UPCOMING EVENTS

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• LY221 Living Room Players: Major Barbara, by George Bernard Shaw

  • When
    22 May 2025
  •  
    2:00 PM - 4:30 PM
  • Location
    A member's apartment in the Marais
  • Spaces left
    0

  Join waitlist

  Major Barbara by George Bernard Shaw is a satirical play that explores themes of morality, wealth, and social responsibility. It critically examines the relationship between morality and capitalism, leaving the audience to ponder whether wealth and ethics can coexist.
  The story follows Barbara Undershaft, a devoted Salvation Army officer who seeks to uplift the poor through charity and faith. Her estranged father, Andrew Undershaft, is a wealthy and pragmatic arms manufacturer who argues that poverty is best solved through power and industry. As Barbara grapples with the implications of her father’s philosophy, she ultimately reevaluates her beliefs, questioning the true sources of societal change. 

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  The general concept of WICE play readings is that people are sent the script a few days beforehand, and when they arrive they pull straws for roles. Attendees sit around a living room and simply read their parts with as much theatrical flourish as they care to give (but there are no expectations of real acting).
  

  The reading will take place at a member's apartment in the Marais. The address, door code, and phone number will be sent in the two reminder emails.

  This will be the last play reading until September.

  
  

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• LY231 Café Littéraire: "Chéri," by Colette

  • When
    23 May 2025
  •  
    3:30 PM - 5:00 PM
  • Location
    Location provided in the 7-day and 1-day reminder emails
  • Spaces left
    0

  Join waitlist

  

  The registration limit for this event has been reached. Please put your name on the waitlist and you will be contacted if a spot becomes available. The next book group meeting is scheduled for Friday, 20 June, and registration opens on Saturday, 24 May.

  Chéri (1920) is a French novel by Colette that explores love, aging, and shifting gender roles in Belle Époque Paris. The story centers on the complex, emotionally charged relationship between Léa de Lonval, a glamorous and independent courtesan nearing fifty, and Chéri, a beautiful, self-indulgent young man twenty-five years her junior. As Chéri prepares for an arranged marriage, both characters are forced to confront their emotional dependence and the realities of change, time, and societal expectation. With elegance and psychological depth, Colette examines the bittersweet end of an unconventional love affair and the quiet tragedy of growing older.

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  The book group normally meets at the organizer's apartment. The directions, door code, telephone number, etc., are sent following registration in the 7-day and 1-day reminder emails.
  

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• BA031 Exploring French History through Novels

  • When
    05 Jun 2025
  •  
    2:00 PM - 3:30 PM
  • Location
    Le Nelson's Café, 16 rue de Coquillière, 75001 Paris

  Register

  Free for WICE members! Come with us on a captivating journey where literature and history intertwine to offer a uniquely vivid perspective on France's past. You’ll plunge into a vibrant tapestry of pivotal events, cultural shifts, and influential figures…while falling under the spell of some of France’s best historical novelists.  And then the discussion begins!

  Our meetings take place in French so you'll enhance your understanding of the past while simultaneously improving your French reading, comprehension, and speaking skills in a friendly convivial group.

  Group facilitator: Claudia Oudet, French teacher, editor, and translator, will offer linguistic help and literary/historical insights.

  We'll meet in person at Le Nelson's Café,

  16 rue Coquillière, 75001 Paris

  Métro : Lignes 1/4/7/11/14 RER A/B/D Châtelet Les Halles 
  Bus : 74 – 85 : Louvre – Etienne Marcel / Bourse du commerce

  
  

  Préparez-vous à discuter:

  "Les Rois maudits, tome 2: La Reine Étranglée" est le deuxième volume de la série historique de Maurice Druon, qui retrace les événements du XIVe siècle en France. Ce tome commence au lendemain même de la mort de Philippe le Bel. Tandis que la Chrétienté attend un pape et que le people meurt de faim, les rivalités, les intrigues, les complots vont déchirer la cour de France et conduire barons, prélats, banquiers, et le roi lui-même, au fond d'une impasse dont ils ne pourront sortir que par le crime. Cette série est reconnue pour sa richesse historique et ses intrigues complexes, offrant une immersion profonde dans les luttes de pouvoir de l'époque médiévale.

  Come prepared to discuss:

  “Les Rois maudits, tome 2: La Reine Étranglée” is the second volume in Maurice Druon's historical series, retracing the events of 14th-century France. This tome begins on the very day after the death of Philip the Fair. While Christendom waits for a pope and the people starve, rivalries, intrigues, and plots tear the French court apart, driving barons, prelates, bankers and the king himself to the depths of an impasse that can only be resolved by crime. The series is renowned for its rich history and complex plots, offering a deep immersion in the power struggles of the medieval era.

  
  

  
  

  
  

  
  

  
  

  
  

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• WU211 The Poetry Playground: A Beginner's Journey (Part II)

  • When
    21 Jun 2025
  •  
    1:30 PM - 4:30 PM
  • Location
    In person, to be shared after registration
  • Spaces left
    3

  Register

  

  The Poetry Playground: A Beginner's Journey (Part II)

   “A poet is, before anything else, a     person who is passionately in love with   language.”     W. H. Auden

  By popular demand from the initial attendees, we are offering a continuation of our 17 May poetry session.

  In the 21 June session, we will continue to discuss free verse and its wide-ranging influence and appeal and also explore prose poems, from their beginnings with Charles Baudelaire up through contemporary prose poems. We will have a writing exercise--possibly two-- based on the poems that we discuss.
  

  Course Description:

  If you’re passionate about, and fascinated by, words—from their deep meanings to their unique sounds to their typography on the page—but you've been intimidated by poetry, this three-hour workshop is for you.

  We will look at a variety of poems, ranging in dates from a seventeenth-century sonnet by William Shakespeare to Diane Seuss’ un-rhymed sonnets published in 2021. We will also study free verse and its rich and long history, with examples including Emily Dickinson, Guillaume Apollinaire, John Keats, Sylvia Plath, and William Carlos Williams. We’ll discuss fundamental elements of poetry including structure, style and tone, voice, theme, sound and imagery.

  Finally, we will use some of the poems as departure points for two prompts to get you writing.

  Join us for a passionate and in-depth introduction to poetry—what it is and how it is—and share inspirations both on and off the page.

  
  

  About the Instructor: 

  

  Heather Hartley’s poetry collections include Adult Swim and Knock Knock, both published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. She was Paris Editor for Tin House magazine for over fifteen years.

  Her short fiction, poems, essays and interviews have appeared in or on PBS Newshour, The Guardian, The Literary Review and other venues. She teaches creative writing at the University of Kent’s (UK) Paris School of Arts and Culture and has also taught at the American University of Paris and the University of Texas El Paso MFA program.

  www.heatherhartleyink.com

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• LU271 Café Littéraire: Ballerina (La Danseuse), by Patrick Modiano

  • When
    27 Jun 2025
  •  
    3:30 PM - 5:00 PM
  • Location
    To be announced
  • Spaces left
    11

  

  From Amazon: Paris, 1960s. A young dancer and single mother, who might or might not be the narrator’s love interest, is revisited by menacing figures from her past, even as she tries to escape that past through her art. Set in the shimmering world of the Paris ballet, a world populated by giants such as Balanchine and Nureyev, Ballerina revisits the themes of memory, desire, and ineffable danger that have become hallmarks of Patrick Modiano’s fiction.
   
  Focusing on the dancer’s troubled relations with her young son, her enigmatic involvement with the narrator, her mysterious past entanglements, and the tension between the narrator’s past and present selves, Modiano’s novel is both a nostalgic evocation of the world gone by and a haunting exploration of time lost and regained.
   
  In deceptively weightless prose, deftly translated by Mark Polizzotti, Patrick Modiano interrogates the clash of current and vanished realities, the paradox of growing older, and the spectral persistence of love.
  

  
  

  Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered before 23 June, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

  
  

  The book group meets at the organizer's apartment. The directions, door code, telephone number, etc., are sent in the 7-day and 1-day reminder emails, following registration.

  Registration for the June meeting opens on 23 May 2025.
  

  
  

  
  

  
  

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