The Written Arts Program
encourages students to experiment with their own writing in a context sensitive to intellectual, historical, and social realities, and the past and current literary landscapes. Students are encouraged to consider how their writing is and can be an act of critical and creative engagement, a way of interrogating and translating the world around us. It is expected that Written Arts students are also passionate readers.Why I Chose Bard Written Arts
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Alex BeattyBorn and raised in St. Petersburg, Florida, Alex Beatty decided on Bard after visiting a literature class taught by Professor Marina Van Zuylen. Once at Bard, he chose to moderate into Written Arts. “I wanted to have the opportunity to focus on my own creative projects.”
Alex Beatty
Born and raised in St. Petersburg, Florida, Alex Beatty decided on Bard after visiting a literature class taught by Professor Marina Van Zuylen. Once at Bard, he chose to moderate into Written Arts. “I wanted to have the opportunity to focus on my own creative projects.”
After spending the second semester of his first year at Bard College Berlin, he became a double major in Written Arts and German Studies. For his German Studies Senior Project, Alex translated Der Stein von Werder [The Stone of Werder], a novella by the Baltic-German animal behaviorist Jakob von Uexküll. In it, three sisters attempt to uncover the meaning of a semilegible stone inscription. “I was drawn to The Stone by Uexküll’s use of narrative to explain his theory of meaning,” says Alex, “which also figured into my creative Senior Project, Pistacia Atlantica, a novel about stories written in the margins of old books.”
Of translation, Alex says: “As a learning experience, a creative challenge, and a valued service, translation work has allowed me to continue pursuing my interests since graduating Bard while also helping me to grow as a writer. It has also given me the opportunity to travel, last year to Uexküll’s archives in Tartu, Estonia, and later this year to Perth, Australia, where I’ll be presenting my research on Uexküll and his literary legacy.” It has given him the opportunity to translate contemporaries of Uexküll, such as Heine Hediger, whose research on the dreams of animals has been neglected by translators in the past. Alex has also been working with the writer Rivka Galchen, for whom he’s translating testimonies from the 17th-century witch trial of Katharina Kepler.
Alex also works as an administrative assistant at The Robert B. Silvers Foundation, a nonprofit organization established by the late editor of the New York Review of Books to support writers in the fields of reportage and criticism. “It’s had a profound impact on how I think of writing as a career,” Alex says. “Silvers’s legendary work ethic and passion for nuanced writing and the writers with whom I correspond in my capacity as an administrative assistant have been a daily inspiration for me to continue writing. I have never been sure exactly how writing will fit into my future, because it has taken so many unexpected forms since I decided to make it a career, but I look forward to pursuing new opportunities and continuing my projects in fiction, nonfiction, and translation.” -
Julie JaremaJulie Jarema transferred to Bard from NYU, drawn by its flexible curriculum and eclectic community. She arrived intending to take a critical approach to the study of literature, but a fiction workshop with Porochista Khakpour drew her to Written Arts.
Julie Jarema
Julie Jarema transferred to Bard from NYU, drawn by its flexible curriculum and eclectic community. She arrived intending to take a critical approach to the study of literature, but a fiction workshop with Porochista Khakpour drew her to Written Arts.
Julie explains, “I’ve always enjoyed writing and illustrating stories, primarily for children. However, my Senior Project pushed me toward approaching writing in a more absurd, experimental way and taught me that writing for an older audience doesn’t mean that the writing has to lose its playfulness.”
Julie’s project, “The Museum,” is a novel about a rootless girl whose employer, a reclusive author and the owner of an obscure museum, sends her on a scavenger hunt through Manhattan to gather artifacts for a new exhibition. As Mia’s quest draws her into spiraling mysteries of identity and artifact, the roles of the author and the reader become increasingly entangled.
At Bard, Julie’s interests also drew her to French, comparative literature, and the experimental humanities. In addition, during her undergraduate years she served as an editorial assistant at Bard’s literary journal Conjunctions, as an intern with Miriam Altshuler at the literary agency DeFiore & Co., and as a children’s marketing and publicity intern with Simon & Schuster. The last of these led to Simon & Schuster taking her on full-time as a children’s books associate immediately upon her graduation in 2016.
Spotlight on Our Faculty
The Written Arts Program is staffed by distinguished writers of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction who emphasize both innovative, experimental work and work that foregrounds the conventions of writing.
Written Arts Faculty Reading Series
From 2020
Upcoming Events
- 10/03Monday6:30 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium
Monday, October 3, 2022
Bard Fiction Prize winner and writer in residence at Bard College reads from her recent work
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
On Monday, October 3 at 6:30pm in the László Z. Bitó ’60 Auditorium, Reem-Kayden Center (RKC), Bard Fiction Prize winner Lindsey Drager will read from her work. Introduced by Bard College literature professor and novelist Bradford Morrow, the reading is free and open to the student body.
