Graphic with speckled paper background and aqua to yellow gradient background with Mayukh Sen's name in large bold red text. A circular headshot of Mayukh Sen is bordered by text with class details in blue text.

Writing your life through movies with mayukh sen

march 16th–april 6th, 2024
Saturdays, 2:00 PM–4:30 PM ET

“Stars matter because they act out aspects of life that matter to us,” Richard Dyer, the godfather of the discipline known as Star Studies, once wrote. “And performers get to be stars when what they act out matters to enough people.” In this four-week workshop, we’ll interpret Dyer’s axiom through the lens of memoir, learning how to write about actors on film and what they mean to us. I’d wager that most of us may have had those moments when we’ve felt inexplicably connected to the performer we see on the big screen. Maybe you felt it when you watched Michelle Yeoh juggle the trials of being a working-class mother in Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), or when you saw Vivien Leigh cling to visions of grandeur in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951).

The parasocial bonds we, as viewers, sometimes forge with performers on screen can be uniquely clarifying: They allow us to see our hopes, fears, and desires reflected back at us in ways that other forms of art just can’t capture. It follows, then, that these relationships make for fertile terrain for memoir writing. What can the work of the stars we watch on screen teach us about ourselves? We’ll answer this very question in our workshop, which will focus on how to use film as a tool for personal essay. We will use writings by such critics as Wesley Morris, Durga Chew-Bose, and Hilton Als as our guideposts.

The generative exercises in this workshop will involve learning how to write about scenes on film while focusing on a performer’s gestures, mien, and affect; how to map a performer’s work on film onto the narratives of our own lives; and how to make yourself a character worth the reader’s emotional investment. We will also discuss pragmatic matters, such as best practices for pitching and submitting essays for publication. Students will walk away from this four-week workshop with an essay that meets all the above criteria, using a performer’s life and work as a window into telling your reader who you are in the world.

eligibility:

This workshop is open to all writers of color, and students must be able to attend all 4 sessions of the workshop. The non-refundable tuition fee is $300. This workshop will be held over Zoom. There is one scholarship spot available, and the applications are open through Sunday, February 25th.

Registration for this class is now closed

SCHOLARSHIPs for this class are now closed

FACULTY:

Mayukh Sen is the James Beard Award-winning author of Taste Makers (2021) and the forthcoming Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star (2025). His writing on film has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and the Criterion Collection, while his food writing has been anthologized in three editions of The Best American Food Writing. He teaches journalism at New York University and lives in Brooklyn.