Lost & Found: A Weekend Writing Intensive with Minal Hajratwala

October 3-4, 10:00am – 2:00pm
KSW @ PariSoMa, 1436 Howard Street

NOW ACCEPTING SIGN-UPS. REGISTER HERE.

Spend a fun weekend playing the writer’s equivalent of “hide and seek”! At the heart of all writing is the desire to recover what has been lost: a magical talisman, our childhood innocence, the one great love, personal and communal histories.

On Day 1 we will write deep into the experience of being and getting “lost,” freewriting with a range of inspirations and prompts from Pablo Neruda to Tracy Chapman and more.

On Day 2, we’ll get “found”: We will play with found objects, invent memories, and discover unknown truths. As we write and share work in class, we’ll experience how writing can help us come to terms with what’s lost and find our right to own and tell our stories.

This two-day writing intensive is guaranteed to help you generate new work, break through blocks, and excavate new depths of emotion, power, and voice. All levels and genres of writing are welcome; we will work with exercises that you can use in your own ongoing project(s) or to create entirely new pieces.

About the instructor: Minal Hajratwala dug up the stories of her family from mythological time to the present in order to write her narrative nonfiction book, Leaving India: My Family’s Journey From Five Villages to Five Continents (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), which has been called “incomparable” by Alice Walker and “searingly honest” by the Washington Post. She is a writer, performer, poet, and queer activist based in San Francisco, where she was born before being whisked off to be raised in New Zealand and suburban Michigan. She spent seven years researching and writing the book, traveling the world to interview more than seventy-five members of her extended family. Her creative work has appeared in numerous journals, anthologies, and theater spaces, and has received recognition and support from the Sundance Institute, the Jon Sims Center for the Arts, the SerpentSource Foundation, and the Hedgebrook writing retreat for women, where she currently serves on the Alumnae Leadership Council. Her one-woman show, “Avatars: Gods for a New Millennium,” was commissioned by the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco for World AIDS Day in 1999. As a journalist, she worked at the San Jose Mercury News for eight years, was a board member of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association, and was a National Arts Journalism Program fellow at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in 2000-01. She is a graduate of Stanford University.

Back by popular demand – Sign up NOW!!

SHIFTING FOCUS: Changing Your Brain, Changing Your Poetic Practice
with Pireeni Sundaralingam

When: August 1 & 8, 10:00am – 1:00pm
Where: KSW @ PariSoMa, 1436 Howard Street

What: This workshop is split over two consecutive Saturdays and is dedicated to helping you develop a sustainable and effective practice as a poet. Incorporating ideas from neuroscience, the workshop’s aim is to challenge the way that we, as writers, engage with the world around us. In particular, the two-day workshop will explore how innovative metaphors can be used to shift our focus.

The workshop involves assignments, designed to enrich your out-of-class writing practice, that need to be completed between workshop sessions.

-    Space is LIMITED. Sign up NOW!!  –

How: Registration fee is $80. To register by check, please send check or money order to: Kearny Street Workshop, PO Box 14545, San Francisco, CA 94114-0545. Or pay online at www.kearnystreet.org. Please include your full name and contact info.

About the instructor: Educated at Oxford, Pireeni has held research posts at MIT and UCLA and is a former professor of cognitive development. She has held national fellowships both in cognitive science and in poetry. Dedicated to examining the confluence of science and art, in the past year alone Pireeni has enjoyed invitations to speak on the intersections between poetry and cognition at MOMA (New York), the Exploratorium (SF), and the Life in Space symposium at Studio Olafur Eliasson (Berlin). Pireeni was born in Sri Lanka, and raised both there and in England.

Pireeni Sundaralingam’s poetry has appeared in national newspapers and political journals such as The Guardian (UK) and The Progressive (USA), university teaching texts, anthologies, and literary journals such as World Literature Today and Ploughshares. Pireeni is a co-editor of the forthcoming collection Writing the Lines of Our Hands, the first anthology of South Asian American poetry. Pireeni’s recent poetry honors include receiving the Rosenthal Fellowship from PEN USA and being invited to give the keynote lecture at the University of Southern California’s annual English Studies conference.

Weekend Blogging Workshop: Sign Up Now

Weekend Blogging Workshop

July 18-19, 10:00am – 1:00pm
KSW @ PariSoMa, 1436 Howard Street

This weekend intensive blogging workshop will take you from beginner basics to blog bragging rights. Sign up for one day or both, and get into the blogosphere.

DAY ONE: Writing 101 with Claire Light 
Saturday, July 18, 11am – 1pm

This FREE two-hour class will help absolute beginners get off the ground. We will discuss what a blog is; what things (skills, technologies) you will need to start a blog; how to actually create your blog; and how to connect with the blogosphere so you’re not casting your pearls into the void.

Prerequisites: familiarity with email programs and web browers; moderate skill with Microsoft Word; possession of a laptop with wireless.

Cost: FREE
Minimum class size: 4

To register, please email ellen@kearnystreet.org with your full name and contact info.

DAY TWO: The Art of Blogging with Claire Light and Glenda Bautista
Sunday, July 19, 10am – 1pm

This three-hour paid class is designed around examining blogging as a writing form, or a written art form. We will discuss blogging as a form; what are its opportunities and limitations; what is commonly done within the blogging form and what are some interesting outliers; what technologies exist to facilitate blogging as a writing form. We will discuss “blog marketing” not as a commercial enterprise but as a method of connecting to a community that furthers the art of the blog. We will also do writing exercises in various blogging forms, on the internet. The result of this three-hour workshop will be a number of blog texts and a group project (for example: a blog carnival, or possibly even a group blog.)