“Lindsey Drager’s wonderfully innovative novel, The Archive of Alternate Endings, takes its readers on an elliptical, speculative, philosophically intrepid journey that tracks the evolution of the old folktale, Hansel and Gretel, between 1378 and 2365, even as it redefines and revises our sense of what narrative itself can achieve,” writes the Bard Fiction Prize committee. “As Halley’s Comet revisits the Earth every 75 years, like some cosmic metronome, we encounter the siblings Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Johannes Gutenberg and his sister, and twin space probes searching the galaxy for a sister planet to our own. As we do, we witness the many ways in which Hansel and Gretel themselves are transformed along with the human experience their tale portrays. Intimate in its understanding of the multiplicities of love, here is an elegantly succinct work of art that is flat-out epic in scope. And while one may look to Borges, Calvino, Winterson, even the Terrence Malik of Tree of Life for comparison, Drager’s vision is breathtakingly original and The Archive of Alternate Endings displays the confident technique and wild inventiveness of an already accomplished literary artist emerging into virtuosity.”
Lindsey Drager is the author of three novels: The Sorrow Proper (Dzanc 2015), The Lost Daughter Collective (Dzanc 2017), and The Archive of Alternate Endings (Dzanc 2019). Her books have won a John Gardner Fiction Award and a Shirley Jackson Award; been listed as a “Best Book of the Year” in The Guardian and NPR; and twice been named a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. A Spanish language edition of her second book was published this year in Spain, and an Italian edition of The Archive of Alternate Endings is forthcoming. A 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship recipient in Prose, she is currently the associate fiction editor of the literary journal West Branch and an assistant professor in the creative writing program at the University of Utah.
Bradford Morrow is the founding editor of Conjunctions. He is the author of ten books of fiction, including Trinity Fields, Giovanni’s Gift, The Forgers, and The Prague Sonata. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction, an Academy Award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the PEN/Nora Magid Award for excellence in editing a literary journal. A Bard Center Fellow and professor of literature at Bard College, he lives in New York City. - 11/04Friday9:30 am – 4:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Olin Humanities Building
Friday, November 4, 2022
Olin Humanities Building 9:30 am – 4:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
This year, IWT’s Writer as Reader workshops will be held on Friday, November 4, 2022. The lineup features novels, poetry, nonfiction, historical documents, plays, letters, and more. Each workshop will highlight writing-to-read strategies that foster close reading and help readers develop an appreciation for the connections between different but related texts. Writer as Reader workshops emphasize the pedagogical value of teaching texts that are unfamiliar to students, prompting them to read closely and critically, with attentiveness and an open mind.
These workshops offer opportunities for critical reading and discussion, while modeling writing and reading activities that can focus class discussion, help students engage with difficult material, and emphasize the social character of all learning.
Workshop offerings:
1. Writing to Read Beloved
Toni Morrison, Beloved; Charles W. Chesnutt, “Po’ Sandy”; Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (excerpts)
2. “To Make Real the Promise of Democracy:” Martin Luther King Jr. and Henry David Thoreau on Citizenship and Civil Disobedience
Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail”; Henry David Thoreau, “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience”
3. Oedipus and Tiresias: Performing Status and Sexuality
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex (trans. Ellen McLaughlin); Anna-Marie McLemore, When the Moon Was Ours; selections from Ovid’s Metamorphoses; and Keith Johnstone, Impro for Storytellers
4. The Radical Power of the Partial Perspective: Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How it Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions and Brian Dillon’s Essayism
Brian Dillon, Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction; Valeria Luiselli Tell Me How it Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions
5. The Cannibal, the Witch, and the Colonizers: Shakespeare’s The Tempest Historicized
William Shakespeare, The Tempest; selections from James Baldwin, Aimé Césaire, Jamaica Kincaid, Michel Montaigne, and Jimmie Durham (provided).
6. Listening to N.K. Jemisin and Janelle Monáe: Writing and the Arts of Change
N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season; music videos by Janelle Monáe.
7. Mapping Elizabeth Bishop: The Poetics of Geography
Selected poems by Elizabeth Bishop; selected maps from the Library of Congress online archives.
8. Sentience, Loss, and Empathy in Klara and the Sun
Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun; Loren Eiseley, “The Bird and the Machine”; Adam Gopnik, “Death of a Fish”
9. Love in a Time of Terror: Connection and Recognition in James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s Undrowned
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time; Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals
10. Telling Our Stories: Building Bridges Through Language, Image, and Form
Trung Le Nguyen, The Magic Fish; Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds