T Kira Māhealani Madden is an APIA writer who taught as a Distinguished Writer in Residence at UH Mānoa in the spring of 2024, having also taught at Mount Holyoke College and Sarah Lawrence College. She is also the founding Editor in Chief of No Tokens, and has received fellowships from MacDowell, Hedgebrook, Tin House, DISQUIET, NYSCA/NYFA, and Yaddo. Join one of MĀNOA’s past interns, Anna Kalabukhova, for an interview at UH Mānoa’s stunning campus with T Kira on her debut memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, which was a Lambda Literary Award finalist, a NBCC John Leonard First Book Prize finalist, and was in the Best Books of 2019 Selections for Esquire O, The Oprah Magazine, Variety, Lit Hub, Book Riot, Electric Literature, and Autostraddle.
Anna Kalabukhova: What initially drew you to nonfiction, especially having your first major debut be a memoir?
T Kira Māhealani Madden: I actually studied fiction in school. I worked on novels, and I worked on stories. Nothing ever drew me to nonfiction—I never planned on writing it, I wasn’t interested. And then my dad died and I went to a residency to work on my novel, and I just couldn’t access a fictional world because the grief was so enormous; I had to process what was going on in that moment, right after he died. I ended up writing about my dad, thinking I needed to get it out, purge something, before I could access the imagination again. And by the time I left that residency, I had a lot of pages, one hundred–plus pages, and it was a matter of other people telling me, “I think this is a book, I think these aren’t just junk pages, maybe you should form this into a memoir.” And I’m like, “I’m not a memoirist, I don’t know anything. I want to be a novelist!” Now I get to publish my first novel after a memoir, which was never the plan, but in art, is anything ever our plan?
Kalabukhova: You mention writing about the past, especially involving your father, and so I was wondering: how do you access memory? Your narrative starts from early on in your childhood, and you just have such vivid imagery and descriptions that brings the reader right into it. Essentially, how do you stay true to your memory?
Madden: It’s a number of things—of course there are challenges. Memory changes and shifts and transforms every day of our lives, and every time we recall something [memory] continues to transform. I’ll start by saying I don’t think anyone has an ultimate, accurate, memory. […] We can only ever offer an approximation to the best of our ability and forge a trust with our readers. I am only offering my impressions of an experience and an emotional truth. If I’m building a scene—for some people, this really ruffles them—I’m fictionalizing to build the scene, and by fictionalizing I don’t mean making up a character or something that did not happen, but if you have to say “the chair squawked as I moved forward” to bring the reader into the scene, to bring them into the conversation, then that is not a lie. That is building a world around the reader so they can then immerse themselves into the dream using context clues. […] I can create the scene using what I learn from talking to other people, from looking at images of the time, listening to music of the time, reading the news, and looking at weather reports for certain days. I use all of that—I reference newspapers, or Nūpepa in Hawaiian work, and I look to pop culture. Some people work more in their own vacuum, but I’m really interested in talking to people and asking not only what they remember, but how. In the end, it’s more of a collaboration. My memory now isn’t as sharp as before, and for some people, memory around trauma tends to fade, disappear, reappear; though for me, the opposite was true—my memory in those years of really traumatic events… It’s potent. Thinking back to those years of youth and childhood—the recall is razor sharp in a way last month is not.
Kalabukhova: It’s interesting that you mention being in collaboration with people in your life to piece together memories, and I know you also obviously wrote about people in your life. How does the ethical part of writing come into play for that? For instance, did you use everyone’s names? Did you switch up names? Did you switch up locations? How do you maneuver around not exposing certain people?
