Students Explore Intersests, Develop Artistic Projects for Winter Term

Yasu Shinozaki

For many Obies, Winter Term is the perfect chance to finally sit down and get to work on that novel, screenplay, or short film they have been itching to create. While Oberlin’s Cinema Studies, Creative Writing, and Studio Art departments provide students with new ideas, skills, and inspiration, it is often hard to fully focus on the creative process during the semester. Winter Term is an opportunity for students to give artistic projects their undivided attention.

“I wanted to synthesize things that I’d learned in my first semester here,” College first-year Vivian Wolfson said.

Wolfson spent Winter Term at home writing a twenty-page screenplay and working on pre-production for a film she intends to make this summer. The film is a drama that revolves around the relationship between two mothers and their daughters, exploring themes of motherhood and femininity. Wolfson began to work on the concept before the start of Winter Term. She developed characters by writing fictional letter correspondences between the people involved in the story. During Winter Term, she completed the screenplay, storyboarded the project, and made a visual style pitch deck — a keynote composed of stills from preexisting films intended to show possible investors what the finished movie might look like.

College first-year Sam Kennedy spent Winter Term working on his first novel, a “high fantasy romance with 20th-century technology.”

“[My] project gave me vital knowledge for the future of my career as a writer, reaffirming my passion for the craft and letting me know that I do, in fact, have the stomach to write very long things,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy wanted to finish a first draft, but ended up getting only a quarter of the way through.

“Loose self-discipline is my greatest obstruction to progress,” Kennedy said. “I was distracted too easily, lifted weights to feel productive when I should have been writing, took my dogs on walks with the intent of brainstorming and the result of daydreaming.”

However, Winter Term also gave writers opportunities to discover what worked and didn’t work.

“I’d wake up and make my coffee and write for two hours and then go on with my day,” Wolfson said. “[Trying to write all day] never has worked for me … but giving myself a condensed period every single morning seemed to work out pretty well.”

College first-year Cole Mirman, who worked on a science-fiction novel about futuristic politics, had similar insight.

“The main thing I learned is that having a set schedule and keeping track of your progress is really helpful for letting you be consistent in the amount of work you get done and allowing you to stick with it,” Mirman said. “If you work every day, even if you don’t do that much each day, that will still add up over time and you can still get a lot done.”

Mirman also spoke about the obstacles he confronted.

“[Winter Term] did challenge my aspirations,” he said. “I definitely had some difficulties. There was one scene that just took me forever to figure out.”

Despite its challenges, the creative process is very rewarding.

“I think working on my project was a reminder of how deeply art can resonate with people,” College third-year Cecil Pulley said.

Pulley created a zine consisting of drawings, comics, collage, and writings reflecting on their life.

“It’s about me and my transness, and transgender things in general,” Pulley wrote in the introduction. “At least it probably is. I’m writing this before I get started, so I can’t exactly be sure.”

Pulley said he was surprised when people responded so positively to his work.

“I wasn’t drawing or making things with the purpose of being relatable or even with any certain audience in mind, so it was really touching to hear that my peers connected with it,” Pulley said. “Being able to authentically create is really uniting, as is seeing yourself and experiences like yours in art and artists you admire.”

For some students, Winter Term has been an opportunity to immerse themselves in an art form they had no experience with. College third-year Creative Writing major Ale Jorge, for example, wrote and directed an audioplay despite having no experience with directing, recording, or producing.

“I have and will continue to describe this as the most ‘building-the-plane-as-I’m-flying-it’ project I’ve ever done,” Jorge said. “From auditioning actors to directing them and recording scenes, nothing except writing the script was anything I’ve done before.”

The audioplay, titled W, for Wizards, tells the story of “three college-age wizards who face off against mysterious forces of evil.” Jorge came up with the characters last spring and started working on the script before postponing the project until Winter Term.

This January, he finished the script, then used microphones checked out from the Center for Information Technology and recording spaces in Mudd Center and Kahn Hall to record W, for Wizards. He learned a lot from people he collaborated with, especially his project partner, Double-degree third year Ryn Lazorchak, who edited and produced the audioplay. The production will be released on YouTube and SoundCloud soon.

All the artists I talked to agreed that Winter Term was challenging yet rewarding.

“If you’re reading this and you want to be an author, start writing that book you’ve been thinking about,” Kennedy said. “If this Winter Term has taught me anything, it’s that you can’t know if you can fall in love with something until you’ve spent enough time with it.”

Cal Ransom News Editor

Lola Lorber, OC ’13, created a film on the Oberlin College Lanes during her senior year, titled Love of the Lanes. combining personal essay and documentary. The film explores the camaraderie built through bowling and the joys of having space for the College and community to come together at the campus lanes.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did you end up getting into bowling?

