View the archive of my 90-minute class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about the women whose important work provides new ways to understand and enjoy the pleasures of classical music.

Think of classical music, and you think of great masterworks written by men: Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and the list goes on. The conventional wisdom is that women, for various historical and cultural reasons, were largely prevented from getting onto the playing field during classical music’s heyday, and now, in the 21st century, we’re working to make up for lost time.

The real picture, however, is more nuanced than that. Yes, there have been and continue to be a lot of obstacles to women’s advancement in classical music — witness how long it’s taken for female conductors to become a significant force. (And now, they are!) But the more you start digging, the more you learn that there have always been a lot of women active in this field, as composers and performers, producing important work. To me, at least, these figures make the whole field seem richer and more colorful — a vibrant territory still ripe for exploration and discovery.

This session is for anyone interested in classical music, whether you’re brand-new to the field or have been subscribing to an orchestra for 40 years. My aim is to give you some new perspectives and new entry points. If you don’t know much about Beethoven, what better way to get to know him than through the eyes of the woman who built his pianos? And you may know all about Mendelssohn, but do you know about his contemporary Emilie Mayer, who ran the opera academy in Berlin, wrote eight symphonies, and was highly praised by critics? My plan is to interweave discussion of some of the main issues that women have faced in this field (like the travails of the female conductor) with brief introductions to a quintet of composers from throughout music history who I’m sure will fascinate you as much as they do me – and who, unlike Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn and some of the female composers whose work has gotten better known, remain largely neglected.

I have a personal stake in this subject: I spent a couple of decades as a classical music critic for major papers — in 2001, I became the first woman to review classical music regularly for the New York Times — and I felt for many years that I needed to prove myself by running with the boys. It took a long time for me to realize that women played a far greater role in this field than I’d ever thought, and that classical music as a whole becomes a lot more exciting and human when women are restored to their proper place in it. Ultimately, I stepped down from my job as chief classical music critic of the Washington Post to work on a long-planned book: A historical novel about Nannette Streicher, the above mentioned piano-builder – a narrative that seeks to put women back in a picture from which posterity has largely removed them. I’m having tremendous fun with this entire topic, and I hope you’ll join me to learn more about a few of the things that have reanimated my love of this thrilling art form.

View the archive of my two-hour class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about the power of storytelling and the joys of publishing – plus the behind-the-scenes lessons I’ve collected throughout my career that will help you get your own story out into the world.

I love storytelling. Through my years in publishing, I have made a career of discovering storytellers, authors, and creators, and helping them publish creative and beautifully written books that stay with readers long after they’ve turned the last page. It’s a wonderful life – one that constantly introduces to me to new voices, new experiences, and new opportunities.

Finding great stories and getting them to readers who will love and value them most is what publishing is all about. Like writing itself, publishing is very much an art at which one improves over time – but every book and every author presents new and unique opportunities and challenges. Publishing is also a collaborative art and a collaborative business –subject to established processes and procedures and considerations, no matter what the book or story.

In my upcoming live class, Five Things I’ve Learned about How Publishing Works, I will pull back the curtain on the mechanics and inner workings of the publishing industry, revealing the stories that fuel our work and the collaborative processes that guide every great story to publication.

In our time together, I’ll share my key lessons from a life devoted to publishing: Why no matter what the circumstance or the book: Content is always king; serving your audience of like-minded readers is essential; and connecting to just the right community sometimes makes all the difference. I’ll also talk about two of the most important parts of book publishing for authors – getting paid and making an impact as your book gets out out into the world.

If you’re a storyteller – or if you’re someone interested in a career in publishing – this class will help you understand the elements that signal a great and publishable story, what agents and publishers are looking for in a new work, and all that happens as they guide a work to publication. I’ll share with you what I wish all writers know about what makes the industry tick, what keeps the cogs in motion, and why publishers like me so love the industry to which we’re devoted.

I hope you’ll join me, and that our time together helps you to get your own story out into the world.

View the archive of my 90-minute class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about Leonard Cohen – and all I still learn from him, five years after he passed away.

Hello, my name is Sylvie Simmons. The short version of my life is that I’ve spent it in a world of music and words. I am an author, music journalist, a biographer of musicians, an essayist, short-story writer, poet and singer-songwriter. When I was a child in London – where I was born and raised before I ran off to L.A in 1977 to be a rock writer – I was a singer-tapdancer too, and when the show was done I’d take out my notebook and write a rave review for an imaginary magazine.

Over the decades I’ve written countless articles and essays about music and musicians, published a bunch of books, won some awards, released a couple of albums, and interviewed many, many musical greats. My upcoming Five Things I’ve Learned class will be about just one of them: Leonard Cohen.

I was Leonard Cohen’s biographer. My book I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen, published in 2012, was written with his participation and support.

To write a biography of someone still living, even with their blessing, is to immerse yourself in that person’s life to a degree that would probably get you locked up in any decent society. You learn a whole lot about a person. In fact,  I’ve never stopped learning about – and from – Leonard Cohen. Something he said or did still comes to mind whatever the situation – be it making the perfect ginger smoothie (Leonard was quite the chef) or those dark nights of the soul, when just I’m just trying to make sense of it all.

In his conversation, as in his songs, his poems, his novels and his artwork, Leonard Cohen could skewer the human condition like no-one else. He was wise and funny – and unflinching. He looked things in the eye that others would shy from. Like death. Or the depression that he battled during most of his life. Just some of the things I will share with you in our class.

I have been thinking about those remarkable shows that Leonard gave on his late-life comeback tour. He was in his seventies, he’d not been onstage in 15 years, but after discovering his former manager had emptied his savings, he had no choice. He turned the adversity into triumph. If you saw one of those shows you’ll know that there was nothing like them: The Rat Pack Rabbi in his suit and fedora, the unwavering quality of the performances, the hushed attention, the humility – and also that camaraderie, the sense of fellow-feeling that we were all in this together, all in the same rickety boat making our way through the dark, every one of us broken but maybe all of us holy too.

There’s so much I’d like to share with you about this extraordinary man – the poet who became a popular music star; the Jew who became a Buddhist monk; the eternal ladies’ man; the perfectionist who knew and accepted that there was a crack in everything, it’s how the light gets in.

I hope that you, like me, will learn something new and meaningful in this class. I’m very much looking forward to seeing you and to answering your questions.

View the archive of my 90-minute class with Richard Peña and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about loving film and film criticism during the golden age of film appreciation.

I’m so pleased to talk with Richard Peña about film criticism, my remarkable experiences during the 1960s and 1970s, and about why that era – the time that I personally discovered film and film criticism – was exciting, and revolutionary. At the time, we thought this “blissful time to be alive” would go on forever, but in retrospect the joys of those decades were due to a unique confluence of factors, never to be repeated.

In my 90-minute class, Five Things I’ve Learned about Movie Love in the Sixties and Seventies, I’ll suggest some of the Five or So Things I discovered during this period: Important moments and ideas in which I was both witness and participant, experiences that shaped my own appreciation of the film and that helped define my continuing love of movies. I hope you’ll join me.

First, a little background:

I was a late-blooming cinephile. In the conservative Southern city where I grew up, there was no such thing as “film culture,” just the latest Hollywood fare — that is, except for the lone art cinema. It was there I saw Diabolique, Henri Georges Clouzot’s thriller starring Simone Signoret, Paul Meurisse and Vera Clouzot as a sexually fraught trio presiding over a second-rate boys prep school. Dark, morbid, seething with malice, this was unlike anything I’d ever seen.

Naturally after I graduated my next stop was Paris, where I entered the world of cinephilia like Buster Keaton entering the screen in Sherlock Jr. What did it mean? All those Left Bank cinemas that showed Fellini and Antonioni and Bergman along with Samuel Fuller and John Ford and Howard Hawks. I gradually came to understand, through the tutelage of magazines like Cahiers du Cinema and the Cinematheque, that what might seem like indiscriminate exhibition of apples and oranges was in fact a capacious exploration of the art of cinema curated (indirectly) by those renegade critics of Cahiers du Cinema—Rohmer, Godard, Truffaut Chabrol—who would become directors in their own right. Take to the streets and break all the rules of the “well-made” film, rebelling against the old-fashioned, prestige “cinema du papa.” 

Fast-forward to the mid-sixties where I had a dream job at the French Film Office, putting out a bulletin and newsletter on upcoming films for the American press. (The French film industry is partly subsidized, and this was its publicity agency in New York.) Along with writing the newsletter, I interpreted when directors and stars came to New York, and as this was the height of the Nouvelle Vague, that meant Godard, Truffaut, Agnes Varda. And Jean-Louis Trintignant, Jeanne Moreau and Catherine Deneuve, among others. It also meant meeting the critics whom I read, and to whose ranks I aspired to join without having quite articulated the wish.