Prerequisites: you must have a laptop with wireless for the session and have an established blog; this session may not be ideal for absolute beginners.

Cost: $50 per person
Minimum class size: 5

SIGN UP NOW HERE.

IWL Anthology “Flick of My Tongue” Released Online

Flick of My Tongue is a celebration of the process of writing. This anthology is bursting with the stories and voices of gifted writers who embrace the risk and thrill of sharing new work with you.

Eleven phenomenal emerging writers and two award-winning lead artists were invited to explore, to experiment, and to develop new work over a period of eight weeks. The Intergenerational/Interdisciplinary Writers Lab (IWL) is a series of workshops and a public reading produced by two longstanding San Francisco based multidisciplinary arts organizations, Intersection for the Arts and Kearny Street Workshop (KSW).

Read Flick of My Tongue here.

Thoughts on Life, Death & Comedy by Jon Yang

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been participating in KSW’s “Life, Death & Comedy” workshop, led by Samantha Chanse. Our public performance was last Tuesday and while it was certainly a nerve-racking experience, everyone pulled off their best showing and afterwards we all had the glow of accomplishment. I think for all budding artists, the chance to showcase your stuff is always appreciated, especially when it’s presented and worked on in a safe space.

Above: Sam Chanse gives a performance pep talk.

Sam was amazing at getting us comfortable from day one, which helped everyone open up to honest critique and a sense of teamwork. The end goal of the eight week workshop was to produce a piece that we would share with the world. While some of our initial efforts were directed toward highlighting the comedy in our work, we quickly learned that being funny has nothing to do with trying to make jokes, trying to keep things light, or trying to force a smile from the audience.

What we learned was that humor often bubbled up from inherently unfunny events, such as death, or depression, or losing romantic love. Life tends to bring out the absurd and the laughable in the least likely situations and that, when highlighted and told well, can be hilarious. So we wrote about life experiences rather than “think of something funny and write about that.”

We read a variety of pieces by people like Danny Hoch, Augusten Burroughs, Sarah Vowell, and Marga Gomez. We brought in things we individually found funny, via YouTube videos and other writings, for show-and-tell and then analysis. We touched on the philosophy of tragedy and comedy, tapping into Aristotle’s Poetics. One of my favorite in-class activities was creating captions for blank New Yorker cartoons, using different comedic attitudes and techniques.

For me, as a first time workshop participant, it was eye opening to see how much a piece could change from week to week through the revision process, and always for the better. That improvement was a testament to how much the entire class put into each other’s work, giving useful feedback and pointers. By the time our rehearsal came around, everyone was still tinkering with their piece but we turned our attention to reading in front of an audience.

Above: Chuck Lacson on stage.

“Don’t shift too much. Enunciate. Pause for breath (or clarity). Exude comfortableness. Hit your high points.” Performance always comes with some nerves so this was when our comfortableness with each other really paid off. We supported and reinforced one another with advice and evaluations all throughout rehearsals and even right before I read, I received empowering pep talks from Sam and Chuck — and then I bounded on stage and promptly forgot everything. But that could be fodder for a future story too.

The entire experience of working with the six members of my class, of being challenged to read in public, and of finding support from the community has been awesome. Thanks KSW!

Above: (from left) Jon Yang, Yasmine Gomez, Linda Park, Sam Chanse, Chuck Lacson, and Cathlin Goulding.

BIO
JON YANG has slummed it in the valley with the Wakefield twins; slumber partied with Huey, Dewey and Louie; joined Krakow in stalking Angela; and climbed every mountain with the Von Trapps. He’s just wrapped up his second book, “Exclusively Chloe,” a fiction novel for teens, and is hard at work on his third one. You can find him online at www.jonyang.org.

Read the paper? Life, Death & Comedy at KSW

The Examiner gives great advice for a night out…

Say, what’s that red circle circling?

Put it in your calendar to come out for the final performance of KSW’s Life, Death, & Comedy workshop, this coming Tuesday!

Angel Island Poetry Reading

KSW’s Postcard Poetry Project students read their work at Angel Island in celebration of Asian Pacific Heritage month. Here’s a video of workshop instructor Debbie Yee and P3 poets Cathlin Goulding, Khoi Nguyen, Lisa Leong, Thy Tran and Truc Nguyen reading on the grassy hill in front of the detention center barracks.

Part 1:

more about “Angel Island Poetry Reading 1 of 2“, posted with vodpod

Part 2:

Your ghost-blogger is one of the poets. Must say it was a beautiful day that began with a reading by Genny Lim. Local politicians read poems that had been carved into the walls of detention center, and then P3 read their work, so it was a balance of APA history and APA today.

Thank you, Bryan Wu for documenting!

Register for Comedy Workshop with Sam Chanse

Let’s take a poll. It’s Friday, why not?

If you answered A, B, C or D, consider taking The Comedy of Life, Death & Art this spring at KSW. During the course of this eight-week workshop, you’ll experiment with creative nonfiction essays, film, music, standup comedy, sketch comedy, and other genres, all toward finding your voice and revealing the existing comedy nuggets.

First session is May 5, so sign yourself up now here.

About the instructor: Samantha Chanse is a writer, performer, and organizer with a bunch of years experience working in community arts, as well as working as a theater writer and performer, including sketch and standup comedy. She’s written & performed a couple solo theater pieces, and has done some other stuff. She’s also a former KSW staff person and current KSW board member.