View the archive of my 90-minute class and discover the ways I’ve found that the process and progress of our lives – like Song – knows more than we do.

My name is Joe Henry. And for the uninitiated among you (please: no show of hands), I declare myself to be a songwriter, singer, and recording artist; a 3-time Grammy-winning record producer (oh, vanity!); a poet, essayist, and author.

I am also a devoted husband of thirty-four years and the father of two: neither fact incidental to who I am as an artist, or the way that I have evolved in that station.

. . . . .

My friend, the poet Jane Hirshfield, once acknowledged a fundamental truth I’d never before heard properly acknowledged, saying:

“The poem has an intelligence that the poet does not possess.”

Blessed be.

When she spoke this, I felt struck as an old tower bell is struck; felt both enlightened and liberated as an artist and as a man; for it has never not been my witness that I am led into thought – understand who I am and what I believe – by the songs that I have been writing since I was fifteen years old. And since those earliest year of having my ear to the street and my shoulder to the wheel, I know that more than anything, I have been cultivating, creatively-speaking, a surrender into process.

By this, I do not mean “surrender” in terms of resignation, but of radical acceptance.

By this, I do not mean that the “creative process” is limited to the making of songs or any other so-called Art; but rather it is as a habit of being; for as I work, so do I live.

And the longer that I live and the longer I have worked, I see that the line I first thought must separate the two has become blurred and ever-changing. Most everything of significance I have learned in my lifetime has either been ushered in on the arm of Song, or affirmed and made clear by it.

All this I mean to tell you when we are together.

All this I hope to make clear when cloudy, and to make blurry when clarity defeats true understanding – for so much of what we experience happens in shadow and thus must be spoken from there.

An outline for my time with you might look like this (though what follows cannot define the engagement any more than a paper map of a road can faithfully describe the storm and humanity you may encounter when upon it):

• Life is mysterious in nature; and we are called not to dispel mystery but to abide it; to stand in its weather, and be shaped by its shifting shape; to rejoice in all that is unseen and wholly / holy unknowable.

• No matter how solitary may be your methods, every creative endeavor is collaborative: a collaboration with time, experience, history, tradition, circumstance, expectation, desire, and breakfast, to name but a few.

•All of mortal living is defined by tension. In the way that no kite remains aloft without the tension of its tether, so no love exists without a taut string between us; and thus it can be plucked to sound, like the string of a guitar – resonate and melodic.

• Like Song, successful living as well as the loved that attends it are not defined by any notion of Perfection – for there is no such thing within mortal life. The mere fact of impermanence should liberate and invite all of us away from the exhausting abstraction of that desire and its false sense of control, and into acceptance, into surrender; away from self-expression and toward discover; into the moment wherein everything that Is feels to have been…inevitable.

• Was that five? I have one additional thing to include, and you may call it a bonus if, by then, it feels like one; and that is that courtesy of Song, I came to see the connective tissue between every-thing and all of us. I can point back and often do to the moment when, at about age ten, i first heard Bob Dylan. Suffice for this moment to say that Bob didn’t change everything as much as he unified everything. By peeling back the onion on his journey and process, I could hear the connection in all I was encountering: understood the taut thread (tension again) that stitched Hank Williams and Jimmy Reed to the so-called beat poets; Miles Davis, Picasso and Cassius Clay (as he was known in that moment of revelation) to Richard Pryor; Walt Whitman to Duke Ellington, and on to Orson Welles.

I’ll strive to share with you the ways in which I believe the process and progress of our lives – like Song, and like Jane’s aforementioned poem – thankfully, compassionately, with wonder and by grace…knows more than we do.

I hope you may join me.

Joe Henry

Bath, Maine

View the archive of my 90-minute class and discover the Five Things I Think I’ve Learned about writing, directing, and editing films — as well as the joys I’m certain accompany a lifetime of loving movies.

I fell madly in love with movies at an early age, around four or five.  Maybe you did, too.  By the time I was in junior high I was giving talks on film history and spending all my allowance money on 8mm and 16mm films. I sought out old movies on TV and in revival screenings as best as I could in Omaha, of all places, but I was also coming of age in the 1970s, a period we now know as a golden age of cinema. Although I’m influenced by films from many different decades and countries, it’s American films of the 1970s that most left their mark on me, most taught me what I think a good, adult, artistic and commercial movie is.  I’ve spent my career still trying to make 70s movies, and my niche has been odd little comedy-dramas often set in the Midwest.

As much a director and screenwriter – and I love making movies — I’m also a film watcher, a buff.  You might think I’d want to come off like an expert, but the more I learn about film history, the more ignorant I realize I am. The cinema world is so vast that I always feel like a beginner, and my film knowledge is dwarfed by that of many other film nerds I know, including Richard Peña.

I’m overjoyed that my 90-minute class, Five Things I’ve Learned about Film Making and Film Watching, gives me a chance to do a deep-dive with my old friend Richard Peña. Richard was kind enough to program some of my films in the New York Film Festival over the years and to invite me to engage in public conversations with him — discussions that started about my own movies but soon took us burrowing down all manner of film rabbit holes with our little wet film snouts.

When Richard and I meet again, we’ll begin with five things I think I’ve learned about filmmaking from my experience writing, directing and editing, but who knows where we’ll end up?  I’ll also be happy to field some of your questions, so be sure to submit them in advance.

You’ll see why film lovers seek one another out – to kibitz about film treasures and film technique, about how to look at movies, of course to gossip, and the discussions always spin in the most delightful, unforeseen directions. All of it comes from the dire need to share the sheer joy of loving movies, which I am convinced is an extension of loving life itself.

The thing I’m most grateful for in life is having been born during a time in which the cinema even existed. Think of all the billions of people who lived and died and never got to see a movie – the poor sons of bitches.

I hope you’ll join us.

View the archive of my two-hour class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about the powerful legacy and continuing pleasure of this engaging, versatile art form.

The essay is a literary form dating back to ancient times, with a long and glorious history.  As the record par excellence of a mind tracking its thoughts, it can be considered the intellectual bellwether of any modern society.  The great promise of essays is the freedom they offer to explore, digress, acknowledge uncertainty; to evade dogmatism and embrace ambivalence and contradiction; to engage in intimate conversation with one’s readers and literary forbears; and to uncover some unexpected truth, preferably via a sparkling prose style.  Flexible, shape-shifting, experimental, as befits its name derived from the French essai = attempt, it is nothing if not versatile.

When I first dreamed of being a writer, in my late teens and early twenties, I was drawn first to fiction and then to poetry.  Never did it enter my mind then to become an essayist.  The essays I was exposed to in college were assigned by way of teaching to write compositions and examination papers, the sort of tax you had to pay in order to read great literature.   As I was usually assigned no more than one essay per writer from a textbook, it did not occur to me that essayists could have personalities as charming or idiosyncratic as my favorite novelists and poets.  But I was already drawn to first-person writing, that intimate, subjective whisper in the ear. What I liked particularly about first-person writing was the one-to-one connection it established between author and reader, its penchant for self-analysis, often undercut by rationalization and self-deception.  Unbeknownst to me, I was in preparation for falling in love with the personal essay.

That captivation occurred during one summer vacation when I rented a cottage in Cape Cod.  As is my wont, I snooped around the bookcases at the house I was subletting, and found a Penguin paperback of William Hazlitt’s selected essays, and took it outside to peruse.  Unlike Paul on the road to Damascus, my conversion experience occurred lying in a hammock.  Hazlitt’s cussed, animated voice electrified me from the start.  He turned me on to his friend Charles Lamb, who had a much more insidious, playful tone, but was every bit as galvanizing.  Hazlitt also warmly recommended Montaigne, whom I had read decades earlier in college with baffled indifference, but who now, as I approached middle age, became my guy, my model.  The rest of the Anglo-American canon followed more or less automatically:  Addison and Steele, Samuel Johnson, Stevenson, Beerbohm, Virginia Woolf, Orwell, and on the other side of the Atlantic, Thoreau, Mencken, Baldwin, Mary McCarthy, etc.

I began writing the stuff and teaching the personal essay to my graduate students; I had to photocopy masses of material because it was hard to find any anthologies that went back before the twentieth century.  I, however, have been blessed or cursed with an historical sense, and have envisioned the personal essay as a conversation between living and dead authors across the centuries.  Eventually it dawned on me that I myself would have to edit the anthology I needed to assign.   That is how The Art of the Personal Essay came about.  It has become the standard text, adopted by universities across the United States.  I became so identified as the champion of the personal essay that I began to feel imprisoned in my promotional role, though happy to take whatever rewards it provided. 

Part of the problem was that the more I studied the vast literature of the essay, the less was I convinced that the personal essay constituted such a unique subgenre, distinct from other kinds of essays.  First, I fell in love with Emerson, whom I had stupidly excluded from my Art of the Personal Essay, only to realize decades later that there was no American essayist more imbued with personality, acuity and sheer strangeness than this man.  Second, I began writing a lot of criticism—of movies, books, architecture, visual arts—and it didn’t seem to me that my brain or my deployment of rhetorical strategies was operating any differently than when I wrote personal essays.  I knew that some of my favorite practitioners, such as Virginia Woolf, George Orwell and Max Beerbohm, were equally adept at critical pieces as they were at personal essays, with no shrinkage of their inimitable personalities in their criticism.    As I immersed myself in the critical masters, from Diderot to Ruskin to Edmund Wilson to Lionel Trilling to Susan Sontag, I saw that they were all cobbling together a highly specific voice or persona through which evaluations and insights could issue forth.  

I have since been expanding my idea of what constitutes an essay, which has taken me in many new directions: food writing, nature writing, science writing, psychoanalysis, sports, politics, geography, religion.  No longer restricted to the self-consciously belletristic, I seek out fine examples in every discipline, because every discipline has gifted writers who are willing to venture forth with their thoughts on the page, testing hypotheses, registering skepticism about received ideas, examining their own doubts, employing worldly irony, and making a pleasing arc of their cogitations.  Which brought me to my current project: editing a three-volume set of anthologies of the American essay.

 At bottom is my conviction that the best way to familiarize yourself with the essay is to become a dedicated reader of the form.  Immerse yourself in its literature.  In our workshop I will be discussing various masters and making recommendations.  As someone who has taught creative writing for more than four decades, I will also be advocating useful practices for those who wish to try their hand at it.  Whether you would like to write essays yourself, or simply enjoy them as a reader, this session should provide a basic introduction to the form, a foundation for further exploration, and, I hope, a good time. 

View the archive of our 90-minute class and discover the Five Things We’ve Learned about bringing international cinema to the American audience, about cinema’s rich history, and about the many ways to love the movies.

When I was about 10, while looking through the stacks in my local public library, I came upon a shelf labeled “Movies,”—793, I think, in the old Dewey Decimal System. Before me were half a dozen books on film. This seemed so strange to me—books about movies? Even though by then I was a pretty voracious filmgoer, somehow I didn’t quite imagine what a book about the movies could be. I checked one out, The Liveliest Art, by Arthur Knight, and soon was entranced. Knight traced the movies from shots of speeding trains to the glory days of Hollywood, also discussing the new waves of cinema coming from abroad. I began to note when some of the films he talked about would show up on TV.

Then, on a Sunday in early September, 1965, the advertisement for the Third New York Film Festival came out in the Times; scouring its offerings, I was amazed to find THE WEDDING MARCH by Erich von Stroheim, one of the more colorful characters in Knight’s book—“the man you love to hate”—and I knew his movies were really hard to see. I asked my parents if I could go and, after getting my wonderful, ballet-loving aunt to agree to accompany me, we ordered tickets. A few weeks later we were sitting in what eventually became Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center. A man came out to introduce the film; he was Henri Langlois, legendary Director of the Cinémathèque Française, although at that time I had no idea what that meant. The lights came down, the piano accompaniment started, and THE WEDDING MARCH lit up the screen. I was completely hooked.

Somehow, 23 years later, I found myself on the stage of Alice Tully Hall, opening the Twenty-Sixth New York Film Festival as its director, a position I was privileged to have for the next twenty-five years. Simultaneously, I tried to keep up an academic career, and since 1989 I’ve been teaching film history and theory at Columbia University. When people ask what I do, I sometimes reply “I’m in the film history business.” As a programmer, I organized retrospectives of national cinemas and significant film artists; as a festival director, I got to cull a wide range of a given year’s films and come up with a kind of snapshot of where my colleagues and I thought the cinema was headed. And finally, as a film professor, I get to offer my thoughts on how the cinema has grown, adapted and evolved over its 125-year history, hoping whatever insights I offer can serve the next generation of filmmakers.

Another question I’m sometimes asked is “Can you still watch movies just for pleasure?” I can’t imagine how else one can watch a movie. If anything, I’m often disappointed that more people don’t take advantage of the enormous, voluptuous banquet the cinema is offering up — such a range of styles, themes, subjects, approaches — more than enough to delight and intrigue every viewer. Sadly, most seem satisfied with only the “fast food” offerings on display at our multiplexes or on our TV screens.

I’m delighted to have been asked to share with you my thoughts about cinema’s past, present and future, and it’s a special treat to be having this conversation with my dear friend Phillip Lopate — one of the few people I know whose passion for the adventure that is the cinema easily matches mine. I look forward to comparing notes on some cinema’s classic masters, and debate who our contemporary masters might be, as well as where we each think that the ”action” in cinema really is nowadays. The writing of film history, and especially film criticism, is an issue of special concern to both of us, and we’ll discuss what we look for when we read about film. As two avid filmgoers, I think both of us are concerned about what seems to be the incipient decline of theatrical screenings; we’ll compare predictions as to what the future of the movie theater could be. Finally, I’m sure there will be plenty of questions about my time at the New York Film Festival—what went right, what went wrong.

I very much hope you’ll join us.

I first fell in love with films when I was a little kid and my parents sent me and my siblings off to the local double-feature movie house so that they could have some “private time.” While they were engrossed in whatever that meant, I was drinking in the erotic magic of Veronica Lake and Yvonne DeCarlo doing their mischief onscreen. As a teenager I had the good fortune to be living through a cinematic high point (the French New Wave, the Italian masters Rossellini, Fellini, Antonioni, Satyajit Ray, the last flourishing of classical Hollywood masters like Ford, Hawks and Hitchcock, the American experimentalists Cassavetes, Mekas, Shirley Clarke…) I started a club in college called Filmmakers of Columbia, and made a short film, but regrettably my working class parents had little money to support my habit, unlike my classmate Brian de Palma whose father was a wealthy surgeon, so I put down my Bolex and turned to the typewriter instead.

Since then I have written some twenty books: essay and poetry collections, novels, monographs, edited anthologies. Not bragging, just saying. I’ve also written a ton of film criticism, because I’m still movie-mad.  But the fact is that though I’ve written for the New York Times, Vogue, Film Comment, Cineaste, etc., I’ve never had an official critic’s post and remain something of an outsider in the world of film festivals. That’s why I was so grateful when Richard Peña asked me to serve on the New York Film Festival selection committee, along with “legitimate” critics. At the time, Richard and I were acquaintances, so I was surprised when he tapped me, but over the decades we have morphed into close friends. Part of that intimacy was acquired during the tricky process of agreeing on which films to include or exclude. Richard can be quite commanding, (dare I say bullying?) but I was never shy about standing up to and opposing him, if need be, which may have accelerated our warm friendship and certainly our mutual respect.

So now I get the chance to engage him in conversation about our mutual love of the cinema.  Five seems a small number of the possible takeaways I am expecting from our talk, but I expect a few of the following to emerge. When we were young, barely more than kids, why did we think it necessary to learn the whole history of cinema? What was it like for Richard to assume the mantle of the Lincoln Center Film Society, and act not only as a film programmer but an administrator, a negotiator with foreign distributors, a multi-lingual presence on the global scene? How does he view the differences between our roles: I as a writer and film critic, he as a curator, scholar, all-purpose film maven?  What does he think of film criticism–who are his favorite film critics? We have both ended up as professors at Columbia: what has been the impact of our teaching lives on our understanding of movies? How has our both being parents affected our sense of responsibility to pass down the knowledge of film history?  How do we see the future of film, the current trends, the risks and problems? I am sure we will not run out of things to talk about, and I would welcome the comments of listeners and kibbitzers.

Please join us!

View the archive of our 90-minute class and discover the Five Things We’ve Learned about the essential mindsets that will help you get your book finished.

For the past three years, we’ve been interviewing all kinds of authors—from Jacqueline Woodson to Elizabeth Gilbert and Pico Iyer to Mary Karr—on our popular weekly podcast, Write-Minded. In our professional roles—Grant as Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and Brooke as the Publisher of She Writes Press—and through our podcast, we’ve learned a thing or two about what it takes to get the work done.

In our 90-minute workshop, we will share secrets to writers’ success, ranging from the emotional challenges writers face (and can overcome) to concrete strategies for prioritizing your writing so you can cross the finish line. 

Between the two of us, we bring decades of experience with writers to this class—and we share what we’ve learned about what separates those writers who want to do it from those writers who actually do it. And when we say do it, what do we mean? That’s right, getting that book done! 

We share a similar ethos when it comes to writing and getting published, and we always have fun together—and bring to all our content things writers really need, like permission to laugh at themselves, to acknowledge that this journey is really hard—and even ridiculous!—sometimes. Our five things will resonate with any writer who’s on the journey, and that matters because it’s in the universal challenges that we find inspiration. 

This class will support writers and authors to stay the course, give themselves the much-needed high-fives along the way, and remember that the journey is indeed the reward. Come ready to be inspired and also held. Getting a book done requires support, and you will find that here. We have your back, and so do the other students you’ll convene with here. Sometimes all it takes is a shift in perspective, someone saying the right thing in the right moment. If this is your year—your time—to finish your book, join us. We welcome you.

View the archive of my 90-minute class and discover the few things I’ve learned about the elasticity of identity and imagination.

After years of readers asking me how I wrote a novel about a seventy-two-year-old woman with blue hair and “gotten it right,” I can say that I am no longer shocked by the question. I remain, however, still a bit bewildered by it. The assumption, of course, is that I’m a man and therefore, shouldn’t be able to understand how a woman thinks or feels.

Now, I am a man, probably, or at least most of the time. I identify as such, and it is my identity. Well-meaning readers who ask the question probably think that my identity limits my perspective. It probably does. I’m sure it does.

And that’s one of the main reasons I write: to expand my perspective, to enlarge my world.

Identifying as a man makes me see the world a certain way, however, being male isn’t my only identity. My work has been described as immigrant literature. Yes, I am one. I’m an Arab, I’m American, I’m Lebanese, I’m an atheist. I’m a soccer player. I am gay. So many identities, so little time. These days, grumpy is the identity that I feel defines me more fully. I am a gay writer, a queer writer, and Arab writer, an immigrant writer, a Lebanese writer, a Lebanese-American writer, an American writer, a grumpy writer, and more, much more.

Drawing on years of experience of being an outsider—and on sixty-some years of being an oddball—I will share a little about what I think works about claiming a certain identity or having one assigned to you by society, and what is limiting about it. I will talk primarily about writing, but identity cuts across everything in life. I suggest that for many of us, the reason we might not be able to understand how someone who is not like us feels or thinks is not necessarily a failure of empathy, but one of imagination. I will tell stories of the elasticity of both identity and imagination.

There are many reasons why I call myself a grumpy writer. I joke about it in hopes of pinpricking the inflated power the subject of identity has over us.

In Lebanon, I am considered an American. In America, I am considered Lebanese. I am grumpy in both countries.

Grumpies of the world, unite!

What I will not do is teach you how to be grumpy. You either have it or you don’t, so get off my lawn.

View the archive of my 90-minute class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about photos’ unique power to inform, to connect, and to document people’s lives.

I’ve been a freelance photojournalist for over ten years, focusing mainly on conflicts and their aftermath. I work regularly with magazines and newspapers in the US and Europe — Harper’s Magazine, Stern, Le Monde, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, among others — and have exhibited my projects most recently at Prix Bayeux Festival for War Correspondents, and Visa Pour l’Image photojournalism festival. 

Photography is a language and a craft that takes time to shape and develop. That can seem almost irrelevant now with social media platforms where images are shared in their billions every day. But photos with meaning, depth – those that can create empathy and inform, those that can be a bridge between people – still hold importance because they can cut through the noise.  

In this live 90-minute class, I will discuss my approach to photographing complex and difficult stories, why I believe they are still important in our image-saturated world, and also touch briefly on the practicalities of being out in the field. Ten years in a career can seem like a short amount of time, but much has changed – because of the intersectional advancements in tech, the Internet, and social media – in the sphere of journalism and photojournalism. I’ll talk a little bit about what compels me to continue doing this work despite the risks, and why it is necessary to be present on frontlines and on the periphery of conflicts and social issues. 

We’ll also discuss how photo stories are researched and constructed with some behind-the-scenes look into the actual making of some pictures. I’ll deconstruct some images, before discussing how narrative, aesthetic, and the content of pictures are put into play, and the various ways in which they can be presented to provide context. 

I very much hope you’ll join me.

View the archive of my two-hour class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about diving into your past and bringing the story you find there to life.

Hi, my name is Russell Shorto. I’m a New York Times bestselling writer of books of narrative history.

With my latest book, I’ve entered new terrain: family history. Like the man said, This time it’s personal. I’ve known since I was a kid that my grandfather was a smalltime mob boss in my Pennsylvania hometown. I decided I was ready to tackle his story. Researching it took me into a netherworld of bookies and payoffs, of America in its mid-century brawn.

More than that, though, it took me into the heart and soul of my family. Not far into my research I realized that this was going to be an act of personal discovery. I’m convinced that writing about your family is one of the richest and most rewarding things you can do.

That’s why I want to share with you “Five Things I Learned About Writing Family History.” I’m inviting you to sign up for a live, two-hour online seminar in which I’ll distill everything I’ve learned from my own family history project. Using my research into my grandfather’s world, I’ll give you my techniques for interviewing relatives. We’ll examine how to squeeze illuminating facts out of old documents. We’ll talk storytelling: the basics of writing a rich, multilayered story. I’ll ask you to look into yourself as well – I’ll encourage you to dig, to push past the painful things that will come up, to see a family history project as a means of personal growth. And finally, I’ll give you my tips for getting it done.

By the end, you’ll be empowered and energized to dive into your past and bring to life the story you find there.

View the archive of my 90-minute class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about the richness and promise that shape the second half of women’s lives.

Hi. My name is Nina Collins. I founded and run a social platform & website  for likeminded —  and by that I mean educated, savvy, witty — women over 40 called The Woolfer.

I wrote a book on Aging without Apology called What Would Virginia Woolf Do? and I also have a masters in the field of Narrative Medicine, which is the study of how we tell our stories in the context of aging, illness, and death. I have a life coaching certificate and have worked in palliative care and end of life settings, and all this activity comes out of a deep interest in how women, particularly, handle transitions of loss.

I’m going to share with you Five Things I’ve learned about women & aging — from some of the practical, the Health/Medical issues that people don’t like to talk about but which are so very real, and also mostly manageable, to the sexual, which encompasses, of course, both physical and psychological issues. I’m going to share with you wisdom I’ve gleaned from the stories and experiences of tens of thousands of women in their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and beyond, and I’m going to talk about loss: death, divorce, the empty nest, the fear and also the freedom of irrelevance and invisibility. I’ll also talk about community, and how much we need each other to make it through our complicated lives. As one Woolfer said to me recently “It’s our job to stay alive for each other.”

I’m so looking forward to having this conversation with you, to share some of the resources and humor that have helped and inspired me, and to really show you that this idea that we can blossom in the second half of our lives is far from an empty promise.

The richness that awaits on this side of 50 is truly surprising. We’re going to have a lot of fun talking about it, and exploring why.

View the archive of my 90-minute class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about the history, art, and heart of dictionary-making.

I have been passionate about dictionaries all my life. That passion was profoundly deepened when I discovered the story of the Oxford English Dictionary and the unlikely collaborators who created it, a tale I first told in The Professor and the Madman and then expanded upon in The Meaning of Everything.

In this class, I want to share some of the most intriguing, illuminating, and joy-inducing things I’ve learned about dictionaries. Among the questions I’ll address are: What was the first dictionary and how was it created? Who decides what gets included in a dictionary? How are words added and dropped? What’s the most surprising thing I’ve learned about dictionaries?  What role has dictionaries played in the dissemination and evolution of culture? What is the oddest word in the English language? What is the most commonly misused word? What’s my favorite word in English?

I’ll be joined for part of this journey by a longtime friend and fellow logophile, the writer and editor Don George, who will be asking me some of the questions that you submit in advance of the class.

I warmly welcome your questions, and very much encourage you to send in any queries you may have, in advance of the class.

Dictionaries have provided me with a lifetime of amusement and edification. I look forward to sharing my passion and my discoveries with you!

View the archive of my 90-minute class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about the life-changing power of diversity in the arts.

I am an author, filmmaker, media host, and Professor of Entrepreneurship and Leadership at Michigan. I have been named a MacArthur Fellow; recognized as President Obama’s first appointment to the National Council on the Arts; served as dean of the University of Michigan’s School of Music, Theatre & Dance; and been appointed to the Michigan Council for Arts & Cultural Affairs.

Connecting these achievements: My lasting commitment social justice and my ongoing devotion to The Sphinx Organization, the non-profit arts program I founded in 1997. Sphinx is dedicated to transforming lives through the power of diversity in the arts.

Our four program areas — Education & Access, Artist Development, Performing Artists, and Arts Leadership — develop and support diversity and inclusion in classical music at every level: music education, artists performing on stage, the repertoire and programing being performed, the communities represented in audiences, and the artistic and administrative leadership within the field. Today, Sphinx’s annual programs reach more than 100,000 students and artists. We also deliver live and broadcast programming to more than two-million arts lovers each year.  

In this 90-minute class, I’ll offer Sphinx’s inspiring story and my own, and I’ll share the five things I’ve learned about how social change really happens in the fields of the arts and creativity.

I’m eager to share what I’ve learned because I know the transforming power that shared artistic experiences bring to individuals, ensembles, and communities. I know the immediate challenges, and the lasting rewards, of putting structures in place that support artists and entrepreneurs. I’ve also learned how the entrepreneurial path of the artist — a path that demands ongoing excellence and re-invention — transforms the organizations and institutions of which they are a part.

I hope you’ll join me, as I share the ways that I’ve found the artist’s path sparks and sustains real social change.

Aristotle stated: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.”

When we’re together, I’ll share strategies for making artistic excellence a habit in your life, and I’ll share the powerful, life-changing things that I’ve learned happen as a result.

View the archive of our 90-minute class and discover the Five Things We’ve Learned from experience about the Art of the Interview.

Drawing on decades of experience conducting interviews onstage, for periodicals, and at home, this class is at heart about refining and deepening the art of conversation. How do we choose questions, structure them and at times remain silent so as to draw the most out of celebrities, strangers, even family members?

Pico has interviewed onstage such figures as the Dalai Lama, Elizabeth Gilbert, Werner Herzog and Annie Leibovitz. Michael has interviewed for magazines and newspapers Jane Goodall, Smokey Robinson and Francis Ford Coppola. Both have also studied—and interviewed—such master interviewers as Studs Terkel, Krista Tippett and Terry Gross.

Together, we’ll share the five things we’ve learned that most determine a great interview, approaching from many angles the practical ways of making all our interactions more illuminating and fresh: How do we put a new acquaintance at ease? How can we prepare extensively in advance and then allow a chat to go exhilaratingly off-script? How might one do richest justice to a job interview, on either side of the table? And how to bring forth an aging mother’s most heart-shaking memories?

We hope you will join us.

View the archive of my two-hour class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about writing and reading great non-fiction.

I’m an author, an analyst, and — currently — a Senior Fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. But first, and always, I am a reporter. I write long-format narratives, mainly about war and the politics of conflict.

