speaking – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

05 Amelia Edwards from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 7 seconds)

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In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —

“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”

I presented this holiday lecture “When Women Write Horror” on Tuesday, October 29th, 2019. Researching the many, many women who have written horror stories – in novels, films and television – brought new names to my attention who I am excited to start reading. I hope you will be, too!

Transcript:

Now this woman really fascinated me. Amelia Edwards. She is known again for travel writing. She traveled the world and that was very fascinating. It’s what she published and got more fame for but in fact, she published ghost stories and there’s a whole collection of her supernatural and weird stories that was just put out again in 2009. So we’re having a Renaissance of looking at women as writers and thinking about the material they put out so many years ago. So I think that’s fascinating. What’s double fascinating. Women have been hidden in history as we know. Women have been hidden in the history of literature. Also, LGBTQ people have been hidden in the history of our actual public life and our literature. Turns out Emilia traveled the world with a widowed friend who never bothered to get married a second time and the two women were companions and did not ask for a male escort which was proper in the day for women to travel with a man to protect them and when they died they were buried side by side in this graveyard.

04 Elizabeth Gaskell and the Salem Witch Trials from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 15 seconds)

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In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —

“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”

Transcript:

I think she’s really interesting because she brings the female gaze — the first female to write about the Salem witch trials right? We hear stories from the male perspective about these crazy bad women who were doing these witchy things and now we have a book from the female perspective. What was this really about and what is being a witch about? Is that about power and is that what scared all the men back in Salem that they didn’t want women to have power right and when we look into the history of the Salem witch trials we know that there are many possibilities for why those women were chosen? Among them, several of them were land-owning women and back of the day women weren’t supposed to own land. Only men were but if your husband died and you had no male kids you inherited it and the funny thing about Salem was the men who sat on the council in the city who decided if you were a witch or not when you were convicted and your land went up for public sale the men on the council got to buy any public sale land first shot half price. Just by accident, they were finding women guilty who happened to own land that was rather lovely for them to buy. So she’s looking at this period through this female gaze which we don’t teach in schools.

03 Elizabeth Gaskell from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 3 seconds)

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In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —

“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”

Transcript:

In also just a little bit post her period when I was researching this I found it so interesting. There were not many women who we teach in our schools, but here they were living full, professional careers as writers in eras when we don’t even think about women having jobs at all, right? So Elizabeth Gaskell really interested me. I love the fact that you can see full shelves of books written by women and books based on horror stories which again, we don’t really relate to women. So what was that about and why were they getting away with that? I think she’s really cool because we mostly know these women for the drama novels they wrote. The things that were proper books. If you wrote a book at all it was about a proper society. So Cranford is what she’s mostly known for which was turned into a miniseries with some famous ladies who’ve you seen in other sorts of Harry Potter-like stories, but she really wrote all kinds of ghost stories and she began her career by being published by Charles Dickens. So Dickens was doing magazine publishing and he’s publishing a lot of women which I thought was very interesting. I had not equated that with him. So Elizabeth Gaskell is one of the names we should know more.

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02 Women and Horror Writing from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (45 seconds)

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In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —

“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”

Transcript:

The best horror — and I’m gonna come to some examples as we travel through — is stuff that involves social commentary along with the scare because that’s the stuff that sticks with us. So I think Mary is very important. I made a point to mention I think it’s useful we think about women writing. Back in the day, it wasn’t acceptable for women to READ novels because it would rot their brains. So they certainly couldn’t write them. So you’ll notice when the book was first came out there was no author on the book. Nobody bothered to wonder how come there’s no writer there. It was because she could not admit that she had written it and then when it came so ridiculously famous and so profitable then she was able to say “well I’m cool enough that’s fine I’ll take the ding for doing this,” right? So I think it’s really important to think about what women had to go through just to be writers right?

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** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!
† Available from the LA Public Library

01 Introduction from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 18 seconds)

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In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —

“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”

Transcript:

Alright, so welcome everybody. Today because we’re just two days outside of Halloween, we want to talk about horror but we want to talk about women in horror because you don’t get a lot of that right? When we think about horror we think about a lot of famous male authors. Now we do think about some of the women — both writers and we’re gonna think about some stories that are famous stories that are female focused and how that affects us as we watch these types of things right? What they make us think about. What we should be thinking about? So when I think about horror, I think about this lady first, Guesses? Mary Shelley. Mary Shelley. When we think about Mary Shelley we think about what book she wrote? Frankenstein. Right? Frankenstein does double duty. It’s kind of a double genre piece. It’s science fiction but it’s also horror. When we think about Frankenstein, we think about the monster and the movies that we’ve seen. The costumes people wear for Halloween. A lot of people — until they read Frankenstein — don’t understand that’s not the name of the monster. That’s name of Dr. Frankenstein who made the monster right? So this was all concocted in the brain of a 19 year old young woman and that’s how important her work was. We’re still reading it to this day right and we’re still thinking about what does it mean.

