All Student Success Letters

Julia Richardson

Dear Gotham,

It began with emails in October and November last year, between my desk in Sydney, Australia, and rooms in New York City that I have never visited. First Sam, and then Dana, answering my enquiries about online courses, patient, attentive, encouraging. 

In the very first week of January, I started Memoir Writing 1, taught by David Berner and peopled by classmates who would be my companions for the next ten weeks. I knew them only by their thumbnail images and bios but their presence was so vivid to me down the line, a time zone away, waiting for Tuesdays when the next lesson would open, and I would hear from them again.

I had hoped that doing the course would bring me back to a creative life I had left behind decades ago—  and it certainly did that—but it also taught me things in a way I hadn’t expected. 

I hadn’t counted on the sheer pleasure of learning and practising the fundamentals of scene, structure, dialogue and desire, or of following the trails laid down by David to other authors and thinkers and reflections. 

As a teacher, David had the calm and measured tone that I needed. His commentary was  gentle, firm, fair—and when he left the note ‘this is your voice,’it really meant something to me. David’s guidance, and the frank and hearty support of my classmates, gave me the tools to take myself and my work seriously, possibly for the first time.

This August, less than a year after those first tentative emails, my story Turn, Turn, Turn was shortlisted and published in the annual Fiction Edition of The Big Issue, a magazine sold on the streets by people experiencing homelessness. It was a story I first drafted as an exercise in my class, and which I improved with feedback from David. It’s been an amazing experience for me—most particularly the launch event which involved hunkering down with the vendors over breakfast in the basement rooms of Sydney’s main train station, listening to them and documenting their stories.

This small success is a first step—but one that would never have happened without my ten weeks at Gotham. 

There is a uniquely American phrase which I love: I appreciate you. It may sound simple and familiar to you, but it speaks with a directness that Australian language shirks, admitting both gratitude and the humbling necessity of support and connection.

Gotham, I appreciate you. I really do.

Julia Richardson