Travel – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

My Mother Always Told Me Busy People Get Things Done – They Also Have Fun!

I guess it’s a sign I’m involved in a lot of projects since on a recent September weekend when I was:

Giving a presentation on Susan Harris at the Screenwriting Research Network conference at Oxford Brookes University.

I could also have been:

On a panel talking about my book at the Monkees Convention in Connecticut celebrating 60 years of The Monkees TV show

• At the Los Ángeles Silent Film Festival celebrating my book on the female screenwriters of the Silent Era

At a book launch in Prague for Stories of the Holocaust: Art for Healing and Renewal, in which I have a chapter celebrating the writing team of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett and their work adapting The Diary of Anne Frank into a Pulitzer Prize-winning play and then their Oscar-winning film.

Along the way, I gave email advice to an author for our Women Making History series at Bloomsbury and set up a lunch with another writer for after I returned. And, of course, I graded things online whenever I was sitting somewhere (airport, hotel, cousin’s house).

Why does one work on so many projects? Largely, because not everything comes to fruition, so that means that often more things happen at the same time, and you might as well jump in and enjoy the ride when they do. It was a pretty fun month.

What a Great Week! — Speaking to Sorbonne Masters Students, a discussion on Writing as Activism, Cinestory Workshop, SeriesFest, and More!

What a Great Week!

I started out last week bright and early Monday morning (6 am LA time/ 1500 Paris time) giving a Zoom lecture to the Masters students of the Professeure au département Cinéma et Audiovisuel at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – yep, the Sorbonne.

Department Directrice Kira Kitsopanidou had a Ph.D. student who was using the book I edited – When Women Wrote Hollywood – so they looked me up online and found all those marvelous lecture clips that Doug posts for me and decided to ask me to deliver a lecture on Early Women Writers and Writers Rooms in the U.S.

They wanted an international focus for their students who already know some of the great French female screenwriters in history so they ask academics from other countries to speak about their industries. It was lovely and will result in having an article I wrote for them translated into French, which will be a new experience for me.

Then I capped the week off as an online guest panelist for one of the Kopenhaver Center Conversations along with my friend, colleague, and MFA mentor Rashaan Dozier-Escalante as we discussed Writing as Activism: Creating for Inclusion on the Screen. Moderated by Dr. Bethanie Irons of Stephens College we discussed the lack of representation for writers of different genders, races, ethnicities, and abilities and how writers can make the needed changes because we all recognize that Representation Matters.

The Sorbonne lecture was a private event but you can find the Kopenhaver Center Conversation here. It will be hard to top a week like that BUT then again this weekend I’ll be at the BEA (Broadcast Education Association) conference in Las Vegas on a panel about Writing as a Career and 2 weeks later I’ll be mentoring new writers at this year’s Cinestory weekend workshop in Idyllwild, California – followed by our MFA commencement at Stephens College and a weekend at the SeriesFest in Denver where I’ll have the honor of introducing this year’s Jan Marino Scholarship recipient at their annual Women Creatives Brunch.

So I guess I can top last week!