Craft Seminar: How to Write Cultural Criticism You Care About in a Culture that Doesn't Care with David Masciotra
Craft Seminar: How to Write Cultural Criticism You Care About in a Culture that Doesn't Care with David Masciotra
2 Sessions: Tuesdays, July 23+30
7:00-8:30pm ET
David Masciotra
David Masciotra is the author of six books, including Exurbia Now: The Battleground of American Democracy," I Am Somebody: Why Jesse Jackson Matters, and Metallica by Metallica"(a 33 1/3 book). He has written cultural criticism for a large variety of national publications, among them, The New Republic, Salon, The Daily Beast, and CNN. He teaches writing courses at Indiana University Northwest, and has conducted writing seminars for the Chicago Public Library.
You have a perspective, voice, and sociocultural analysis relevant to national discussion and debate. There are seemingly more opportunities for publication than ever before, but the terrain of publication has become confusing, frustrating, and contradictory. The cultural and political discourse seems locked in bromides, and often neglects the subjects you feel are most important, or addresses them only narrowly and briefly. Attention spans are shrinking. How do you ensure that your perspective cuts through the noise, and finds an audience? How do you get published, and how do you get published writing about the issues, ideas, and crises that you feel demand attention and outrage? How do address these topics of consequence with loyalty to and amplification of your own identity and story?
This two session workshop, in the first session, will spotlight works of cultural criticism that rise to the above challenges. Through examining the achievements of great cultural critics, we will develop a microscopic intimacy with the authorial techniques and tactics that allow essays to resonate, and enable them to make an impact. In session two, we will learn how to publish our own essays by addressing the following:
How to pitch editors
How to use current events to your advantage, regardless of your topic
How to build relationships with editors How to write arguments that appeal to editors and readers
A list with curated selections of cultural criticism essays, published in national outlets (large and small), will detail required reading for all students.
Workshop Highlights:
What makes great cultural criticism work
How to publish your own cultural criticism
How to participate in national discourse with personal authenticity, addressing subjects of importance
1 full and 1 partial scholarship available. For information, please contact Kate Mabus, kate@theshipmanagency.com
David Masciotra is an author, lecturer, and journalist. His most recent book is Exurbia Now: The Battleground of American Democracy (Melville House, 2024), a brilliant work of political and cultural inquiry that provides a definitive account of what exurbia is, how it came to be, and how it’s transforming American life, as well as showing how exurbia has become a safe space to fly the MAGA flag and romanticize the mores of the pre-civil rights, pre-feminist, pre-gay rights 1950s.
His other books include I Am Somebody: Why Jesse Jackson Matters (I.B. Tauris, 2020), Mellencamp: American Troubadour (University Press of Kentucky), Barack Obama: Invisible Man (Eyewear Publishers, 2017), and Metallica by Metallica, a 33 1/3 (Bloomsbury Publishers, 2015). In 2010, Continuum Books published his first book, Working On a Dream: The Progressive Political Vision of Bruce Springsteen.
