NYU SCHOOL OF PROFESSIONAL STUDIES CENTER FOR PUBLISHING & APPLIED LIBERAL ARTS CONTINUING EDUCATION PROGRAMS (PALA/CE)

Continuing Education Programs in Publishing, the Humanities, Arts, Producing, Design, Writing, and Translation.

Thomas M Devlin

CALA Instructor John Hart Directing ‘Close Enough’

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Left to Right: Daniel Stravino, Debra McNulty, and Gerry Kelly, the stars of “Close Enough.”

Each year, Equity Library Theater puts on their Summer Play Festival, which features 30 short plays over the course of three Saturdays. The event is a wonderful chance to see a wide variety of plays from people of all different backgrounds. There is one day left of the festival, this Saturday, August 19, so you still have a chance to see a full day of plays. The festival starts at noon, and is hosted by the Harry Belafonte Library at 115th Street.

One such play is “Close Enough,” which will be directed by CALA instructor John Hart. The play, written by Steve Burton, will star Daniel Stravino, Debra McNulty, and Gerry Kelly. It is well worth checking out this play, as well as the nine others which will be features this Saturday.

John Hart isn’t teaching any classes this Fall, but if plays pique your interest, CALA offers a number of courses that cover acting and theater:

CALA Alum Mindy Fichter on How Earning a Copyediting Diploma Changed Her Life

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Mindy Fichter just moved to Toronto and started a job at Penguin Random House.

Making a career change is always a bit daunting. It can be hard enough to get an edge in your current field, never mind entering another. Fortunately, courses and diploma programs can make the transition much simpler, and many students are enrolling in them to get a solid handle on their chosen industry. One such student who used this to her advantage is Mindy Fichter, who completed the Copyediting, Proofreading, and Fact-Checking diploma program this past December. She had this to say about her experience:

Earning an advanced diploma in Copyediting, Proofreading, and Fact-Checking at New York University’s School of Professional Studies has been integral in achieving my career goals. Adjunct Professor Thomas Claire has created a program that immerses students in industry knowledge and values practical application. After completing the program, I was able to land freelance proofreading assignments with book publishers in New York City, and now work full-time as a managing editor at Penguin Random House. The skills learned through these courses helped me make a career change of a lifetime.

Fichter started her career in publicity, but was able to use these courses to switch into a job she wanted more. When entering a field like publishing, which can be incredibly competitive, it’s worth seeking out programs that will allow you to stand out from everyone else.

For those who want to make their own career shifts, you can learn more about the Copyediting, Proofreading, and Fact-Checking diploma program on our website. There are also a number of other diploma programs you can participate in, including 3D Designing and 3D Printing, Professional Translation, and many others.

Review of Bryan Garner’s ‘The Chicago Guide to Grammar, Usage, and Punctuation’

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Beyond William Strunk and E.B. White, there are very few celebrities in the world of grammar and usage. If there is one language superstar alive today, though, it is Bryan Garner. He started a career as a lawyer, and later brought his expertise in legal language to the rest of the world with Modern American Usage. This book is perhaps most famous for being the subject of a very, very long review titled “Authority and American Usage.” It’s a fascinating essay on what Standard English is and how Garner expresses his authority over the language. For a slightly more current work by Garner, you can turn to The Chicago Guide to Grammar, Usage, and Punctuation, which was recently reviewed by CALA instructor Thomas Claire.

Claire’s review of Chicago Guide is in almost all aspects glowing, noting how Garner explains concepts so clearly. The review praises every part of the book, which has sections on parts of speech, syntax, word formation, word usage, and punctuation — the latter always being the trickiest topic that grammarians attempt to tackle.While there are many books out there that attempt to cover all of the fundamentals of the English language, almost all of them come up short in one way or another. Claire writes that Garner’s book is the first one he’s seen that gets (almost) everything right. There are just a few quibbles in the review, such as Garner’s omission of a discussion about the use of en dashes with certain compound adjectives and nouns.

Claire has a vested interest in finding a good guide to the English language. As he writes at the beginning of the review, he teaches copyediting courses at CALA, which means it is very useful to find one book that can be used throughout a class for guidance. It is certainly a lot better than his old method, which he said was compiling a bunch of PDFs drawn from various sources.

If you’re interested in learning more about grammar and usage, you may be interested in the CALA Diploma in Copyediting, Proofreading, and Fact-Checking, which Thomas Claire is a part of. The program will teach you about the basics of editing, the magazine and book publishing industry, and Adobe InCopy and InDesign, all of which are valuable skills for the copyeditor working today. It can be hard to stand out in a city filled with publishers and editors, so this diploma can be a great step in furthering your career. And if you take the courses now, there should be fewer PDFs than usual.

