LitPDX seeks to amplify marginalized voices, and welcomes all, their ideas, their events, and their words.
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Word by Word: A Generative Webinar with T Kira Madden
April 24, 2021 @ 1:00 pm - 3:00 pm
$100WHAT: A 2-hour online webinar.
WITH: T Kira Madden
WHEN: Saturday, April 24, 2021 from 1PM to 3PM PST
WHERE: ZOOM (But of course.) Meeting ID will be provided ahead of time. This event will be recorded and registrants unable to make it to the session or who wish to revisit it will have access to the video for 48 hours afterwards.
HOW MUCH: $100. Payment plans are always available, contact Daniel Elder at registration@corporealwriting.com
SCHOLARSHIPS: Ten scholarships are available, prioritized for parents with children at home. Click here to apply.
Word by Word with T Kira Madden
Why do some stories require 30+ pages to reach a payoff, while others feel fully satisfying in a single paragraph or line? The answer, often, is in the details. In our time together, we will engage in close readings of micro/flash pieces of all genres in order to unpack sentence structure, sonics, and the metaphorical properties within a piece.
When a full narrative arc isn’t possible, one must build a set-up and payoff. I’m interested in how a full swoop of narrative power is achieved in the whispers between the opening and closing notes, how recursion and rhyming action might engine a piece into feeling. We’ll consider the sprawl of life—with its many characters, events, timelines, memories—distilling and shaping our pieces until they create spark, friction, and meaning. This generative session will focus on isolation and compression, word choices, and on finding the narrative heat and emotional potency in our memories, our selves, and all the selves we’ve been. Be prepared to experiment and reimagine; I will encourage you to try on a new tense, a new point of view, a new structure, just to see how it feels. The scaffolding behind short published work (sent in advance) will serve as blueprints for our discussion and in class writing exercises.
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, MacDowell, 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, and others, and she is the author of the 2019 New York Times Editors’ Choice memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the LAMBDA Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir. She currently teaches in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College.