I grew up in New York City and I would go bowling occasionally with my dad. We went to bowling alleys at Chelsea Piers — there was this fun place called Bowlmor Lanes in Union Square, and it was definitely something that I enjoyed doing with my dad, but I didn’t really have much of a relationship to it. I saw the bowling alley when I first toured and was like, “This is so cool.”

Director of Love of the Lanes

one on and you get so excited if someone else gets a strike, even if it’s not your team. The sounds, and the visuals, and the pins — how could you not make a movie about that?

I definitely see all that love for the alleys coming through in the film – can you walk me through your creative process when you were shooting it?

Well, I’m a huge fan of mockumentaries, but I wanted it to be true, I didn’t want it to be made up. I wanted to highlight the characters that are real people. I also heard these stories about people falling in love at the Oberlin bowling alley. A professor met her husband at a bowling alley. All these people are falling in love at bowling alleys.

When you came to Oberlin, what was your relationship with the bowling alleys? How did you end up getting involved?

I first went to the bowling alley my first year, some time in 2009. I went on a kind of friend-date. This guy I sort of knew from New York was like, “I’ll show you around,” and he took me bowling and said, “You should really sign up for Bowling I. It’s a really fun class and you’ll improve your bowling, but also the teacher is just someone you really need to meet.” So I signed up for it first semester of my first year. I don’t think I started working there until my second year.

Can you tell me about your experience working at the Lanes?

I really was completely mesmerized by Tom Reid. He was the head of the Student Union and he ran the Cat in the Cream and Wilder and the bowling alley. He’s an incredible bowler. Everything he does is ground- ed in mindfulness and patience. His whole approach to bowling is his approach to life and his approach to life is his approach to bowling, and I was obsessed with that. Even though I never became that good of a bowler — I had some high scores that I’m proud of, but I didn’t really ever get that good — I just loved the community that was formed around the lanes. I met so many interesting people at the lanes that I would not have met in any other circumstance, I wouldn’t have formed a close relationship or performed with in any other circumstance and I thought the creation of those relationships was so beautiful. I feel like everyone that goes to Oberlin has a certain flavor of weird or quirk. I stuck with my crew and wouldn’t always mingle with a different flavor, but at the bowling alley, everyone was a freak and fun and would just get together and support each other. I just had never really understood the concept of sports and teammates, but you really are just cheering every-

I had heard, like, four stories in the last two months, I knew I wanted that to be the through line.

I wanted it to be kind of a personal narrative about my experience of wanting just to spend all day spraying the shoes. There was something spiritual about having these routines.

I knew that I wanted myself to be in it and a part of it because it was sort of a personal essay. At some point, in one of our film classes we had to use 16-millimeter film and I wanted to include some kind of true film aspect, and what’s cooler than the pinsetter machines? I was really excited to have that footage of the pinsetters and the end when I birth the bowling ball. I was in the Big Parade, and Laura, who runs the Big Parade, helped me build a life-size bowling pin. I knew that I wanted to have interviews with real people. My second year, I took an advanced documentary class with Professor of Cinema Studies and English Geoff Pingree. I had taken this life-changing documentary class, and it was super influential in why I wanted to have my film be semi-scripted, semi-interview-based. He guided me through the process and helped me find the story. Everything just kind of fell together. I had all of these pieces and then I sat down, and I think I even wrote it out on cards and tried to do a puzzle of what makes the most sense. Like, love of the lanes is the through line — should there be a marriage? Should I marry a bowling pin? Should Tom Reid be a minister?

Can you tell me a bit about your career after Oberlin?

I almost minored in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. I was just two credits away from that as a minor, and I’ve always been passionate about birth and newborn care. One of my jobs early out of college was assisting Abby Epstein and Ricky Lake, who are documentary filmmakers, in The Business of Being Born. When we were shooting interviews with different people, endocrinologists and acupuncturists and midwives and reproductive rights experts, that’s when I met a bunch of doulas and realized I want to be supporting people through birth. At first I thought it was gonna be a side thing and then I just started taking more and more classes. But it got complicated with the pandemic — and even before that it was hard to make a living. I felt the more I increased my rates, the more I was working with upper-class white people. Of course everyone needs care, but I want to be serving demographics that really need support. I couldn’t take on volunteer births unless I was charging even more for others. I worked at a fertility benefits company and now I am head of brand and partnerships at a period and moon tracking app. I do feel like I’m in the perfect place with my career because I’m using creativity and my passion for reproductive health.