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** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!
† Available from the LA Public Library

40 Conclusion from The Sisterhood of Science Fiction – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 42 seconds)

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The Sisterhood of Science Fiction: A Walk Through Some Writers and Characters You (Should) Know And Love

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This one allowed me to riff on some of my favorite female science fiction writers across time, whether they be novelists or television writers. It also opened up a good conversation on what art we support and include in our lives – and what that art says to us and about us. — Rosanne

Transcript:

We’ve moved to the world thankfully where now we’re gonna have female superheroes even and that’s the big deal. Likewise I love this meme. It’s been going around on Facebook but you probably saw it — makes a difference that little girls are now seeing women in charge and all these kinds of films makes a big difference. I like this one too. I’ve live long enough to see my child princesses become generals right? That’s Princess Buttercup — kicking some butt and what — exactly — in Wonder Woman. As you wish exactly. As I wish that someone take care. That’s pretty cool. and we’ve come to a place where there’s a new movie opening this weekend or next weekend that’s about an African-American girl who has superhero powers and so does her mother and her grandmother. It all comes through three generations of women who have to use those powers well and they have to deal with them and not cause violence and issues like that. So the fact that we’ve moved all the way here from Frankenstein is pretty amazing I think and I think we always have to go back to what Octavia Butler said, we have to think what we don’t see we assume we can’t be. So whatever that is, we need to see those depictions of all of our different selves because diversity isn’t about getting more money at the box office. Those make much richer, better stories because we are a hugely diverse world and it’s not just actually here in America. It’s all over the world. There’s all kinds of different people everywhere. We really need to think about all of them living on into the future. That makes the best science fiction, in my opinion. So there we have it. Thank you all for coming.

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39 Buffy The Vampire Slayer from The Sisterhood of Science Fiction – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (48 seconds)

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Transcript:

Moves us into the world of Buffy which is part horror/part sci-fi I would say blending and I think really finally a powerful woman though yes she does use weapons but it’s also about her inner strength and her buddy Willow who doesn’t have to be sexy she’s just a cool really smart girl. So we’re trying to get some more normal representations of women. However when they sell the box set, uhhh, that’s a pretty like it yeah, an overtly sexual pose that doesn’t really thrill me, but the series is pretty brilliant and she’s pretty powerful in it and there’s an ending to it — not gonna spoil it — but there’s a choice made in the last episode in terms of how men would take having to deal with their power issues and how a woman decides to save the day. — what she does and it’s a big interesting thing.

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38 Russell T Davies and Doctor Who from The Sisterhood of Science Fiction – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (57 seconds)

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Transcript:

I’m going to go back to my Russell Davies guy because he said something that is really interesting in one of his interviews about what’s wrong with television. He happens to be a gay man — an out, gay man — in England. So he made sure that most of his pieces involved gay men in partnerships because he wanted to see, again, as a child — he wanted to see that that was normal and acceptable, but he also recognized how badly women are represented on television and he wanted to something about that. So, in Doctor Who, when he took it over, he invented a lot of very interesting female companions who had all their different levels of strength. I could do a whole talk on that. I already have, but of course, the great thing about Doctor Who, post the Russell Davies period we’ve now come up with regenerating — so we’re going back to Virginia Woolfe and Orlando — we’re making the male character — who for 50 years has been represented by a male actor — he regenerated into a female character and so we’re moving forward in the Doctor Who universe as well as a female character.

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37 Sarah Connor and Dana Scully from The Sisterhood of Science Fiction – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (52 seconds)

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Transcript:

Of course, then we move over to Sarah Connor and the Terminator. Again. it’s this thing that gives everybody power. Not what I’m providing inside and Sarah Connor is pretty boss and pretty tough but it’s that gun we always go back to. So I don’t think about it’s– (Audience) I always remember her and even when I’m exercising when she’s doing the pull-ups. (Rosanne) Yes. (Audience) I — when I exercise, I think about her. (Rosanne) See that’s good. That’s– that’s the inner strength. That’s very cool yeah. That is the cool bit of it. Yeah. So we’re getting around to it. Of course through those movies we then come up with the X-Files and now we have Dana Scully who is all-powerful because it’s her brain. Not big on using the gun, right, that’s his job. She’s using her brain and she’s the more intellectual — the stronger one — in many ways. He’s the one running by his heart and his emotions and she’s the one running through her mind. So we’re switching the male and female sort of identifiers in this piece, which is pretty strong.

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36 Star Wars, Alien, and Women Characters from The Sisterhood of Science Fiction – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute)

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Transcript:

And of course, it brought us many other powerful engaging women right? We got Rei. We’re dealing with Padme from the earlier session. We had Jyn Erso. I really like Rogue One more than I even like the new Star Wars, but that’s just me. Then we have Rose Tiko which was a big move right and then there are people kind of Oh, what’s she doing in there. She doesn’t have any place in the movie. She does. She’s showing us that people of Asian descent show up in the future. That’s a huge message right and again she does it mostly peacefully you know there’s a gun in there someone but we get rid of that pretty quick and then it’s about your skill with it with lightsaber stuff. Moving forward we all know or we think we know Alien right and Sigourney Weaver. Sadly the rumor in Hollywood is that the reason that character is so strong and interesting is the it was written to be a man and when they couldn’t get a male to star in the movie they just threw it to Sigourney Weaver and they never rewrote it girl-ify it up. So she’s powerful because she’s doing all the things we expect men to do in movies without having to be a guy.

* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs
** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!