Upcoming Kundiman Events:
Found Forms for Fiction:
The Litany and How To
with Kristiana Kahakauwila
Thursday, August 5th
6:00 PM–9:00 PM ET
“In teaching, I ask my students to focus a lot on revision […] I can’t help but line-edit their work, even their first drafts. But in these line-edits, these requests for sharper word choice or more concision, is also a request for better logic, more original thinking. So I think that asking for poetry in prose—and teaching it beside prose—is a sure way to improve fiction.”
–– Kristiana Kahakauwila, Fiction Writers Review: “Novels Masquerading as Stories: An Interview with Kristiana Kahakauwila”
Formal constraints often fuel poets and nonfiction writers but can be tools too easily left out of the fiction writer’s repertoire. In fact, found forms can help a fiction writer focus, energize, and give shape to their writing—as well as inspire new work.
This one-day class will center on two found forms: the litany and the how-to. In poetry, litany is any form that catalogues a series. The word’s roots, however, lie in prayer and supplication, particularly those offered in times of great thanksgiving or public danger. Our course will open by studying several examples of the litany story—fictions that not only catalogue but also engage with gratitude and/or fear. Then we’ll look to the how-to, that old standard of practical advice and procedures. Here again we will study published examples, fiction that remakes the how-to into a narrative with humor, irony, and tension gleaned from the friction between a form that implies knowing with subject matter often centered on uncertainty and not-knowing. Throughout the three hours we will brainstorm, draft, experiment, and aim to produce two entirely different story starts. We’ll also consider the histories of these forms and how they might unlock ways of writing material we’ve found difficult to put into words.
This class will be recorded and sent out to all registered participants the following week.
eligibility:
This craft class is open to all writers of color. The non-refundable tuition fee is $50. This class will be held over Zoom. There are scholarship spots available, and applications are open through Sunday, August 1st.
Registration for this class is now closed.
FACULTY:
Kristiana Kahakauwila is a hapa writer of kanaka maoli (Native Hawaiian), German and Norwegian descent. Her first book, This is Paradise: Stories (Hogarth 2013), takes as its heart the people and landscapes of contemporary Hawai‘i and was named a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. Recent essays and stories have appeared in Kartika Review, Hunger Mountain, and Red Ink, among others. Kristiana earned a BA in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan. She was a 2015-16 Fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study and is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. She also teaches in the Low-Residency MFA at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe.