Online Classes
Reviews and Other Modes of Arts Writing
5-session class, two-hour class meetings, summer 2026
Cost: $250
The review’s become ubiquitous. On a daily basis, you may read and/or write user reviews on Amazon, Letterbox DVD, or a gazillion other platforms. Nonetheless there’s still a place for the professionally written review or arts essay published in a magazine, journal, or newspaper. In this class, you’ll not only learn how to write a review but how to go about getting it published. Your trusty instructor has experience writing book and music reviews, museum catalog essays, and arts essays that go beyond the review. However, you might be interested in reviewing films, TV shows, video games, restaurants, architecture, technology, sports equipment—et al. Media outlets for all these, so to speak, products exist. If there’s interest, we might also read and write longer-form, think-piece style arts essays. Finally, if you’re interested in writing and publishing interviews with writers, artists, and other creators, we can focus on the nuts and bolts of interviewing, from pitch to publication. Everyone will write a review or essay, identify outlets where you might publish it, and work on pitch letters to editors.
If you are interested in this class, please email me at gudas@ucla.edu. Let me know what time zone you're in and what your availability is in June through August of 2026.
Eric Gudas attended Sarah Lawrence College, UC Davis (M.A. in English & Creative Writing), and UCLA (Ph.D., English). He is the author of Best Western and Other Poems (Silverfish Review Press, 2010), winner of 2008 Gerald Cable Book Award. His poems, reviews, essays, creative nonfiction, translations, and interviews have appeared in The American Poetry Review, BOMB, Raritan, All About Jazz, Poetry Flash, Senses of Cinema, Reading in Translation, and elsewhere. He’s a regular contributor and Contributing Editor at Los Angeles Review of Books. He wrote the the afterword for Natalia Ginzburg’s Family and Borghesia (NYRB Classics, 2021).