Kickstarter, called "the people's NEA" by The New York Times, recently sent out their 2011 round-up of success stories on their crowdsourced fundraising site, with women filmmakers taking significant applause on the roster, including Dee Rees' Pariah, which won the Excellence in…

Filmmaker Audrey Ewell and her partner Aaron Ailes are collaborating on a crowdsourced film project about #Occupy Wall Street called "99% (The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film)". As I write, they have pushed past their original goal of $17,500, so success is now a given.

Check out their video on Kickstarter, where they now have 10 hours to raise funds…

Can a tweet change the world? Can a blog? A book? A line of poetry? In the era of insta-communications, with keyboards clicking, touchpads texting around the clock, what is the role of writers in evoking viral change, stoking the flames of ideas into online dialogues and…

Earlier this year, my friend Rachel and I explored our neighborhoods to visually document urban writer inspirations for a blog we were creating called WordCityStudio.com. Our first stop was the New York Public Library. Yes, the one with the lions out front...[insert vimeo here]

And here's the New York Public Library's video featuring some wonderful girl readers and supporters!…

So here it is, full moon time on the horizon with an incredible red moon view at dawn tomorrow for those living on the West Coast of the United States or Australia. That leaves us New Yorkers to dream via video metaphor, so here's a recent Bjork video to commemorate the experience (they won't see the eclipse in Iceland, either...) Take a look at "Moon"...it's wild and quirky, and her wig even matches the imminent eclipse....…

A few weeks ago, in the midst of #OWS, a video crossed my path which startled the frameworks of beauty, especially for a viral clip....Here was an extraordinary phenomenon of starlings in wave formations traversing the sky, captured in Ireland by Sophie Windsor Clive and her friend Liberty Smith. The video has had over 6.4 million views on Vimeo (an alternative site to YouTube), been featured on major news networks and flown across the blog world and back again.

"Murmuration"…

When police raided Liberty Park in the wee hours of November 15th, what occupiers cared most about, in addition to free speech rights violation, press censorship and police brutality, was the removal of their library, which contained 5,000 donated titles. In this movement of ideas, Books have become a key symbol to the cause. The shelter for the library at #OccupyWallStreet was donated by National Book Award-winner and punk…

The Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City has produced an incredible exhibition (through March 2012) called Water Matters: Why We Need to Act Now to Save our Most Critical Resource. It begins with the premise “Our bodies are molded rivers.” Talk about core concept poetics...

The opportunities for writers in this setting is highly fluid, to say the least. Featuring multimedia artworks and…

     Last Friday, I took the #4 train down to Fulton Street to video-explore the real time history-in-transit that is #OccupyWallStreet at Zuccotti Park/Liberty Square. Though I had been following the stories, the tweets, the memes and viral videos as they traversed social media, I had yet to head south and experience the events firsthand.

     While I expected police personnel, signage, dancing, drumming, tarps and tents, there were many other unexpected observations that met the…

When I first saw Meshes of the Afternoon by Maya Deren, it was as if a window flew open in all the houses I ever inhabited. Yes, that kind of weather event.

Visually, Maya Deren broke open the rules on experimental narrative. The links between images create unexpected sentences of allusion and visual epiphany. So what does this mean for writers? A whole host of possibilities for poetics,…

        This recent TedTalks by Sunni Brown gets at a key piece of the creative life: the need for doodling. Granted, "doodle" is a silly word (it rhymes with "noodle" so yes, fun incarnate.) But "serious" writers and artists devoting "serious" "disciplined" time to a daily writing and creative practice, might not want to admit to doodling, daydreaming, or playing around.

        Sunni Brown reveals how scribbling enhances memory, while hinting at what this oft-maligned activity means…

Over the summer, Kamy Wicoff and I chatted over iced coffee about the kinship between visual stories and stories of text, and the ways writers and creative storytellers are using video online. An idea emerged to curate a series of videos by, about and for women writers. So, tada--! Here is the first of many to arrive at SheWrites on Fridays.



Consider them inspirations. Consider them writing prompts. Consider them the beginning of a dialogue.



In this TedTalks, the…

As writers and publishers innovate ways to buzz up interest in their work, book trailers have increasingly amplified the webwaves. Yet, with Harry Potter trailers, kitty antics and Lady Gaga videos dominating social media shareware, what unique spin can book trailers bring to the screen? And how can book trailers reveal enough plotline without eliciting spoiler alerts or compromising readers' own imaginative imprint of fictional worlds?

These questions were already…