I’m a former Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2020 I was awarded the Black Dodd Prize, the American Academy of Arts and Letters highest prize in Non-Fiction. My award-winning book, The Morning They Came For Us: Dispatches from Syria, has been translated into 30 languages. I’ve written seven other books on war and conflict, served as the Middle East Editor at Newsweek reporting mainly on human rights abuses and investigating war crimes, and been a frequent writer for The New York Times, the New York Review of Books, Harpers, Granta and The Guardian. 

Some of the greatest forms of literature come in the form of narrative nonfiction – in particular memoir and essay. I look forward to leading you through five things I’ve learned about this form.

In this live, two-hour class, I’ll talk about the essential role that great non-fiction narrative plays in shaping readers’ and writers’ understanding of the world. I’ll also share the most storytelling techniques I’ve found most useful in my own work: I’ll talk about the best ways to interview sources (including family members and voices from the past), and address each of the essential components of great narrative: construction, timing, research, pace, dialogue, and recall.

We’ll also talk specifically about memoir — about how to construct a compelling and successful narrative that shares the substance of your own life and what we all can learn from specific techniques of great writers including Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Barbara Skelton, Lillian Hellman. Together, we’ll look at thematic memoirs such as Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon, Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club and Lit; and also at some populist nonfiction, including Cheryl Strayed’s Wild. (I’ll share specific readings I’ll reference in this class in advance with you via email closer to the time of our live session.)

If you’re a writer, my aim is that when this class concludes you’ll be better equipped to make your non-fiction as successful as you want it to be. If you’re a reader, I hope all we share together will increase your continuing appreciation and enjoyment of great, essential writing.

I hope you’ll join me.

View the archive of my two-hour class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about the focal point of all great writing: Location. Location, Location.

How do the most successful writers so effectively transport their readers to another era, to another planet, to Timbuktu, or to a dark, rainy Paris street during World War II? To date, I’ve written 19 books in the Private Investigator Aimée Leduc series and a historical standalone, Three Hours in Paris. In the process, I’ve thought a great deal about how a strong sense of place can immediately engage a story’s readers and how essentially location establishes a story’s themes and characters, shapes its plot, and determines the narrative’s possibilities.

I live in San Francisco, but each of my Aimée Leduc mysteries are set in Paris. In part because I work so hard to establish an authentic sense of that wonderful city, I’ve been fortunate to be recognized for my writing. I’ve received multiple nominations for the Anthony and Macavity Awards, a Washington Post Book World Book of the Year citation, the Médaille de la Ville de Paris—the Paris City Medal, which is awarded in recognition of contribution to international culture—and invitations to be the Guest of Honor at conferences such as the Paris Polar Crime Festival and Left Coast Crime. I also know that my writing travels: With more than 400,000 books in print, the Aimée Leduc series has been translated into German, Norwegian, Japanese, French, Spanish, Italian, and Hebrew.

In this online class, I’ll share the five things I’ve found most essential to my own ability to establish a strong sense of place, no matter the subject or location. A good part of creating a vivid sense of place is linked to preparation: Each time I return to Paris I make a point of entrenching myself in a different part of the city, learning its secret history. I’ve posed as a journalist to sneak into closed areas, trained at a firing range with real Paris flics, gotten locked in a bathroom at the Victor Hugo museum, and even gone down into the sewers with the rats so that my heroine Aimée can complete the same journey in a way that feels genuine and authentic to my readers.

I’m hoping to share a couple of these wonderful stories with you, but our time together will focus on some other essential strategies you can employ to make the settings in your stories come alive for your readers. I’ll share the ways I research a location before I sit down to write — what I first need to understand about a place before I can even begin a draft, the kinds of details I search for to make things vivid for my readers, and how later I focus my research once writing is underway. I’ll share how I invoke the five senses to bring key details to live in my writing; and the ways I use emotions and feelings to deepen, contrast, or complement the story’s essential elements. I’ll also share my thoughts about what I call “writer’s immersion,” and how this technique helps me uncover the most important, most telling details that keep my story moving forward.

It’s a lot to cover in a single sitting, but I’m confident you’ll find our time together worthwhile. When our class has concluded, you’ll know what it’s taken me a long time to discover for myself about the ways that a strong sense of place establishes everything else in a story. If you’re a writer, the things I’ve learned are sure to help you to compose  your own more effective narratives no matter your subject or style—in fiction, non-fiction, memoir, or travel essay.

A strong sense of place anchors readers and draws them into the story. If you’re a reader, this class will give you a behind-the-scenes, personal glimpse at the ways my mysteries are crafted and assembled.

I hope you’ll join me.

View the archive of my 90-minute class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about how artists and art lovers become really good at art.

Art is for anyone. It’s just not for everyone. I know this viscerally, as a would-be artist who burned out. Many people ask “How can I be an artist?” Or “How do I look at art?” I never went to school and have no degrees – other than three honorary PhDs. I spent decades as a long-distance truck driver (my CB-handle was The Jewish Cowboy) and didn’t start writing till I was forty. All this is by way of say that all of us are self-taught and that art— and the confidence to understand art—is best when it is most self-taught.

But how do you get from starting to make art or just looking at it seriously to being really good at it? There’s no special way. But to begin you need to understand art. How? Everyone takes a different path. I am still not sure what I’m doing. Yet over the years I’ve found myself returning to a handful of core ideas again and again. Most of these ideas come from the simple act of looking at art, then looking some more. Others come from listening to artists talk about their work and their struggles.

In this talk we’ll plumb art’s mysteries and depths. On offer will be nodes and nubs of advice, a kind of assemblage designed to take the listener from clueless amateur to generational talent or at least help you live your life as an artist or lover of art a little more creatively. Art, in all its forms, raises many persistent, strange, and even scary issues—challenges that can keep artists and onlookers intimidated, cynical, afraid to get started or to keep going. Even lifers like me. Don’t be afraid; or do be afraid and get on with it and to work anyway, you big babies. Smileface emoji.

Some of our fears of incompetence are circumstantial or learned:

What happens if you didn’t go to school for this? (I didn’t.)

What if you’re almost pathologically bashful? (Hi.)

What if you have impostor syndrome? (Almost everyone does; it’s the price of admission to the House of Creativity.)

Other questions are foundational:

Is the psychology of the work the same as the psychology of the artist? (Not really. And yet there must be a little bit of Jane Austen in every character in Sense and Sensibility, right? Just as there must be a bit of Goya in each of his monstrous figures. Or is there?)

How do you know if your art is working? (As painter Bridget Riley put it, “If it doesn’t feel right—it’s not right.”)

Deepest of all: What is art, anyway? Is it a form of consciousness? A tool the universe uses to become aware of itself? Is it a craft-based tool for the study of consciousness or maybe the greatest operating system our species has ever invented to explore the seen and unseen worlds? 

I say yes—art is all these and more. And your talent and desire is like a wild animal that must be fed.

With all these questions floating around unresolved, how does any aspiring artist take that leap of faith to rise above the cacophony of external messages and internal fears and do their best work? How does a would-be lover of art do the same?

That’s what we’ll be touching on. Please join me.

View the archive of this 90-minute class and discover your voice and the work you were born to create with one of the most widely read authors in the world.

