Lost and Found: A Weekend Writing Intensive with Minal Hajratwala

Lost and Found: A Weekend Writing Intensive
with Minal Hajratwala

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

PireeniSpend 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.

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 http://www.kearnystreet.org. Please include your full name and contact info.