CALA’s Karen Schadow One of Top 10 Voice Teachers in New York for 2017

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No matter what career you’re pursuing in New York City, standing out from the crowd is extraordinarily difficult. You’re competing against some of the most talented people in the world in basically every discipline. That gives us all the more reason to represent Karen Schadow, who was named one of the top 10 voice teachers in New York by Expertise, a company that specializes in finding the best in every business. Schadow, who runs The Voice of Success, was chosen for her reputation, credibility, experience, availability, and professionalism. It can also be noted that she is the only speaking coach on the list. As per Expertise:

Karen Schadow [runs The Voice of Success] in New York, [which] specializes in speech improvement, voice coaching, and media training services. They also help clients in improving and developing their presentation skills as well as overcome their speaking fear. The provider has expertise in reducing their client’s accents that results in expressing themselves effectively in every setting. Karen Schadow has creative techniques in teaching voice improvement as well as clearer speech for non-native speakers. This business has gained customers from the national and international levels. They conduct seminars and motivational workshops with large and small groups of audiences in companies and organizations. The provider also offers acting techniques as well as voice improvement, on-camera presentation, corporate development, and total production coordination lessons.

If you’re interested in finding an excellent voice teacher, you can take Schadow’s course 10 Steps to a More Dynamic Voice this fall.

Creative Writing Professor Jan Clausen’s Memoir Reissued This Month

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Having a book reissued is probably one of the most exciting things to happen for an author. It means not only does a publisher think it’s good, but also the general public thinks so too, enough that the publisher is convinced more people want to read it even though it’s not considered “new” anymore. It’s a great vote of confidence, then, that CALA professor Jan Clausen’s 1999 memoir Apples & Oranges was reissued by Seven Stories Press on July 25. It is a multilayered book, but here is the story in brief:

In the late 1980s, after more than a decade living within a strong Brooklyn lesbian community with her female lover and their daughter, Clausen travels to a war zone in Nicaragua, where she falls in love with a West Indian male lawyer. Her memoir is brimming with intimate physical and emotional details of her personal journey, but perhaps what sets it apart are the deeply informed historical and philosophical lenses through which she examines her own experience.

A reissued book tends to also undergo a reevaluation. How does it stand the test of time? It may have been novel then, but what does it have to offer us now? This can be a bit nerve-wracking for an author, especially when the book happens to be a deeply personal memoir. Clausen decided to consider the critiques in an essay, “Self-Determined,” on Women = Books.

Clausen responds to one criticism in particular, which is that Apples & Oranges looks almost exclusively at women and men. She says that this is a valid point, but that it is part of a trend of treating “just women” as boring. She links this to the idea of female self-determination:

Time and again, I’m astonished (I know I shouldn’t be) that the discoveries about self-determination that my feminist and lesbian cohort made in the 1970s and 80s seem so lost to the larger culture. In my more optimistic moods, I believe that my memoir is now more relevant than ever, thanks not so much to its theoretical framework, but rather to its efforts to recall the intimate texture of erotic feeling, creative insurrection, mutual support, and practical organizing knowledge in an intensely politicized community of female human beings nervy enough to think that women, all by ourselves, could take on the world.

Apples & Orange, in any case, is worth reading through the lens of the ever-more-urgent feminist movement that is at the heart of many political issues today. With some of the leaders of today’s movements being preteens in 1999, it’s always important to reflect on the ideas that brought us to the present.

Jan Clausen is on leave for the fall semester, but if you’re interested in writing your own memoir/philosophical meditation on feminism (or anything else), you should check out some of our Fall 2017 course offerings:

Creative Writing Student Publishes Essay About Tango on Salon

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Photo by Zabara Alexander

It takes two to tango, but what happens when you’re having trouble finding a second? This is the question that’s dealt with in the literal sense by Nancy Green in “On paying for it: Ten cents a dance (adjusted for inflation)”, which was recently published on Salon. The essay talks about the night Green paid her teacher to dance with her, after experiencing frustration over trying to find a partner in a tango environment where there are more women than men. She describes various types of tango throughout the piece:

The Argentine tango is a deceptive dance. From the outside, it can look like an intimate conversation that, once started, is best finished off the dance floor. Deeply woven in each other’s arms, lips brushed up against a cheek, and with its leg-entwining antics, you’d think the tango was all sex. What makes it so intoxicating, though, is that the tango is really an inside job — a hypnotic, dancing meditation. The goal, and then the pleasure, is to dance as one, to tango’s time-honored steps, to be so merged that the separate self is abandoned.

