Ball

“Women and Comedy” focuses on the intersection between comedy and gender, race, class and sexuality. Aware that as Judith Butler says, “the process of securing greater freedom for women requires an ongoing rethinking of this category,” we use the term “woman” not as a fixed position but an entry point into discussing history – specifically to interrogate and challenge comedy’s all-too-long and enduring history of making a punchline out of marginalized groups. We will explore laughter as a subversive act and how the identity of a “funny woman” can be both dangerous and liberating. As Margo Jefferson writes, “Given the history of social restriction and sexual regulation, how many women have been in a position to -- or been willing to -- take these risks?” We will explore how the tools of comedy can be used to make mischief, to transgress the bounds of genre and form and to contest popular ideas about difference and power. How can humor be illuminating? How can humor be feminist? How can humor be intersectional? How can humor help us tell the hard truths? Can we laugh at oppression without laughing it off? This course does exclusively focus on humorists and welcomes writers of all genres who want to get playful. Rather than “funny,” we focus on “fun,” explore playfulness as it occurs in myriad ways across a diverse variety of texts. As we do, we will find models, key writerly moves, to adapt into our own writing whatever shape or form it takes. As we shift to sharing our own thoughts and work, we will do so from a place of generosity. As Charna Halpern, Del Close and Kim “Howard” Johnson put it: “A truly funny scene is not the result of someone trying to steal laughs at the expense of his partner, but of generosity – of trying to make the other person (and his ideas) look as good as possible.” Let’s share and discuss from this place of generosity. Rather than prescriptive critiques, let’s ask one another “what’s the fun of this story?” Let’s urge each other to see how can that fun remain, adhere, and grow through our time together.

Time: Mon, Tues, Wed, and Thurs 9:30 AM- 12:00 PM EST

Thurs afternoons from 2:00- 4:30 PM EST.

Migrant Narratives

Instructor: Duygu Oya Ula

This seminar brings together literary, artistic and nonfiction works that focus on migrant, immigrant, refugee, expat and exile experiences. We will explore how migrant subjects negotiate dominant discourses of nationality and citizenship, and how their identities as migrants intersect with their other positionalities, with a particular emphasis on race, gender and queerness. Some questions we will consider: How are immigrant, migrant and refugees marginalized, racialized and queered by dominant discourses? How do immigrants, migrants and refugees negotiate belonging when they cross cultural, national, linguistic and religious borders? How do these authors, filmmakers and artists resist erasure and complicate our understanding of home, belonging and identity?

Readings are subject to change but will likely include texts by writers such as James Baldwin, Fatimah Asghar, Ocean Vuong, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Jamaica Kincaid, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Kazim Ali, Edward Said and Hannah Arendt as well as visual media and op-eds. Students will get a chance to hone their formal and informal writing skills and their discussion skills through engagement with our course texts.

Time: Mon, Tues, Wed, and Thurs 9:30 AM- 12:00 PM EST

Thurs afternoons from 2:00- 4:30 PM EST.

Dystopia in the Margins 

Instructor: Mimi Wong

“Dystopia in the Margins” will explore dystopian fiction from the perspective of minority writers, specifically those belonging to the Asian diaspora. Over the course of three weeks, we will read and discuss three contemporary novels: Severance by Ling Ma, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, and On Such a Full Sea by Chang-rae Lee. The course is designed to cultivate critical reading and writing skills, while engaging with topics such as identity, race, class, globalization, and the impact of capitalism.

Time: Mon, Tues, Wed, and Thurs 9:30 AM- 12:00 PM EST

Thurs afternoons from 2:00- 4:30 PM EST.

Decolonizing Poetry

Instructor: Gauri Awasthi

Different cultures and communities have been colonized, subverted, and often removed from history to respond to the colonizer’s culture in diverse ways. In this seminar, we examine poetry and poets who’ve spoken from marginalized groups and made themselves seen through their writing. We will focus on studying global poetry informed by these voices and learning their original traditions and concerns. The White Man’s voice has dominated the poetic cannon for so long. This course reflects on the obsessions of the 'othered' and their literary traditions, examining the forms and techniques they use to decolonize poetry. Our readings will span poetry and essays by writers like Agha Shahid Ali, Patricia Smith, Adrienne Rich, A.K. Ramanujan, Wole Soyinka, Eunice DeSouza, Angel Nafis, Yusef Komunyakaa, Aimee Nezkhukumatathil, and many others. We will occasionally respond to songs, visual art and other media.

Times: Mon, Tues, Wed, and Thurs 9:30 AM - 12:00 PM EST

Thurs afternoons from 2:00 PM - 4:30 PM EST

An Introduction to Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction

Instructor: Ye Odelia Lu

The most compelling creative nonfiction usually balances two things on a scale: looking inward and looking outward. The writer usually commands the attention of the reader with personal fixation, urgent inquisition, and/or evocative occurrence before allowing the self to move beyond and observe, digest, and/or criticize the world with a keen eye. To learn how to do so, we will be reading diverse works of nonfiction that center an honest, complex, and incredibly porous narrative, each combining the reflective and the analytical in its distinct style. We will also approach major genres of nonfiction, including memoir and personal essay, and other miscellaneous forms such as diary and writing with archival materials. There will be voluntary in-class and take-home exercises that encourage students to practice techniques exemplified by assigned texts, while weekly writing assignments will give students opportunities to adopt these skills to fit their own language and style.

Times: Mon, Tues, Wed, and Thurs 9:30 AM - 12:00 PM EST

Thurs afternoons from 2:00 PM - 4:30 PM EST