It’s the details of these times and all I learned from the people who formed them that I wish to share during our time together:

Chief among them for me was Andrew Sarris who imported the politique des auteurs to systematically reframe and reevaluate the American cinema in terms of Hollywood directors whose films reflected strikingly personal visions and sensibilities.

It was a special, even revolutionary, moment in the arts and journalism. Hollywood, no longer able to rely on the fifties business model gave a free hand to independent filmmakers like Robert Altman, John Cassavetes, Arthur Penn, Paul Mazursky, and later Martin Scorsese, Brian de Palma and others. Some consider it a golden age of movies, but in my eyes, golden ages come and go – they’re generally in the eye of the beholder. Ours was a golden age of appreciation.

As I’ll also share: It was pre-digital and pre-multiplexes. There were film societies on college campuses, revival houses in New York, and the New York Film Festival had begun in 1963. All across the country people were seeing the same films, reading some of the same critics. Critics mattered because movies mattered and were worth fighting over. As in the New Journalism, criticism was personal, there was no such thing as “objective” criticism, biases were acknowledged. We came to see and take seriously how much movies had made us who we were, shaped our deepest selves.

If anything, the wealth of movies today extends way beyond what was available to us back then. Just see how the New York Film Festival has widened the borders beyond the mostly European films of its early years – and expansion largely due to Richard Peña during his amazing tenure as director (1982-2012). The sheer volume of films from all over the world — the number of countries with sophisticated film industries, the diversity of directorial talent and subject matter — makes any pretense of keeping up risible. But that’s part of the issue: When we first got hooked on movies there were fewer movies to encompass, and the past wasn’t so far away, there wasn’t so much of it. Even silent film didn’t seem remote and the glory days of Hollywood were ripe for reevaluation. It almost seemed as if you could hold the history of cinema in your hands. But not everyone accepted Olivier Assayas’s assertion that “Cinema is an art and we are artists.” Especially when applied to Hollywood directors.

Critics then were like crusaders; the language was spiritual. People were afraid critics were taking the “fun” out of movies, the one art form with populist roots, the one they’d come to love without benefit of experts. People would buttonhole you at parties, incensed over a movie you’d panned. It would turn ferocious, what was at stake wasn’t just aesthetic taste but a kind of spiritual ownership. It’s no accident that just as orthodox religion was fading and churches losing their congregants, movie theaters acquired a kind of sacred aura, as we gathered together in the dark before those luminous icons on the screen.

This contested sense of ownership animated passions and arguments between and among critics: Pauline Kael took after the auteur theory with a switchblade and like the Krips and the Bloods, others took sides as Sarrisites or Paulettes. Then disdaining both as movie buffs, film and theater critics Stanley Kauffmann and John Simon defended high culture. There were fistfights at meetings of the National Society of Film Critics, rude disputes at New York Film Festival parties. (Declaration of personal interest: I was a Sarrisite, and Reader, I married him. In 1969.)

Eventually I did join the ranks of those quarrelsome critics. In the late sixties I would review for the Village Voice, then Vogue and New York Magazine, often from a feminist perspective when that was still a bit controversial.  I’ve written film books and memoirs, but am probably best known for my first, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies.

All of which is to say: I’ve got five things – and more! – that I look forward to sharing with you.  I can’t wait to talk to Richard Peña about all this, it’s a real privilege for me.

I hope you’ll join us.

– Molly Haskell

View the archive of my two-hour class and discover how the Five Things That I’ve Learned about self-editing can help you to recognize what works in your own writing – and to fix what doesn’t.

The ugly truth? Most writing groups don’t know much about writing. The individuals in the group most often critique by letting the writer know what “doesn’t work” for them without giving the writer any guidance in the area of how to fix it. Sometimes someone in the writing group decides she doesn’t “like” or “cannot connect with” the main character. Sometimes someone says there’s something wrong with the pacing. Sometimes someone declares that she “just doesn’t get” what you’re trying to do. And on and on.

Often, the writer takes copious notes, returns home, and tries to fix everything that was mentioned during the group meeting. Often, also, the writer struggles to please the group members in the hope that pleasing them equates to pleasing a literary agent or a publisher. The best that can happen is a miraculous Road-to-Damascus moment during which the writer achieves clarity on what’s gone wrong and what’s gone right in her work. The worst that can happen is an unfortunate throw-in-the-towel moment during which the writer has become so confused that she just gives up. 

This doesn’t have to be your reality. You don’t have to go through this. You also don’t have to pay an independent editor to read and evaluate your work and then to write an editorial opinion piece for you. You can learn how to edit yourself.    

Learning how to edit yourself will give you an advantage as you make your way along the road to publication. Potential literary agents will be looking at a much more polished piece of work than they are used to seeing. Potential editors will see a manuscript that is quite possibly the start of a career as a professional writer. And you will be spared the possibility that your writing group’s evaluation of your work is actually a case of the blind leading the blind down a rabbit hole. 

In this live, two-hour class, I’ll take you through the steps of self-editing your work. I’ll answer your questions as we go along and giving your pointers about recognizing in your own writing what actually works as well as what actually doesn’t work and how to fix it.   

View the archive of my 90-minute class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about how the Dutch founding of New York City shaped the world’s most dynamic metropolis – and continues to impact America.

Have you ever wondered why New York is the most dynamic city on earth? With all due respect to Chicago and Los Angeles, no place in the U.S. can match its vitality, its capacity for reinventing itself, its turbulent creativity, or its impact on the country as a whole. Why is that?

The secret to New York’s dynamism is in its roots. New York’s beginnings are unique. Before the skyscrapers, before the tenements, before Tammany Hall, was the Dutch city of New Amsterdam, capital of the colony of New Netherland. Between 1609, when Henry Hudson charted the region on behalf of the Dutch East India Company, and 1664, when the English invaded and renamed New Amsterdam after the Duke of York, the Dutch laid the foundations for a world-changing metropolis.

My New York Times bestselling book about Dutch Manhattan, The Island at the Center of the World, won the New York City Book Prize and got me a Dutch knighthood. It has been optioned for a TV series and has been translated into eight languages. Now I’d like to invite you to join me as I use it as the basis for a live, one-time class in which I’ll share with you Five Things I’ve Learned About How Manhattan Became the Island at the Center of the World. We’ll dive into history, and then pull back to the present to connect that history to today. Among the insights you’ll discover:

Diversity. We think of America as a melting pot, but for most of our history Americans were proud of their “pure” English roots. But while the colonies of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Virginia were indeed founded by the English, right in the middle of those was the Dutch colony of New Netherland. It covered parts of five future states, with its capital of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island. That little city, of only 16 streets, was the key to New York’s future. Among other astounding facts about it was this: its residents spoke a total of 18 different languages – at a time when the population was only about 500. You might say that New York was New York even before it was New York.

Money. At the same time the Dutch were founding a colony based on Manhattan Island, they were inventing what we now call capitalism. Shares of stock. A stock exchange. Multi-national corporations. Using these tools, this little European nation rapidly developed a global trading empire. Family-run companies based in Amsterdam sent one of their sons to New Amsterdam to set up branch offices, giving the mixed residents of Manhattan an introductory course in capitalism and allowing them to profit from beaver pelts and tobacco.

Tolerance. What was the key to the success of the Dutch Manhattan? Beneath their way with money and their racially mixed society was a secret ingredient: tolerance. Intolerance was official policy in places like England, France and Spain. This was common sense: in order for your society to be strong, it was felt, everyone had to be on the same page – most of all in matters of religion. But the Dutch thought otherwise. They crafted an official policy of tolerance of religious and other differences. They invited people of different backgrounds and languages to be part of their society, both in the Old World and on Manhattan, believing it would be good for business. And it worked. The Dutch Republic became the European center of trade, and Manhattan Island became a New World juggernaut.

The Power of Parenthood. New Amsterdam owed its success to the fact that it had a doting parent. The city of Amsterdam treated this little village at the tip of Manhattan Island as a child that needed constant attention. Diversity, tolerance, trade – all these were traits the parent instilled in the child. And with them came one other thing: unparalleled creativity. At this same period, the city of Amsterdam was in its Golden Age. Rembrandt led the way in creating a new, secular art. The Dutch were inventing the microscope, peering through lenses into the heavens, creating the world’s most accurate maps. The city of Amsterdam published about one-third of all books that were produced in the 17^th century. The culture of fervid creativity passed from parent to child.

Legacy. New Amsterdam didn’t last. In 1664 the English sent an invasion force and took over, renaming it after the Duke of York, brother of the king. But what the Dutch brought to Manhattan was like genetic material, which dictated the island’s development through the next centuries. Trade, diversity, and creativity became the birthright of New York. And New York in turn helped to instill those same traits in the country as a whole.  

I believe this combination of ingredients is the key not just to what makes New York great but to what makes modern society vibrant. Right now we’re in a period of great uncertainty about the future. I hope you’ll join me in this one-time class in which we look to history for reminders of who we are.