Upcoming Kundiman Events:
The Hook with T Kira Madden
open to Fiction & Nonfiction writers
June 15th to July 20th
Mondays, 6:00 PM–8:30 PM ET
"‘It must be so healing to write memoir’ is something I hear no fewer than a few times a day. ‘It must be so therapeutic, so cathartic.’ These are the most popular words. The people who use these words mean well (for the most part). The people who say these words to me are saying them because I wrote a memoir about being a child—and now, an adult—one the other side of the glass. I have written into the memories and the smells of all the locked bathroom doors, the scorched foils; I have written about my father trying to drink gasoline as he came down from a bender, and my mother’s overdose on opiates, her subsequent coma. I have written about the blood of that. […] But none of that. No sentence, no chapter, no list or description of any of it, ‘throttled’ me. None of it collapsed the years. Brought on a prickle of the scalp.”
–– T Kira Madden, Lit Hub: “Against Catharsis: Writing is Not Therapy”
Every great work of writing provides a satisfying setup and payoff, and this class will take a closer look at how that might be accomplished. In our time together, we will engage in close readings of opening sentences, paragraphs, and chapters, identifying the “hooks” that might engage and propel a reader forward. We’ll workshop short pieces and openings, focusing on distillation, compression, and line-level precision. We’ll examine the sonics and metaphorical properties of a single sentence or image in order to magnify a story or essay’s engine.
There will be assigned readings every week in addition to workshop pieces for review. All students will workshop one piece (though this is always optional; workshopping isn’t helpful for every writer) over the course of the class, at a max of 12 pages. Generative in-class exercises and optional homework prompts will be offered in every class. While the homework won’t be workshopped or turned in (unless students choose to use it as their workshop submission), there will always be time for reading aloud for first impression group feedback.
This workshop is open to all writers who are BIPOC, and all students must be able to attend all six sessions of the workshop. The non-refundable tuition fee is $350. This workshop will be limited to 12 participants and will be held over Zoom. There is one scholarship spot available: if interested in a scholarship, please apply by June 1st.
This Class is now full
The waitlist for this class is also now full, and we are no longer accepting applications.
FACULTY:
Photo Credit: Annabel Graham.
T Kira Mahealani Madden is a writer, photographer, and amateur magician. A recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Hedgebrook, Tin House, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo, she serves as the founding Editor-in-chief of No Tokens, a magazine of literature and art. Her fiction and nonfiction has been featured in Harper’s, New York Magazine, McSweeney’s, and others, and she is the author of the 2019 New York Times Editors’ Choice memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, which is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the LAMBDA Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, and forthcoming as a feature film.