Madden: Every writer has a different way of moving through these questions of ethics. It’s really important for all of us, individually, to decide what our code of ethics will be and to stay true to it. There’s no one grand unifying idea. I figured that out as I went. I was someone, again, who was really interested in having conversations. And in those conversations, I always gave everyone a look at what I was writing, and then I would take their feedback. And I never asked for permission (I did from my mom). But instead I just asked, “How does this read to you? Is this how you remember it? What do you think?” And they would come back with feedback. Often I would edit and change the piece until it felt like something they were comfortable with; that is something I needed to do for myself to sleep at night. Some people don’t care and it’s like, “Whatever happens, happens; it’s my experience.” I respect that too—I’m just too anxious of a person to do that. Almost every piece was collaborative with the person I was writing about, and I allowed the person to have a say in what they wanted their name to be—their pseudonym. Although, some people are deceased, or I had no way of contacting them—in that case their identity was changed to protect their privacy, which I think is really important. There can be a kind of intense, legal read for a book—especially works of nonfiction—that come out with a traditional publisher, where lawyers read the work, and they tell you what you need to change. A general rule of thumb (with exceptions and nuance) is that you would change three identifying qualities about a character if they haven’t signed off on the work. If they do approve it, you can keep their name the same, you can keep everything about them the same—they sign off, and it’s done. But if they don’t, then you would change three identifying qualities so that no reasonable person would be able to identify them from your text. You would give them a different colored hair, maybe their job is different, but it should of course stay true to who they are. Maybe they’re from South Dakota instead of another state, […] or you give them a tattoo they don’t have. But this becomes tricky, because then you have to make sure the edits are consistent with who they are as a person. If they’re not someone with a tattoo, would giving them a tattoo change their essence? And that becomes its own interesting revision challenge. Quite simply: it doesn’t matter what I think. It’s legally what one often has to do.
Kalabukhova: That’s a very enlightening insight for writing about other real people, and I definitely did not know about the changing three identifying qualities rule! I want to change gears from talking about people to talking about place since that’s another prominent element in your book. At Mānoa Journal for the volumes we publish and the pieces we curate, there is a general theme of place—a person’s connection to place, or a diaspora, or a group of people and how they’re connected to the land or ʻāina, or anything in that sense. In your memoir you hop around between places—a big part of it takes place in Boca Raton, where you grew up, until moving into New York City for your college years, and then finishing with Hawaiʻi, especially from your mother’s perspective. Could you elaborate—at least, from your perspective—how you think place functions in your memoir?
Madden: It’s very much a place-based book. Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, in many ways, is a book about Florida. And I think Florida’s a fascinating place because, first of all, people loathe Florida. It’s often a punchline. It’s almost always reduced to an unimaginative stereotype. The punchlines about politicians don’t offer much grace or room for people who are doing really good, impactful work there (or any place in which people are disenfranchised, or any place marginalized people are at risk). Florida is beautifully diverse, a place for brown people, for immigrant communities—and it’s a place that is currently dangerous for our trans youth and LGBTQ folks just living their lives. There are extraordinarily high stakes in these places we’re so quick to dismiss. I’m guilty of doing the same—when I left Florida, I also made it a punchline because I didn’t want to be a punchline. As a biracial lesbian, you get good at getting to the joke first. It took writing Long Live and publishing it to realize how much I want to honor this place, for all its complications. My highest respect to people who are still there, friends and family who are educators in Florida, going to battle everyday to get banned books in people’s hands. This is noble work. I hope my work is a love letter to Florida. Hawaiʻi and New York are present in the book but I wouldn’t say it’s a book about those places. That isn’t to say those places aren’t central to my life—they are. It’s a story of place and it’s also a book about displacement, which I’m not sure completely comes through, especially for a reader who might not be as familiar with the displacement of the people of these islands. But I think towards the end it becomes the story it wants to be.
Kalabukhova: I know towards the end of your book, you have a whole section titled “Kuleana.” And I know you talked about your kuleana to your ʻohana, to honor their story and honor your bloodline in a sense. I was just wondering—if, or how, your relationship to your kuleana, or your view towards it, or what it means to you now has shifted, since writing your memoir?
Madden: I wrote that memoir, hmm, I was twenty-seven, I’m almost thirty-six now. A book takes a long time to write and to come out. Even though I spent so much time here growing up, I was—I still am, in many ways—malahini, or still somewhat a stranger to this place. And though I don’t believe in blood quantum hierarchies, I’m only now at a place where I feel Hawaiian enough—though I know many people struggle with that, and I certainly have my whole life. I will always have so much to learn and there is humility in every experience. When I wrote this book, I still had very little grasp of ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi. Now maybe I’ve got four percent (still a mere sliver) whereas then I had one. I was very new to the nuances and poetics of this language. Back then kuleana, to me, was more about people. More about belonging to my ‘ohana and to the lāhui of kānaka and of any kamaʻāina shepherds of this land. And I would say now, years later, spending more time here and more time evolving my mana’o, my kuleana is to the ʻāina, the land, here. As someone who grew up with a very colonized mind off-island, I didn’t see that as my responsibility as much as I do now. […] I’m not an environmentalist, I’m not perfect, but certainly, spending every Saturday at least trying to volunteer, whether it’s with Loʻi or fishponds or cleaning up trash—that’s my kuleana, and I look forward to tracing that shift in my art.
Kalabukhova: I know you mentioned that you have a novel in the works. Would you mind sharing anything you can about that?
Madden: It should come out in either late 2025 or 2026. It’s a big novel, and it’s currently called Whidbey, as in Whidbey Island. At the center of the story there is a murder of a child sex abuser, and it’s told through the perspectives of three women in his life: one is his mother, another is a Chinese American adult survivor of his abuse, and the third is a white survivor who ended up on a reality dating show, and subsequently wrote a tell-all memoir about it. These three women have survived in very different ways. But I think the boogeyman of the book, to me, is the violent systems of media and the commodification of suffering, and how people make money and capitalize on the pain of others. It’s kind of a thriller, a whodunit, but also I think—I hope—a scathing critique of what we consume. It feels not at all like the life I’ve lived. It’s certainly fiction and I’m not represented in the book, but these are my own curiosities and questions in a way, a continuation of the memoir.
Kalabukhova: What advice do you have for young writers who are looking to get their works out there or be a part of the writing community?
Madden: Be in community… And I mean that in myriad ways. I think we are in community when we are remembering and reading the works of those who came before us, whether they’re alive or not. I think that our kuleana is to always look to our ancestors and those who have created the foundation for us to be able to make stories. Also support a present community, whether that’s the writing club you’re in, or the class you’re in, or showing up to readings. In a time in which art and free speech is threatened—certainly right now—we must support creators as much as possible. Support your local indie bookstore if you can, your local library. Major corporations are stripping away the power of independent artists and vendors. Literary journals are dying, as many know. Even funded journals are disappearing. […] Also reading these journals will prepare you to submit to them. If you want to be in a journal—I really believe this—you should love reading it. And that might sound really obvious, but I’ve been the editor of the literary journal for over ten years, and I can’t tell you how many people come to our booth at AWP and they want to submit to our journal, No Tokens, but don’t want to read it or buy it. Some people want to see their name printed without caring about the greater question: “Why do I belong here?” Reading literary journals, reading books, participating in any storytelling traditions before demanding a place in it is our responsibility. How would you want someone to engage with your work? Hopefully you’d want them to engage, period. We should do the same—we should be engaging not only with the writers but the editorial vision and process. It’s a dialogue: writing should be a dialogue, if that’s your mission. One can certainly write for therapeutic purposes, catharsis, for the self, for processing. That’s noble as well. But if you’re interested in publishing, and your question was about getting your work out there, then I would hope you would want a dialogue, and therefore contribute to a conversation, and is the most important part of a conversation not listening?
Anna Kalabukhova is a first year English master’s student in the creative writing program, having graduated with her bachelors in spring 2024 from UH Mānoa. She worked with Mānoa Journal for a semester as an Abernethy Fellow in her undergraduate time.
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