“Leap Before You Look”
The Art of Creative Writing

March 7-10, 2023 | H 6:30 pm
Binario 3 | OGR Torino

Lectures on March 7, 8, and 10 will be in English with simultaneous translation
Free admission

From March 7 to 10, 2023, OGR Torino will host “Leap Before You Look”: The Art of Creative Writing, a cycle of four conversations on the art of writing in its various applications: fiction, non-fiction, new technologies, video games and comics.

The title is the motto of the Experimental School of Liberal Arts, Black Mountain College, founded in 1933 and active until 1957. Extremely progressive and multidisciplinary in its approach to art as the center of an individual’s educational and political life, BMC was the crossroads of refugees from Europe and emerging American artists who found themselves experimenting with new ways of teaching and learning through the rigor of graduate-level study, research, and laboratory time.

“Leap Before You Look” exhorts you to take risks in the creative act, letting the unexpected element hit you even before you have fixed an idea or form on the page. It is an encouragement to let a story choose us and unexpectedly take root within us.

The aim of these four meetings is to show how dramaturgical writing applies to various narrative mediums that is, to attempt to bridge the gap between learning and working, by providing novice students, artists, and professionals with the skills to work autonomously on innovative projects while developing the ability to fit into a broader context, both domestically and internationally.

“Leap Before You Look” seeks to provide valuable knowledge to its audience and aims at setting up a place for discussion with professionals in the field, crucial to keeping the educational stimulus high and creating future opportunities. It also responds to the need to gather appropriate feedback to evolve one’s work and to understand which market and target audience it belongs to: that is, to convey information that would otherwise be out-of-reach, except by attending expensive creative writing classes.

Guest speakers: Carol Becker, who will talk about creativity and its various facets in writing; Ross Berger, an expert on storytelling for video games, new technologies, and online platforms; Joyce Carol Oates, who will take us deep into fiction and beyond; Marco Rizzo, who will shed light on the comic book script; and Francesco Ripoli, author of comics and graphic novels. They will be in conversation with Argia Coppola, creator of the project.

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March 7, 2023, H 6:30 pm | Carol Becker | English language

In the first meeting, Carol Becker, an American author and scholar will delve into the working methods of Black Mountain College and analyze creativity and writing as a spiritual act, a practice useful for gaining clarity and sorting out the things we do not understand.

During her conversation with Argia Coppola, she will also talk about Losing Helen: An Essay, which tells the story of a daughter coping with the many painful stages of losing her elderly mother, written with an artistic process that mixes real life, imagined life, and quotations from authors who have dealt with the severity and grace of the mourning process, such as Simone Weil, Roland Barthes, Sandra Edelman, Sushila Blackman, and Theodore Roethke.

March 8, 2023, H 6:30 pm | Ross Berger | English language

Connecting live from Los Angeles, video game narrative designer Ross Berger, together with Argia Coppola, will explore the world of video games by analyzing what aspects and skills are required of their creators, from how to build a story for video games to a quick insight into their ever-growing market.
Using his experience as a transmedia strategist, Ross will also talk about how to create an entertainment experience that can be consumed across multiple mediums and answer questions such as: what are the mechanisms that govern the story in a video game? How do you guide users from one medium to another so that a more complete and rich experience satisfies their ultimate vision? Are there narrative rules common to novels? Or to cinema?

March 9, 2023, H 6:30 pm | Marco Rizzo and Francesco Ripoli

Marco Rizzo, an author and scriptwriter for comic books, and Francesco Ripoli, a cartoonist, will talk about their professions and explore their collaboration on the graphic novel Ilaria Alpi. Il prezzo della verità.
During their dialogue, moderated by Argia Coppola, they will ponder questions such as: What is the process that takes place from scratch to the comic page? How do you write a comic book? How do royalties, advance payments, and fees work?

March 10, 2023, H 6:30 pm | Joyce Carol Oates | English language

The celebrated American author has mastered every literary genre, and her many publications have been adapted for film and theater.
With Argia Coppola, she will talk about her own career and her job as an author, providing useful tips and advice for anyone who wants to write.
The talk will address the practice of adaptation and its creative and ontological significance in its relationship to the source material, delving into the play, Love Is Blonde, which Argia adapted from her novel Blonde and exploring the recent Netflix film adaptation, directed by Andrew Dominik and starring Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe.