SEPT 17– OCT 22

WAITING FOR YOUR WORDS
a 6-week poetry workshop with maiana minahal

Wednesdays, 6 – 9PM
September 17– October 22

Final reading on October 29

Class size: minimum of 8, maximum of 12. Location: Chinatown Culture Center Gallery, 750 Kearny Street, 3rd Floor.

Cost: $135 non-members, $115 for KSW members. To register, please send a check for the full amount to: Kearny Street Workshop, 934 Brannan Street, San Francisco, CA 94103. Please include your name, contact information (phone number and email address if possible), and which class you are registering for. For questions, please contact program manager Samantha Chanse at 415.503.0520 or info@kearnystreet.org.

Workshop Description:
In this workshop, we will read and discuss a wide variety of poetry, with an emphasis on the work of contemporary poets of color. We'll talk about the importance of language, focus on the poet's purpose, look at craft and poetic devices, discuss rhythm and music ... and we will do homework! During the course of the sessions, you will write poems and receive/give feedback on each other's work.

Hopefully this workshop will increase your enjoyment of poetry!

This workshop will be challenging, but accessible and engaging. I will expect a lot out of you, and you will get a lot out of it. I hope these sessions are fun and inspiring, and I expect that you'll learn more about poetry and poetic devices, and write at least one poem.

About the Instructor:
Maiana Minahal has been writing, performing and teaching throughout the Bay Area since 1994. She taught poetry workshops at UC Berkeley with June Jordan's poetry collective, Poetry for the People, and at San Francisco community organizations with the WritersCorps program. Some of the workshops she has taught include Dublin Women's Prison, Glide Memorial Church, Center for Young Women's Development, Career Resources Development Center, API Wellness Center's AQUA program, Hospitality House Youth Shelter, Berkeley High School, Oakland Asian Cultural Center, Asian Health Services, and We Interrupt This Message. Maiana just completed a poetry workshop in Oakland and at San Francisco's Bindlestiff Studio. An active performer and poet, her first book of poetry is forthcoming this year from Monkey Press.

for more information on maiana, please visit: http://maianaminahal.tripod.com

OCTOBER 3– 5

Remembering You: A Memoir Writing Intensive
with Linda Watanabe McFerrin

Friday, October 3; 7 - 9 PM
Saturday, October 4, 10 AM - 4 PM
Sunday, October 5, 10 AM - 4 PM

Seminar size: minimum of 8, maximum of 14. Location: SomArts Cultural Center, 934 Brannan Street, SF.

Cost: $165 non-members, $150 for KSW members. To register, please send a check for the full amount to: Kearny Street Workshop, 934 Brannan Street, San Francisco, CA 94103. Please include your name, contact information (phone number and email address if possible), and which class you are registering for. For questions, please contact program manager Samantha Chanse at 415.503.0520 or info@kearnystreet.org.

Seminar Description:
Our earliest experiences shape our lives and their expression AND they are the essence of marvelous literature.

In this weekend intensive we will explore the experiences of childhood and early adolescence as reflected in memoir and its fictional extensions. Through in-class exercises and evening assignments, participants will capture and come to understand their personal visions of childhood and how they manifest in the present.

You will learn to use journal and workbook as a way to creatively and constructively explore the past, and you'll begin to shape the story or stories that experience dictates. You'll have an opportunity to work on settings, characters, scenes and dialogue. Once you get started, you'll find it is difficult to stop.

Selected readings will include passages from: The House on Mango Street - Sandra Cisneros, The Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison, When the Elephants Dance, Tess Uriza Holthe, Other Voices, Other Rooms - Truman Capote, and more.

About the Instructor:
Poet, travel writer, novelist and teacher Linda Watanabe McFerrin, M.A., has been traveling since she was two and writing about it since she was six. She is a contributor to numerous journals, newspapers, magazines, anthologies and online publications including the San Francisco Examiner, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, Modern Bride, Travelers' Tales, Salon.com, and Women.com. Linda is the author of two poetry collections and the editor of the 4th edition of Best Places Northern California..

A winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction, her work has also appeared in Wild Places and American Fiction. Her novel, Namako: Sea Cucumber was published by Coffee House Press and named Best Book for the Teen-Age by the New York Public Library. Her collection of award-winning short stories, The Hand of Buddha, was published in 2000.

A popular teacher and lecturer, Linda has served as a judge for the San Francisco Literary Awards, the Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence and the Kirayama Prize. She is also a contributor and publishing partner in the recently released Wild Writing Women: Stories of World Travel.

OCT 13– DEC 8

FICTION WRITING: SPECULATIVE AND CROSS-GENRE
A fiction writing workshop with Claire Light

Mondays, 7 – 9PM
October 27– December 15

Class size: minimum of 8, maximum of 12. Location: SomArts Cultural Center, 934 Brannan Street, between 8th and 9th streets, SF.

Cost: $135 non-members, $115 for KSW members. To register, please send a check for the full amount to: Kearny Street Workshop, 934 Brannan Street, San Francisco, CA 94103. Please include your name, contact information (phone number and email address if possible), and which class you are registering for. For questions, please contact program manager Samantha Chanse at 415.503.0520 or info@kearnystreet.org.

Course Description:
In the United States in the past fifty years, "literary fiction" has become synonymous with fictional realism, and elements of the fabulous or speculative have been relegated to "genre fiction". Yet the origins of both poetry and fiction lie in lyric and epic, forms full of images of gods, fantastical creatures, impossible events. More recently, the European novel and short story forms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries cut their teeth on gothic, fantastic, and adventure stories. Yet, in our century, fiction has become less about telling stories that symbolize human struggles, and more about retelling and interpreting existing stories.

In this context, Asian American writers and marginalized writers concern ourselves primarily with the survival of our community stories Æ with expanding literary realism to include us. Yet the development of an Asian American voice, of a community voice, also requires us to develop a vocabulary of our own fairy tales, symbols, and wonders of the imagination. Sometimes, it is easier to get at our reality Æ to make it fresh and vivid and resonant Æ through unreality or fantasy. Sometimes, rather than asking "Why?" we need to ask "What if?"

This course seeks to acquaint Æ or reacquaint Æ readers and writers of our community and beyond with the ideas, traditions and tools of speculative fiction: magic realism, fantasy, science fiction, and horror. At the same time, the course will introduce beginners Æ and refresh more advanced writers Æ to basic craft elements of fiction writing. The inquiry of our writing throughout these eight weeks will be: "What if ...?" And to answer that, anything goes.

Students will read and discuss short stories and novel excerpts from marginalized and mainstream writers using speculative elements, as well as analytical texts. Students will write in-class exercises and one take-home assignment per week. And at the end of the course each student will turn in the first draft of a longer writing project for the class to workshop.

About the Instructor:
Claire Light recently stepped down as Kearny Street Workshop's program manager to pursue her Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing (fiction) at San Francisco State University. She received her Bachelor's degree in creative writing from the University of Arizona in 1992 and subsequently studied contemporary history and cultural studies at Humboldt University of Berlin. She is also a graduate of the Clarion West Writer's Workshop, an intensive workshop/retreat for writers of speculative fiction. She is a co-founder and the literary editor of HYPHEN Magazine and has had her stories and articles published in various online and print zines and magazines, as well as in the chapbooks TOO MIXED UP and WRITINGS FROM THE LONG TABLE II.

OCT 29

Poetry Reading with Maiana Minahal's Poetry Workshop
Wednesday, October 29th
6.30 pm– 8.30pm

featuring maiana minahal and members of the KSW poetry
writing workshop.

Where:
The Chinese Culture Center
750 Kearny Street, between Clay and Washington
3rd Floor of Holiday Inn Building
San Francisco

Free and open to the public

Donations always accepted!