If you test positive for Covid – Don’t come to class until you test negative. But let your teacher know and we’ll work to give you access to your missed classes via Zoom.
If you show Covid symptoms OR If you have been exposed to someone with Covid – Don’t come to class for at least 5 days after showing symptoms or exposure, and then take a test to confirm that you are negative. Let your teacher know and we’ll work to give you access to your missed classes via Zoom.
If you have any questions about this, you may call (212-974-8377) or email us ([email protected]).
Pen on Fire
Pen on Fire is a 10-week workshop, which includes lectures, exercises, and the critiquing of student projects. It’s for beginners or anyone who wants to brush up on the fundamentals. Farther down, you can view a syllabus for this course.
The dream of a writer is to write like their pen is on fire. To burn through pages with confidence and finesse. But we often put all kinds of obstacles in our own path, slowing us down and robbing us of the freedom we need.
Perhaps you’re stuck with starting a project, or unhappy with your progress, or you need inspiration to put some gas in your tank, or you want to stretch some under-used muscles. Or you want the support of a teacher and like-minded writers.
This course provides techniques and tricks and insights that help you push past your worst internal roadblocks, so you can fly through your writing on a daily basis.
Gets one’s creative juices flowing and flooding over.
Karen Waltensperger
global health advisor
Notes
This is a cross-genre course, applicable to any kind of prose writing.
Upcoming Classes
NYC COVID Info
10-Week
-
Online
Anytime, week-long sessions
Tuition: $439 (returning students: $409)
Syllabus
This course introduces techniques and tricks and insights that help you surmount obstacles to your writing path. Course components:
Lectures
Writing exercises
Workshopping of student projects (each student presenting work two times)
Week 1
Confidence: Letting go of disclaimers. Finding compassion for yourself. The differences between freewriting vs. journaling and the benefits of each.
Week 2
Rituals: Finding what works for you. Identifying your strengths. Visiting with your work.
Week 3
Playing to your Strengths: Choosing the right genre. Throat clearing, vamping, and prevaricating. Breaking through resistance to tell the story you want to tell.
Week 4
Obstacle of the Self: Getting out of your own way. What are the obstacles you most frequently impose on yourself? Discovering them, developing tactics to get rid of them, and preventing new ones from appearing.
Week 5
Who Is Telling the Story?: Whose story is it, anyway? Who is the narrator? Who is driving the action? Paring away all distractions and focusing on who is telling this story.
Week 6
The Finer Points of Revision: Where to start when you feel lost. Things to keep an eye out for. Creating a plot board.
Week 7
Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?: How your past influences your thinking about your work. Setting goals. Using compassion and poetry to grow your writing.
Week 8
Marketplace Madness: To publish or not to publish? Putting yourself out there. Surviving the business of writing with your psyche intact.
Week 9
No MFA Needed Here: What are the elements of an MFA program that could help you grow your writing? Finding them in your community and your life. Connecting to the literary world.
Week 10
Persevering: Handling rejection. Minimizing rejection. Techniques for persistence and perseverance.
Teachers
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett is the author of Pen on Fire: A Busy Woman's Guide to Igniting the Writer Within (Harcourt Mifflin Harcourt/Mars Street Press), which was a Los Angeles Times bestseller and winner of the Best Book Award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors. She edited the anthology Palm Springs Noir (Akashic Books), and her short stories have been included in the anthologies Coolest American Stories (Coolest Stories Press), USA Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series, and Orange County Noir (both Akashic Books). Her short fiction has appeared in Oyez Review, Literary Hatchet, Broad River Review, Rock and a Hard Place, and Dark City Crime and Mystery Magazine. Her essays and articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Inlandia, the Antarctica Review, the Ocotillo Review, the San Jose Mercury News, Orange Coast Magazine, Poets and Writers, Writer’s Digest, and The Writer. She hosts and produces the long-running podcast Writers on Writing, and she was a co-producer and writer of the documentary Not in My Neighborhood. She has taught at Chapman University, the University of California-Irvine, and Saddleback College.
Read moreBarbara DeMarco-Barrett
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
is the author of Pen on Fire: A Busy Woman's Guide to Igniting the Writer Within (Harcourt Mifflin Harcourt/Mars Street Press), which was a Los Angeles Times bestseller and winner of the Best Book Award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors. She edited the anthology Palm Springs Noir (Akashic Books), and her short stories have been included in the anthologies Coolest American Stories (Coolest Stories Press), USA Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series, and Orange County Noir (both Akashic Books). Her short fiction has appeared in Oyez Review, Literary Hatchet, Broad River Review, Rock and a Hard Place, and Dark City Crime and Mystery Magazine. Her essays and articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Inlandia, the Antarctica Review, the Ocotillo Review, the San Jose Mercury News, Orange Coast Magazine, Poets and Writers, Writer’s Digest, and The Writer. She hosts and produces the long-running podcast Writers on Writing, and she was a co-producer and writer of the documentary Not in My Neighborhood. She has taught at Chapman University, the University of California-Irvine, and Saddleback College.
