Writing and Literature
Writing and Literature
The Writing and Literature track encourages writers to find their voice and share it with the world. Students will spend their mornings learning from Barnard instructors in courses such as Screenwriting, Dystopia in the Margins, and Poetry, on the same campus where writers like Greta Gerwig, Zora Neale Hurson, Jhumpa Lahiri got their start. Afternoons will be spent in intensives focused on developing a writing portfolio, getting published, and careers for writers.
Program Structure
Classes take place on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.
Office Hours, Junior Junction and Leadership in Action Workshops will be held on Monday and Friday.
Student life activities will be held in the evenings after class.
The Curriculum
Dystopia in the Margins
Instructor: Mimi Wong
“Dystopia in the Margins” explores 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. Short, supplemental texts of cultural and literary criticism will also be assigned. 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.
Screenwriting: The Art of Storytelling Through Film
Instructor: Bess 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. 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.
Introduction to Writing about Literature and Culture
Instructor: Tara Needham
What does it mean to “close read”? Does the author’s biography matter in understanding a novel? What about the time and place that the text was written? This course will introduce students to a range of reading habits, writing practices, and interpretative approaches that will deepen their encounters with and responses to novels, poems, and various other cultural artifacts. In particular, we will engage in writing practices that empower students to identify and express what interests them about a piece of writing or culture, to make a claim about it, and to articulate that claim against other interpretations. Foundational to this endeavor is re-envisioning the writing process, from an isolated, individual experience to one that involves collaboration and conversation; copious in-class writing; peer workshops; drafts and revision; blurring the boundary between creative and critical writing; and the inclusion of research and theoretical frames. We will use Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus as our main text to open up questions of humankind’s relationship to science, technology, and progress (among many other themes!), accompanied by additional readings, films, and excursions that expand the world of our writing and the objects we seek to understand.
Writing for TV: Discovering Your Voice in the Age of Streaming
Instructor: Dafina Roberts
Successfully selling a television show requires a writer to have a unique POV, engaging characters and a solid story engine. A series creator must develop two important documents to help them sell their show to television executives – the series bible and the pilot script. Through a number of creative exercises, students will learn the intricacies of the unique screenwriting formats that are the half-hour and hour-long teleplays. Together we will cover the differences between an episode arc and a seasonal one, the requirements of A/B/C story plotting, and how to write an effective show bible.
We will survey popular tv series from diverse voices, primarily focusing on women showrunners and/or series with strong female leads (including New Girl, Stranger Things, Never Have I Ever, Abbott Elementary, Ginny & Georgia, Derry Girls and more). By the end of the course, students will have a written mini series bible, a detailed pilot outline and the first act of their pilot script, which will be the springboard for creating a series that truly stands out!
The Instructors
Mimi Wong
Dystopia in the Margins
Mimi Wong is a writer, editor, and educator. For her work engaging with Asian diasporic culture, she was awarded the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Her writing has been published in The Believer, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, and was anthologized in Best! Letters from Asian Americans in the Arts (Paper Monument/n+1, 2021). She is Editor-in-Chief of the literary magazine The Offing and an assistant professor at The New School. She lives in New York.
Bess Frankel
Screenwriting
Bess Frankel is a director, writer, and teaching artist based in New York City. Her work has been a finalist for the O'Neill Playwrights Conference, Playwrights Realm Fellowship, Actors’ Theatre of Louisville Heideman Award, Jewish Plays Project, the Drama League’s Beatrice Terry Residency, and twice the Columbia@Roundabout Reading Series. As an associate/assistant director, Bess has worked on Broadway, the Public Theater, the Signature Theater, the Goodman Theater, among others. She was the long-term assistant to playwright Lynn Nottage and was the Manager of New Work Development for Ms. Nottage’s production company, Market Road Films. Bess is also the Co-Director and Head of Playwriting for CreateHER, a free theatre education program for girls and non-binary high school students, and teaches Screenwriting at Barnard College’s summer high school program. Bess received a BFA in Theatre Directing from the University of Michigan (Go Blue) and an MFA in Playwriting from Columbia University. Member: SDC; Dramatists Guild.
Tara Needham
Introduction to Writing about Literature and Culture
Tara Emelye Needham has taught extensively in the fields of literature, writing, and critical theory at diverse institutions, including Skidmore College, Bilkent University in Ankara Türkiye, and Bard College, where she also served as Assistant Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities. Tara’s poems and essays have appeared in several print and online journals and the archives of her 90’s feminist zine Cupsize are held in the Barnard Special Collections. She is currently a Ph. D candidate in Literary Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY, researching and writing on novels of the late British Empire.
Dafina Roberts
Writing for TV: Discovering Your Voice in the Age of Streaming
Dafina Roberts is a writer/director/producer, who creates dramedies targeted towards Gen Y and Z audiences. Her work explores themes of power, perception, and identity in the postmodern world.
Dafina has been a Barnard College Artemis Rising Foundation Filmmaker Fellow, a Ryan Murphy Half Initiative Directing Fellow, a Blackhouse Producer Lab Fellow and a Kickstarter Creator-In-Residence. Previously, she created the digital series Giving Me Life (In The Land Of The Deadass), which was released via Comcast’s Xfinity. Giving Me Life also won the AT&T Audience Award for Best Episodic at the Frameline San Francisco International LGBTQ Film Festival.
Dafina worked as a Director of Development & Production at Nickelodeon, where she oversaw creative development and current series; helped manage the first-look deal with Nick Cannon’s Ncredible Entertainment and coordinated on shows including the Emmy-nominated Degrassi. She also co-produced the feature film, Punching At The Sun (Sundance Film Festival; Sundance Institute's Humanitas Prize nominee; Tribeca Film Festival), which has been featured in the Criterion Collection.
Bridging Curriculum and Community
We believe student life does not start and end in the classroom. Each night after class, students can participate in activities led by our residential student staff.
Community Office Hours
Each Monday, students are invited to meet with any member of our Pre-College Programs team. Office hours emphasize PCP’s open door office policy and gives students a space to meet with their instructor, Peer Academic Leader, or a professional staff member.
Technology and Academic Support
Barnard PCP utilizes Canvas, an online platform, where students will find their syllabus, assignments, discussion boards, and access to message their instructor or peers outside of class.
Students will also receive a PCP email to use for the duration of the program.
Our team will go over technology usage in the student manual and during Orientation.