Tag: awesome

I don’t know if some of you have been to these live reads at LACMA, where a classic film is read live on stage by actors who just sit and read the script. We did one recently of American Pie, but we reversed the gender roles. All the women played men; all the men played women. And it was so fascinating to be a part of this because, as the women took on these central roles — they had all the good lines, they had all the good laughs, all the great moments — the men who joined us to sit on stage started squirming rather uncomfortably and got really bored because they weren’t used to being the supporting cast.

It was fascinating to feel their discomfort [and] to discuss it with them afterward, when they said, “It’s boring to play the girl role!” And I said, “Yeah. Yeah. You think? Welcome to our world!

—Olivia Wilde crushing it when she talks about women in Hollywood.  (via leanin)

passivemanipulations:

Project for my Social Psych class last semester. This poster series was created to 1) challenge these internalized stereotypes by bringing them to the viewer’s attention and 2) expand the range of role models by including a diverse group of women. Each poster follows the same basic pattern: a woman who has demonstrated her competency in a particular area refutes the stereotype that appears above her in the form of “Girls can’t …”. While the posters target girls ranging from children to young adults, I expect the message would also cause people outside that demographic to question their own beliefs about women and power.  I designed each aspect of the posters with several principles of social psychology in mind:

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What keeps me going? Why write when there are so many other things I could be doing with my one and only life? Why not become a savior, a saint, a martyr? Why not make a ton of money and surround myself with luxury? Why not raise a litter of children and disseminate my DNA far and wide? Why not watch TV and drink beer all day? Why not stop breathing and maybe find out that I’m wrong about what happens next? … because every new book is the book that will float us above and away from (choose three) irrelevance, poverty, mediocrity, madness, obscurity, obloquy, ourselves.

Pete Hautman on the Book that Will Save Us (Writing for the Long Haul series)

Whoa, I needed to see this today. See, sometimes I feel like as a YA writer I’m supposed to talk about books in the context of readers needing them. I’m supposed to write Because [Something] Is Important. There’s a whole “books save lives” thing thing out there. Which may be true. But for me, when it comes to writing, I think about the Flannery O’Connor quote I put in the front of How to Save a Life – “The life you save may be your own." Truth is, writing is what I happen to need to do with my life, and the alternatives are terrifying.

(Also I learned a new word from Hautman in this piece!)