The Spaces Between Us: A University-Level Writing Course

21 May - 25 June 2021

Questions of what is close, what is far, and what is far too close have become matters of life, death, and illness... Distance has become the sign of intimacy — of respect, care, concern, shared understanding of a shared world, a sense of belonging to a form of life. 

Kyle Stevens, “When Movies Get Sick”

Who could have known two years ago that our understanding of space would so radically change in such a short time? Closing borders, locking us inside, barring us from going out for all but our simplest needs, the Covid-19 pandemic has altered our relationship to the spaces we inhabit: our world, our cities, our homes and even our bodies. 

In this college-level writing course, your instructors Oana Marian and Christabelle Dilks will guide you through a series of texts - literary and theoretical - about pandemics past and present, real and imaginary, and help you to become a better academic writer before starting college in the fall.

We will start our course with the bedroom Georges Perec stays in the summer after high school, drinking pink gin and deciding to become a writer, and continue with Claire-Louise Bennett’s sea-side cottage, where she reads dystopian fiction and imagines being the last person alive. Anton Chekhov will take us to the sick bay of a Russian warship in the hot Indian Ocean, where soldiers lie dreaming of their snow-covered homes. Steven Soderbergh’s thriller film Contagion will show us a world in the grip of a pandemic, eerily similar to the one we’re living in. Daisy Hildyard will help us think about our “second bodies”: the imprint we leave on ecosystems close and far. 

This is a summer course that is designed to prepare you for college-level academic writing. We will help you develop your writing skills through a series of short exercises, brainstorming assignments, in-class workshops, peer reviews, and revisions. 

Audience: High School Seniors and UNIVERSITY Students

The class meets from 3-4.20pm BST (7-8.20am PDT/10-11.20am EDT/5-6.20pm Turkey) on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Each student will also be assigned to one of the instructors (Oana or Christabelle) for 30-minute one-on-one tutorials, which will also take place on Fridays, and will be scheduled with each student individually.

See the syllabus for more details.