I have written twenty-six books, eighteen of which are novels. I can say without bragging too much that I have some experience in this strange craft of writing. In this class, I will talk about the most important lessons I’ve learned about fiction writing in the last forty years.

First, I’ll discuss the distinctive characteristics and requirements of some literary genres, such as historical fiction, the crime novel, and young adult fiction.

Then, I’ll talk about my way of shaping a plot, which probably differs from the standard norm, but it has worked for me.

Next is research: What’s the best way to find the information needed to write your book? How do you use the information without overwhelming the story? Research is essential, but it shouldn’t be too obvious. When is it time to stop researching and start writing?

I’ll also discuss the challenges of creating characters that are believable, three-dimensional and complex, like real people.  Characters move the plot and sooner or later they have to talk, so I’ll discuss the role of dialogue in my fiction, when and how I use it.

For me, a sense of place is essential in a novel. I’ll talk about how I bring a place to life in my writing.

And finally, we will talk about the very act of writing: How do you instill discipline in your schedule? What should you do when you get stuck? How do you kill off characters you love? And how do you know when you’re done?

I’ll be joined for part of this journey by a trusted travel companion and my beloved friend, the writer and editor Don George, who will be asking me some of the questions that you submit in advance of the class.

I am passionate about fiction writing, and it’s my honor to share my experience with other writers, wherever they are in their own writing journey.  Maybe I can help a little to discover your voice and to write the work you were born to create.

I hope you’ll join me!

View the archive of my two-hour class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about opening up space in our heads, and in our days.

Long before the global pandemic, our lives were spinning out of control. More data and distraction than we knew what to do with. Less time to take care of anything essential. A post-human pace that we could survive only by not being quite human.

As we prepare to return to something like normal, will we find ways to live at a saner pace, with things more in balance? What might help us keep both calm and clarity alive? More and more people these days turn to meditation, or yoga, to qigong or mindful eating. But even for those not ready for a formal practice, there’s something gained—this strange season has reminded us—in stepping back from the rush, in taking a break, in going for a walk or losing yourself in a book, if only so as to remind yourself of what matters most and how to remain close to what truly sustains us.

Drawing upon 30 years of going on retreat (more than 90 times), 33 years of trying to live simply in Japan and 46 years of talking to the Dalai Lama, I’d like to share five things I think I know about opening up space in our heads and our days so that our moments feel unhurried and we can best deal with all life throws at us.

This class will call upon viewer suggestions, on personal experience and on the wisdom of the ages to try to offer concrete, practical tips that anyone can use to try to restore depth and intimacy to her life and to build up what is ultimately our most essential resource: an inner savings-account.

I hope you will join us.

View the archive of my two-hour class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about living meaningfully with death after our year of challenge and loss.

As I wrote in a recent year-ending editorial in the New York Times, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has done more than awaken us to the fact that we die. This personal, global disaster challenges us to honor the passing of others and to activate the role we each have in facing our own mortality. The shared loss and pain we’ve each experienced in the last year makes it harder than ever to follow our first impulses, simply to turn away from death. Covid-19 demands that we fold the prospect of death meaningfully into our lives.

As a hospice and palliative medicine physician and founder of Mettle Health, I devote my professional life to consulting and supporting patients and caregivers navigating serious illness. Now, in this online class, I’ll share the five essential lessons I’ve learned while helping others navigate serious health challenges for themselves or for someone they love. More than that, I’ll try as best I can to contextualize the essential things that have become even clearer to me over the course of the pandemic.

Some of what I’ll share I’ve been thinking about for a long time: For example, how my own experiences have shaped how I’ve come to think about death. I’ll also share the key themes of my book, A Beginner’s Guide to the End, Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death— which offers strategies for planning ahead, dealing with illness, getting help along the way, preparing for when death is close, and the practical matters that come after death.

But what I really hope to focus on is what I’ve learned even more clearly about living and dying since last March, when the pandemic began. I’ll explain how living in the face of illness can set off a cascade of realization and appreciation; how loss can be the force that shows you what you love and urges you to revel in that love while the clock ticks; and how I’ve often seen that reveling in love is one sure way to see through and beyond yourself to the wider world, where immortality lives.

I’ve come to see that the invisible threat we’ve been forced to face during the pandemic offers us a unique moment to look at the big picture of life I believe that the things I’ve learned might offer something of a mission statement for some ambitious and practical changes, ideas that can lead to something better for ourselves and for the people we’re connected to. I’d very much like to share these possibilities with you and to hear what you’re thinking and feeling.

I hope you will join me.

View the archive of my 90-minute class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about uncovering the forgotten voices and experiences that make us reconsider the people and events that we assume we know inside and out.

Winston Churchill. Franklin Roosevelt. World War II. These are some of the biggest names on the biggest stage of history—the people and events that have endured in the public imagination perhaps more than any other. As Winston Churchill said in 1940, “History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. What is the worth of all this?” Indeed, what is its worth? And with more than one thousand books written about Winston Churchill alone, it is natural to wonder what is left to say that hasn’t been said already. 

However, it is the history we think we know so well that is the history that most needs to be reexamined. Sometimes this is because new sources come to light, revealing perspectives we did not know existed that suddenly illuminate the shadows that lie just beyond these well-trodden paths. Long-forgotten voices and experiences make us reconsider the people and events that we assume we know inside and out, offering nuance through crucial details that have escaped notice. In other instances, it is because events in our own times spark fresh ideas about how to think about the past, and new technologies make it possible to reconstruct what has come before in tangible and immersive ways.

When I set out to write The Daughters of Yalta, I knew that it would be very different from any book written about the 1945 conference between Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin. Yes, it is the story of Yalta, the consequences of which we are still living with today, but despite all that has been written about Yalta, a crucial story had remained hidden. Yalta is also the story of the special bonds between three fathers and their remarkable daughters—Winston and Sarah Churchill, Franklin and Anna Roosevelt, Averell and Kathleen Harriman—all brought together on the world stage.  These three women had been passed over by historians, in part because historians only engaged with their story to sprinkle in tidbits of lighthearted human interest between heavy debates about the fate of the world.  But never before seen sources and the forces of the present brought these daughters to the forefront of the narrative. They also challenged me to see their famous fathers as I had never seen them before.

In this class, I’ll share the things I’ve learned about what we mean when we talk about “history” — about how the ways that we and our contemporaries see things impact what feels like a new story worth telling about the past, about how historical perspectives change over time, and about how a fresh look at what we think of as a well-known figure or historical event can teach us something new about the legacy we inherit from the past.

More than anything, I will share what I’ve learned about history’s time-bending power. History should not be considered in a vacuum.  It is about so much more than static memorization of names and dates in the steady march of time. It is also sold short by the dire warning that we must learn the past so as not to repeat our mistakes in the future. History is dynamic.  It should be harnessed to comfort and inspire us today and tomorrow. It can show us that even in the most challenging times, those who we think of as the “Great Men of History” grappled with the same doubts, fears, and trepidations that we face in our own times, and that ingenuity, creativity, and cooperation can win the day. 

At its heart, history is just a story about relationships, whether it is relationships between nations or relationships between individuals—including the relationship between one father and his daughter. Most of us will never know what it’s like to tussle with Stalin over the future of Europe in a Tsar’s former palace on the war-torn coast of the Black Sea, but we all know what it’s like to be someone’s parent or child. It is in the most difficult times, we need to look again and again at the history we think we know so well to remind ourselves that the individuals we put up on a pedestal are not so very different from us after all.

We’ll do that together when we meet. I hope you’ll join me.

View the archive of my 90-minute class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about how to document and share the lives of some of the transforming figures in art, culture, and fashion.

I’m lucky. By working hard I’ve built a career making documentaries about transforming figures in art, culture, and fashion — powerful, exciting creators including Peggy Guggenheim, Diana Vreeland, Cecil Beaton, Truman Capote, and Tennessee Williams. My interest in sharing these stories has occurred just as streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Apple TV are transforming film distribution, making my stories more available to more people every day.

Before I began making documentaries, I watched films closely. I fell under the spell early on of the Neo-realistic films of Vittoria De Sica, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Luchino Visconti. I loved their films, and I studied the way they created their fictional worlds. My own work doesn’t follow their great films note for note, but each documentary I make is very much inspired by the realism I found in those films and experiences in my own life.

In recent years, I’ve researched, written and directed films that have appeared in film festivals from Venice to Telluride. In the process, I’ve had the chance to travel the world, to discover previously overlooked or forgotten moments that have shaped the lives of my film’s subjects, and to share these fragments in ways that bring their full stories to life. My recent series, The Art of Style, is a similar collection of shorter films, each profiling contemporary figures shaping today’s world of fashion and creativity, people including Thom Browne, Manolo Blahnik, and Dries vanNoten.

If creators of style and design are of interest to you, and if you want to learn more about how one puts together films that tell their stories, this class is just right for you. I would like to share with you how I approach this work, why I choose the subjects I do, and how I envision each film visually, integrating original footage and archival material. If you’re a director or storyteller, you’ll have a better sense of how to approach your own work when the class concludes. If you’re just a fan of fashion, style, or design, you’ll learn more about how to think about and appreciate these vital disciplines.

My good friend Penelope Tree — who is known to be one of the most important icons of the 60’s — will be joining us for part of this session. Penelope has many great stories to share of her own; she’s a provocative thinker and writer who is always pushing the buttons for me when it comes to storytelling.

We both invite you to join us for this live, online class.

View the archive of my 90-minute class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about naming and understanding moral injury and about surviving its personal consequence.

I’m an author, an analyst, and — currently — a Professor of Practice of Human Rights at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. But first, and always, I am a reporter. I write long-format narratives, mainly about war and the politics of conflict.

My focus is on war crimes; global terrorism; refugee issues and sexual violence during war time. My goal is to document evidence on the ground that can later be cited in war crimes tribunals. I work alone; often undercover and in closed and difficult countries. And as a result, I’ve seen first-hand the profound trauma common to every war zone. Too often, I have also witnessed the devastating psychological consequences of conflict that continue to live on for members of local populations, for active soldiers, and for journalists like me.

In August 2020, Harper’s Magazine published my essay, “On Moral Injury,” in which I sought to give name to a single, shared scar common to all war zone participants — a scar that Dr. Anthony Feinstein, with whom I’ve worked closely, describes it as: “an affront to your moral compass based on your own behavior and the things you have failed to do.”

Moral injury is a branch of trauma that affects individuals forced to witness an event that goes against their moral core: A soldier, for example, who during war time is forced to witness torture; a a mother who sees her children bullied; journalists who witness terrible atrocities and must face choices between their obligation to help and their duty to observe, and who many remain haunted by their decisions for years afterward. In a collective sense, moral injury can similarly impact groups of people — citizens, for example, whose political values differ drastically from their country’s leaders and who feel deeply offended by lying, cheating or injustice in their political life.

In this ninety-minute class, I will look more closely at moral injury, and focus on what I’ve seen when individuals — and communities — believe they have significantly failed to live up to their own ethical standards. I’ll illustrate the psychological damage inflicted by this ethical dilemma with stories from my own career as a frontline journalist. I’ll address the responsibilities that journalists have toward their subjects, and that news organizations should their similarly have to their reporters. I will also explore some extended dimensions of moral injury, including for example, the moral injuries that the COVID-19 pandemic will likely inflict on us all in the months and years ahead.

Living through 2020 tested many of our core values — about what is fair and what is just, about illness as a metaphor. It also exposed the weakness of the health care system and the underlying structural injustice in America —  who is rich, who is poor, who gets good care and who does not. How do we live with ourselves about witnessing such cataclysmic shifts in society, and our own collective trauma as a society?  How can racism, sexism and injustice be so prevalent in a country that has so much to offer and is so evolved?

With the start of a new year, the beginning of a new U.S. government, and — we all hope — the beginning of the end of COVID-19 now in sight, it feels like the time to think through these issues, and to further develop together the concept of moral injury and its personal consequences.

I hope you’ll join me.

View the archive of my two-hour class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about what happens when women trust their instincts, dignify their values, and speak their truths — values and truths that redefine what it means to be a hero.

Humans are storytellers. That’s how we learn, create culture, and determine shared values. I’ve been a story lover, story creator, and story gatherer throughout my life — as a voracious book-reader and movie-watcher, an author, and a curator of conferences. As a student of history and mythology, I know that most of humankind’s origin stories, hero’s tales, novels, and films have been created by men. Embedded in those stories are the beliefs we live by — beliefs about women and men, power and war, sex and love. There’s much to enjoy in the old stories and hero’s adventure tales. But even as a young girl I longed for stories I could relate to. Where were the tales that celebrated the experiences and dreams and visions of women? Why were women painted as fickle and weak — second in creation yet first to sin? Why were men described as white knights with superior minds and values? And why were men always the heroes? 

For more than twenty years I have been organizing conferences for women that question and defy our culture’s prevailing definition of what it means to be a hero. I’ve come to see that it’s up to us to tell new stories that balance out millennia of one-sided storytelling. And I’m not talking about Wonder Woman or other outdated shoot-‘em-up tales of winners and losers. I’m interested in stories — on the page and in our real lives — that celebrate a different kind of hero. I’m ready for women to dignify some of our best qualities and give muscle and clout to leaders and creators who value caretaking, champion compassion, and choose communication over vengeance and violence. We all can conjure, tell, and teach these new stories. We can live them out in our own lives. This class (open to everyone), is based on my new book Cassandra Speaks: When Women are the Storytellers, the Human Story Changes.

During our time together we’ll:

1.    Dig deep for our truest voice.

2.    Explore what it means to do power differently—at home, at work, in the world.

3.    Learn some ways to overcome the imposter syndrome.

4.    Practice what I call the “Do No Harm and Take No Shit” meditation.

5.    Map next steps on our own hero’s journey.

Throughout the class there will be time to ask questions and to engage in meditation and writing exercises.

I hope you will join me.

View the archive of our two-hour class and discover the Five Things We’ve Learned about cultivating your creative spirit and making it as deep and wide-ranging as possible in your art and in your life.