Nancy Green keeps about blog about learning to tango called Nancy Learns the Tango, but this particular piece was developed in Nicole Kear’s Writing Your Memoir course. Green also wrote a testimonial to the great time she had in that class:

Even at 59, the first day of school was as terrifying as it was exciting. The fear lasted for but a minute…well…maybe for 15 minutes.
Nicole, in her delightful and insightful way, and through example, discussion, homework, writing prompts and critique, lead us down the revealing path of how to craft a personal essay or memoir. As it turns out, it’s not so scary. I learned so much from Nicole, and from my fellow classmates. I’d even crafted an essay during the course that was possibly ready for the big time.
I researched publications that accepted personal essays, sat up straight in my chair, dusted off my wits, made a few grammar and punctuation corrections, and hit send.
A month later, I sent a kind reminder to the handful of publications. I heard back almost immediately from an editor at Salon who thanked me for the “nudge” and said she’d love to publish the piece. This was a Thursday morning and the essay made its prime-time-digital-debut the following Sunday.

The course Writing Your Memoir is being offered this fall, along with a slew of other classes that will allow you to hone your writing skills, no matter your age or dance style:

Instructor Victor Corona Launches His Memoir ‘Night Class’

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In the latest season of Revisionist History, the podcast host Malcolm Gladwell talks about his theory about autobiographies and memoirs. He says that the books written by very famous people are usually incredibly boring, as they need to play it safe in order to avoid mass media scrutiny. Gladwell continues, saying, “But the memoir of the person under the general, or the president, or the CEO, the person you’ve never heard of? That person has a lot less to lose. And their memoirs are where the gold lies.” With that in mind, you may have never heard of Victor Corona before, but that makes Night Class: A Downtown Memoir all the more exciting. The book has already generated some buzz as one of Barnes & Noble’s “12 Must-Read Indie Books Coming This Summer,” and its likely to be one of the most captivating books of the summer.

The story follows Corona’s adventures in downtown New York when he was younger, taking part in the nightclub and art scene. Corona is now a sociology professor at NYU, making him an astute observer who can turn his personal story into a grander view of the history of New York. His CV also includes other notable entries that make this book so captivating, like his time spent as an assistant to Michael Alig, a notorious club promoter who spent 17 years in prison for manslaughter.

As noted in the New Yorker, Corona is launching his book at Rizzoli Bookstore on Thursday, July 13 at 6 p.m. If you happen to live in East Hampton, you can also attend the 2017 East Hampton Library’s Authors Night featuring a number of personalities including Alec Baldwin, Robert Caro, and Dick Cavett.

Victor Corona isn’t teaching any courses at CALA this fall (though keep an eye out for possible classes in the future). If you’re interested in writing your own memoir, though you may want to check out Jumpstart Your Memoir being offered this summer, or Writing Your Memoir which will take place in the fall.

July Events at the Museum of the City of New York

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If you haven’t been to the Museum of the City of New York recently, I can’t recommend highly enough that you do. Not only do they have a number of exhibits that change regularly, but also their recently opened permanent exhibit, “New York at Its Core,” is a wonderful overview of the past, present, and future of the city. You can learn about the first settlers of the area to the plans being put in place to keep New York a sustainable place to live in a world with ever-increasing changes in technology.

The museum is also a hub for events that correspond with their exhibits. Here are three of the upcoming events this month, along with CALA courses you may be interested in to add depth to your knowledge.

“The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge”
Wednesday, July 12 at 6:30 pm at the Museum of the City of New York (1220 Fifth Avenue)
Washington Roebling constructed one of America’s most iconic structures, the Brooklyn Bridge, but his story spans much more than just the East River. It’s a story of immigration, personal adversity, and pushing the boundaries of possibility. Join Erica Wagner, author of Chief Engineer: Washington Roebling, The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge, and Kevin Baker, best selling author of America the Ingenious, for a conversation about this incredible feat of human engineering and the making of modern New York. Reception and book signing to follow.
Register online at mcny.org/offthepage | Use the code NYUSPS for $10 tickets (regularly $20)

If you want to learn about some of the other massive architectural achievements undertaken in New York City, you can check out Olmsted, Vaux, Central Park, and 19th-Century New York or Robert Moses and the Making of New York.

“In the Steps of Salsa Walking Tour”
Friday, July 14 at 3:00 pm beginning at the Museum of the City of New York
Inspired by their exhibition, Rhythm & Power: Salsa in New York, Elena Martinez, folklorist at City Folk, will lead a walking tour of East Harlem, the barrio of salsa, to explore the music venues, theaters, and social clubs that fostered the nascent dance movement. Stops will include the first Spanish Methodist Church where the Young Lords Party staged some of their most audacious civil rights campaigns, New York City’s oldest botanicas, spiritual shops that sell candles, herbs, and amulets, and the Julia de Burgos Latino Cultural Center, a community staple even to this day. Includes Museum admission.
Register online at mcny.org/salsa | Use code NYUSPS for $20 tickets (regularly $30)

One of the greatest advantages of courses in New York is using the city as your classroom. You may want to take Manhattan History: Pre-European to Post-Revolutionary War and New York in the Jazz Age: Art Deco Architecture from Tribeca to the Upper West Side to view the city from other historical angles.

