MFA in Creative Writing Program
Teaching dramatic writing isn’t like instructing someone how to ride a bicycle or mend a broken pipe. Writing is unique and idiosyncratic, a deeply personal form of communication. It’s informed by not only the past and present, but by one’s identity, imagination, values, aesthetics, politics, sense of humor, appreciation of tragedy. At the same time, good writing demands not just aptitude; it requires intense discipline, resilience, openness, and patience. It takes bravery, a clear eye, and heart. As a teacher, I try to encourage personal expression while reinforcing the discipline of craft. I help students identify and clarify their voice and the story they’re trying to tell. At the same time, I teach them the basic tools of dramatic writing and how to use (or perhaps even subvert) them: structure, plot, character, action. How do you shape a play, anyway? Or a screenplay? How do you maximize the potential of the stage or screen? Most of all, I try to empower all my students to open up to the vast creative potential within them, and to help them find its best expression.
About me: I’ve written in many different forms over the years. My plays have been produced in the Ensemble Studio Theatre Marathon of One-Act Plays in New York (Death and the Maiden, Rapid Eye Movement, Memento Mori, Pandora, Seventh Word Four Syllables) and around the country; several were subsequently published by Dramatists Play Service and Farrar Strauss. My stage adaptation of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club was commissioned and produced by the Long Wharf Theatre and has had productions around the world. It is slated for production by NY’s Pan Asian Repertory Theatre in the fall of 2007. In addition, I’ve written for more than two dozen children’s live action and animated TV series (Wonder Pets, Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Courage the Cowardly Dog, Reading Rainbow, Dragon Tales, Happily Ever After, etc.), for which I’ve been nominated for the Emmy five times, and the Writers Guild Award four times. I’ve written many documentaries, including PBS' Paving the Way, winner of a Cine Golden Eagle and the Writers Guild Award, and AMC's Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust, narrated by Gene Hackman. Weirdly enough, I also wrote one of Martha Stewart’s Christmas specials. I wrote an original screenplay, The Ghost of Lexy Ambrose, for Nickelodeon Movies. With Laurence Klavan, I wrote the graphic novel Germantown, that will be published by First Second Books in 2008. Laurence and I recently completed our second graphic novel, The Fielding Course.
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Susan Kim, BA