Category: LA/Los Angeles

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In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —

“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”

I presented this holiday lecture “When Women Write Horror” on Tuesday, October 29th, 2019. Researching the many, many women who have written horror stories – in novels, films and television – brought new names to my attention who I am excited to start reading. I hope you will be, too!

Transcript:

Some of you probably know her more from this short story that is also often read in high schools, The Lottery, which has to do with a town where once a year we choose one person who everybody else in town can stone to death and then we get all our aggressions out and we’re -peaceful the rest of the year and if you think about that coming from the brain of a housewife who’s been hanging around little kids all day and what was she saying about “I just want one day when I can take out all these aggressions and then I’ll be fine. I promise you,” but, of course, the issue is it’s a random — it’s a lottery when that name is pulled and this particular year it’s the mother in a family and how does the family react when it’s their mother that is going to be stoned to death this year. So, a really interesting brain going on with this woman. You might have heard of her before. This is her best-known novel and her best critic novel, “We’ve always lived in the castle.” Again, having to do with the family and people coming together and being horrified together. I think it’s very cool. I like that she says, “I delight in what I fear.” That’s not usually what I delight in but ok, whatever.

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Watch this entire presentation

Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!

In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —

“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”

I presented this holiday lecture “When Women Write Horror” on Tuesday, October 29th, 2019. Researching the many, many women who have written horror stories – in novels, films and television – brought new names to my attention who I am excited to start reading. I hope you will be, too!

Transcript:

I’m jumping ahead to the woman we consider the mother of all haunted house stories and someone we actually teach in this class that we do here, which is Demons, The Undead and the Monstrous Other and we talk about horror. So Shirley Jackson. Shirley Jackson was actually said by Stephen King to be the best horror writer in American history and hello Stephen King is not exactly a nobody when we talk about that world and so The Haunting of Hill House was her major book. She’s a really interesting woman. She was a housewife which doesn’t sound like woo a housewife and she wrote horror while she was taking care of her kids. She had a little deal with alcoholism so that was a problem.

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Watch this entire presentation

Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!

In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —

“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”

I presented this holiday lecture “When Women Write Horror” on Tuesday, October 29th, 2019. Researching the many, many women who have written horror stories – in novels, films and television – brought new names to my attention who I am excited to start reading. I hope you will be, too!

Transcript:

Who has done anything with her ghost stories for Christmas? I think that’d be an excellent thing to check into. Her house is on a haunted home tour, right,, if you go through the UK. You can study her house. That’s her library. When you see libraries like that from the old days, those are usually the rooms that belong to men. Those were the man caves of their day, but this is hers. This room belonged to a woman who was a writer and its haunted by her spirit. So I’m kind of making myself want to go do this tour while I think about it.

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Watch this entire presentation

Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!

In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —

“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”

I presented this holiday lecture “When Women Write Horror” on Tuesday, October 29th, 2019. Researching the many, many women who have written horror stories – in novels, films and television – brought new names to my attention who I am excited to start reading. I hope you will be, too!

Transcript:

Now Edith Wharton is somebody people sometimes had to study in high school especially if you did an AP sort of literature class and she’s fascinating because she is the first woman ever to win a Pulitzer Prize. Which is huge for a woman right in 1927 — which I think is great — for The Age Of Innocence which was turned into a film. This is a whole section of her books here. We teach her in schools. Sometimes kids find her boring because the world she writes about was that world of proper manners and all that sort of thing and they have to really work through why this is interesting. I think we should teach some of her ghost stories. If we taught her ghost stories how more interested would an audience be and then maybe they’d want to read the more grown-up world and society that she’s, you know, satirizing. I think it’s really cool that she put out all these ghost stories back in the day. Afterward is her ghost story for Christmas, which is nothing more than what Charles Dickens did with A Christmas Carol. We read him every year. There’s been how many versions of a Christmas carol made into films including The Muppets which is the best one.

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Watch this entire presentation

Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!

In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —

“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”

I presented this holiday lecture “When Women Write Horror” on Tuesday, October 29th, 2019. Researching the many, many women who have written horror stories – in novels, films and television – brought new names to my attention who I am excited to start reading. I hope you will be, too!

Transcript:

We also have difficulty finding African-American successes in the past because those aren’t the stories that were passed forward. When we think about female writers who were African Americans Phyllis Wheatley is who we hear about in this time period right in this earlier time period excuse me. And then we Pauline Hopkins who was publishing ghost stories. She was an African-American woman in the period publishing in the Colored American magazine right? So this is an outlet for writers back in the day and she was publishing all kinds of stories that had to do with the ghosts of slavery. So she’s talking about a real piece of history and essentially what she’s doing is discussing PTSD without giving it that terminology that we’ve given it today. When you think about being haunted by the past — that’s a ghost story and this is what she was doing in the 1880s right? So just 20 years really 15 years past the end of slavery. So she’s a pretty cool person.

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Watch this entire presentation

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In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —

“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”

I presented this holiday lecture “When Women Write Horror” on Tuesday, October 29th, 2019. Researching the many, many women who have written horror stories – in novels, films and television – brought new names to my attention who I am excited to start reading. I hope you will be, too!

Transcript:

It’s very difficult studying LGBTQ people from the past because we don’t have a definitive “here’s a piece of paper that promises you that I am gay” because it was against the law, right? So nobody did that. So scholars have had to find ways to say ‘Here are some pieces of evidence we can use to generally guess this was probably the story and being buried side by side is kind of one of them. Another is wills. Often people would grant their land to someone who had been their companion for many years rather than inheriting it to a cousin or some far-flung relative if they didn’t have children. So scholars have had to work hard to figure that out but I think it’s really interesting. There’s a thing in the UK called Places Of Pride and it’s a tour you can take of LGBTQ locations and her gravesite is one of them. So I think, she’s a really interesting woman. To read her supernatural stories and see what underlying theme — what was she trying to say about how we’re afraid of different things. People tell you what they really want as a message in their writing and I think that’s somebody we should know.

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Watch this entire presentation

Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!

In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —

“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”

I presented this holiday lecture “When Women Write Horror” on Tuesday, October 29th, 2019. Researching the many, many women who have written horror stories – in novels, films and television – brought new names to my attention who I am excited to start reading. I hope you will be, too!

Transcript:

Now this woman really fascinated me. Amelia Edwards. She is known again for travel writing. She traveled the world and that was very fascinating. It’s what she published and got more fame for but in fact, she published ghost stories and there’s a whole collection of her supernatural and weird stories that was just put out again in 2009. So we’re having a Renaissance of looking at women as writers and thinking about the material they put out so many years ago. So I think that’s fascinating. What’s double fascinating. Women have been hidden in history as we know. Women have been hidden in the history of literature. Also, LGBTQ people have been hidden in the history of our actual public life and our literature. Turns out Emilia traveled the world with a widowed friend who never bothered to get married a second time and the two women were companions and did not ask for a male escort which was proper in the day for women to travel with a man to protect them and when they died they were buried side by side in this graveyard.

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