“Feeding the Fight: The Culinary History of WWI”
Tuesday, July 18 at 6:30 pm at the Museum of the City of New York (1220 Fifth Avenue)
Savor a bite of culinary history by exploring the food and drinks that defined the American experience during World War I. Inspired by their exhibition, Posters & Patriotism: Selling World War I in New York, food historian Libby O’Connell, author of The American Plate: A Culinary History in 100 Bites, will delve into American cuisine both at home and abroad during war years.
French 75s, a cocktail popular during the period named for the French 75 mm field gun, will be served courtesy of the new wine cocktail company Pampelonne and attendees will receive a copy of an original cake recipe promoted by the Red Cross to send to soldiers overseas.
Register online at mcny.org/posters | Use the code NYUSPS for $10 tickets (regularly $20)

To learn about the time after World War I using a slightly different lense, you may be interested in Interwar Breakpoint: 1929 in World Literature or The Rise of Italian Fascism.

Quartz: A Leading Silicon Valley Engineer Explains Why Every Tech Worker Needs a Humanities Education

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For a while, it was nice to think of the algorithms that run the internet as being entirely objective. Websites were not supposed to change what anyone said, they were merely a medium through which to say it. In the past few years, however, companies like Reddit and Twitter have realized that they don’t necessarily want their websites to become the home of abuse and vitriol. This is not a simple problem to solve, however, as each time a website does something that is perceived as non-objective, they get attacked for being unfair. When people found out, for example, that Facebook’s trending news section was chosen by employees rather than actual popularity, many people (primarily conservatives) accused the website of propaganda and silencing of certain voices. How, then, does someone make decisions?

Tracy Chou, a very successful software engineer, promotes one possibility: humanities. In a piece on Quartz she talks about how she spent her college career ignoring her non-engineering classes, and why she regrets that now:

Ruefully—and with some embarrassment at my younger self’s condescending attitude toward the humanities—I now wish that I had strived for a proper liberal arts education. That I’d learned how to think critically about the world we live in and how to engage with it. That I’d absorbed lessons about how to identify and interrogate privilege, power structures, structural inequality, and injustice. That I’d had opportunities to debate my peers and develop informed opinions on philosophy and morality. And even more than all of that, I wish I’d even realized that these were worthwhile thoughts to fill my mind with—that all of my engineering work would be contextualized by such subjects.

This is of course not an entirely new thought, but still an important one. In the pendulum of education, society seems to swing between the extremes of “STEM is the only field worth studying” to “the humanities are the most important studies for mankind to undertake.” As with almost any black-and-white debate, the answer is actually in between. Every philosopher should know something about the physics and technology that creates our world, and every scientist should spend time pondering questions about the nature of being.

Fortunately, one place you can study the humanities is right here at CALA. If you’re in the STEM fields, take a look at the many history, literature, theater, music, and philosophy courses we’ll be offering this fall. And if you’re in humanities, you could always consider taking a course in programming, information security, or data science.

Flagstaff Dark Skies Celebration Includes Work of CALA Instructor Kay Kenny

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Kay Kenny’s photograph at the exhibit.

Living in New York City, the beauty of the night sky seems to be entirely replaced by a dull glow emitted by the signs of Times Square and all the other sources of light pollution. That’s what makes it all the more spectacular when you get out of the city and witness a sky filled with thousands of stars. It is this theme that inspired NightVisions, a photography exhibit in Flagstaff, Arizona, focusing on views of the galaxy taken from earth. CALA instructor Kay Kenny is one of the many talented photographers featured in the exhibit. You can see her photo at the top of this article.

Flagstaff is the first International Dark Skies City, having established itself as such in 1958, which means measures have been taken to ensure that the effects of light pollution are reduced as much as possible. New York City might seem like the exact opposite of that. Still, the city has its own kind of beauty as the night falls. To celebrate this, Kay Kenny is teaching a course this fall along with Lynn Saville called New York at Twilight: A Two-Day Photography Workshop. The course will teach techniques on how to capture the lights and colors of the city as the sun starts to disappear. The results will certainly be different than those exhibited in Flagstaff right now, but it will show the extremes of the world at night, each beautiful in their own way.