In Process with: T Kira Māhealani Madden
"It is difficult to keep up with the person you become in all the years it takes to write a book."
Today’s In Process With… brings us to the desk of the writer and teacher T Kira Māhealani Madden. Her 2019 memoir, Long Live The Tribe Of Fatherless Girls, about family and Florida and the rocketships of friendship and grief, about floating above and trying to find grounding, was a New York Times Editors' Choice selection, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and a finalist for the LAMBDA Literary Award for lesbian memoir. Winner of the 2021 Judith A. Markowitz Award, she teaches at Mount Holyoke College, and today writes to us from Hawai’i, where she is currently serving as the 2024 Distinguished Writer in Residence at University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Her debut novel, Whidbey, is forthcoming with Mariner, HarperCollins.
You can find T Kira with impressive infrequency on Instagram @tkiramadden where she often posts about her process in writing and cooking (you have been warned; you will get hungry) and which frequently honors her teaching work, her roots, her animals (mini poodles! full size donkeys!) and her friends regularly.
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve sent T Kira’s essay, Against Catharsis, on the role of imagination and processing personal narratives, on the necessary space between writer and (good) storytelling, to other writers. Before we were friends—and through the wildest stroke of luck, neighbors for a glorious year; she and her wife and their little poodles literally lived around the corner from me—I read her essays, submitted to No Tokens, the amazing literary journal she founded, and admired her work across the too great expanse of the internet.
In my Twitter days, I described reading T Kira’s work as “being handed someone’s bloody and beautiful heart.” Precious and alive and vital and intimate in the way that someone trusts you to hear an important story, not dumps all their shit on you, you know? What I’ve always loved about T Kira’s work is that it doesn’t ask for a solve, not from its reader, or its narrators, that it lets what is sticky and hard about being a human in the world in relationship—with people and places and inheritances—exist in visceral tenderness, that it asks us to love fiercely despite, and because of, how being alive is sticky and hard and also very beautiful.
I’m going to brag here and say I've read an early draft of Whidbey and this novel is already all of the above, and so suspenseful, and that I can guarantee you will be hooked on the ride of it all. And too, that you’ll be left thinking about the consequences of actions and their ripple effects, the spider webs of loving and being loved.
Reading T Kira’s answers to the questions here about growing with (being pushed out out of, perhaps?) one’s project felt at times like the call was coming from inside the house. Her fears and growing pains are something I share, and I think a lot of you working on long projects will as well. It also made me deeply excited for where she puts her writerly attention after she reaches the finish line on Whidbey, the process of which she unpacks for us in the next section of the newsletter with her characteristic thoughtfulness and expansiveness.
-Danielle
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