We’re all creators—not just consumers of others’ creations—and in this class we’ll explore how to give voice to your creativity on the page and in the world. We’ll address how to develop your creative muscles and your creative confidence; how to break rules and go in unexpected directions; and how to ignore the pressures of society to craft a life that sustains you and those around you.

Michael Shapiro recently published The Creative Spark, a collection of interviews with musicians, writers, explorers and visionaries who suggest exciting new ways of living and being. Pico Iyer has spent much of the virus season writing on writing—which is to say, the subconscious, surrender, and leaps of faith.

Together, we’ll share the five things we’ve learned about deepening the creative flow in our own lives and how this same process has played out in the lives of people we admire: Sometimes creativity involves simply taking things out, sometimes it involves bringing together two familiar worlds to create something liberatingly unfamiliar. Often it means finding ways of crafting lives of value and thinking afresh — thinking, for example, about how best to raise children, how to make a living, and how to honor our deepest selves. Our hope is to help you engage and cultivate your own creative spirit, and to make that spirit as deep and wide-ranging as possible in your art and in your life.

We hope you will join us.

View the archive of my two-hour class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about creating memorable characters who come to life for my readers.

Fiction is characters.

Oh, sure, we love an exotic setting and research that puts us THERE and a plot so clever we never saw the twists coming—but without the characters who walk through that scrupulously researched setting and perform that series of intricately choreographed acts, those other elements are an empty stage, waiting for actors to emerge from the wings.

I’ve been a published writer for nearly thirty years. More than 12,000 pages of hardback fiction have come out under my name, hitting the New York Times list, winning a lot of prizes, finding their way into a number of languages and bringing together a community of fans. Every one of those stories, from 650-word flash-fiction tale to 115,000-word novel, succeeds or fails because of the characters who inhabit its pages.

So how do we, as writers, create these people? How do we use the 26 letters of the English language to summon up living, breathing beings—characters so memorable that readers cry with their sorrows and celebrate their victories, find courage and inspiration from them and change their lives because of the words on the page? How do we shape characters that, when a book is over, the reader continues to feel them, wondering about their lives, speculating and daydreaming as if they were real?

Creation is magic—but it is also craft, a long series of deliberate choices and experiments which are the focus of this workshop.

In this two-hour class, we will look at what goes into building a character who feels real: What kind of research do I need to do? What does he look like, how does she speak, where are they from? What has made this person a villain and that one a hero, and how much of their backstory do I need to know—more than that, how much does my reader need?

And then, once I have made these myriad decisions to build three-dimensional characters, how do I use them?  What brings a character to life on the page, and makes the reader care what happens next?

Join me, as I explore how creation is done and how characters come to life.

View the archive of my 90-minute class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about putting out the message you most want to share in the new year.

Based on my popular book, Write On, Sisters!, this 90-minute workshop supports and inspires writers (and aspiring writers) to think about the five things they want to give voice to in the new year.

As we emerge into 2021, many of us will be looking back at the many challenges and necessary resilience of 2020. This will be an important moment to consider how we can give voice to what matters—what messages, ideas, and impact we want our writing to center around and what we want or need to deliver in 2021.

As a writing coach, publisher of She Writes Press, and cohost of the Write-minded podcast, I’ve has spent the past 20+ years supporting authors to birth their ideas, to hone their messages, and to boldly give voice to their stories. What story or message in you is ready to take form, or to be set free? What is one action you will take in 2021 that will lead you toward a new growth edge of telling or sharing your story, or becoming a thought leader? What obstacles have been in your way that need to be cleared in order for you to emerge into 2021 ready to give voice to what matters? How will you harness the energy of this inspiring force and move from intention to action?

This class will support writers and authors to step into their big, bold dreams. If ever there were a time to do this, it’s now. Come ready to be both challenged and supported around elevating your voice—whether that’s through writing, publishing, or amplifying.

I hope you’ll join me!

View the archive of my two-hour class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned that make it easy to appreciate and enjoy this crazy art form.

Opera is one of the most misunderstood art forms in Western culture. Many people equate it with shrieking, large women in breastplates and Viking helmets, and overpriced elitism. But all those people have it wrong. Opera is one of the most visceral and enjoyable media out there, once you attune yourself to its idiom. It’s a direct ancestor of both popular song and Hollywood film, and if you like either of those, there’s no reason you shouldn’t like opera as well. After all, this is an art form that, perhaps more than any other, specializes in heightened emotion, and in finding ways to communicate it — often at the top of one’s lungs. Forget elitism: opera, at its best, is primal and cathartic.

For me, opera is a lifelong passion: my guilty pleasure, my deep love, the thing that got me started as a music critic, and the art to which I always return. And I’m always eager to share my excitement about it (as my friends can attest). This course isn’t a history of opera with a timeline of the Great Composers or the Best Works — there are plenty of books you can turn to for that kind of thing, once your interest is kindled. What I want to do, instead, is offer you a bunch of different doorways into opera, with a lot of examples to whet your appetite, and leave it up to you which one entices you to enter. I’ll offer thoughts about how to appreciate the singing, what to make of the ways these stories are put on stage (Verdi’s Aida, the Ethiopian princess, as a cleaning lady?!), how the form is evolving today, and whether we can break free of some of the social baggage that has accumulated over the centuries, particularly around questions of race and gender.

This class is designed for anyone who’s ever thought about opera, whether you know nothing about it and can’t imagine why anyone cares; are an occasional opera-goer uncertain how to deepen your relationship to the genre; or are a die-hard opera fan who’s always eager for more opera talk. Whichever of those descriptions fits you, I bet I can offer something to pique your interest, and let you come away with a sense of the terrain and the way aficionados think about it, and give you the resources to continue your explorations on your own. My whole career as a music critic over the last three decades was entirely, and improbably, spawned from my love of this crazy art form; I have a lot to say about opera, and I would love if if you’d come along for the ride.

View the archive of my two-hour class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about creating and publishing great travel writing.

Join the author of How to Be a Travel Writer, Lonely Planet’s best-selling guide to travel writing. (It’s actually the best-selling travel writing guide in the world!)

I’ve been fortunate enough to be a travel writer and editor all my professional life, more than three decades. I’ve been Travel Editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, and Lonely Planet, and I’m now an Editor at Large for National Geographic Travel. Through the years, I’ve learned what makes a great travel story and how to maximize your chances for success in travel writing. My goal in this class is to share the most important lessons I’ve learned, as a writer and as an editor, for both print and online publications.

Some of the questions I’ll answer include: What are the secrets of great travel writing? How do you get started? How do you decide what to write about? How do you research a story before a trip and on the ground?  How do you shape a story for maximum effect? What are the biggest mistakes you should avoid? How do you take your writing from good to great? What’s the best way to work with editors and travel industry professionals? Can you actually make a living as a travel writer? Is it all as good as it sounds?

Whether your goal is simply to write unforgettable emails and wow-inspiring blog posts or to make a career from your travels, I’ll share field-tested tips that will help distinguish your writing from everyone else’s and give you the best chance for realizing your dreams.

I’ve been teaching travel writing for three decades, and I love sharing what I’ve learned along the way.

I hope you’ll join me on this journey into the art and heart of travel writing.