T Kira Madden Casts a Spell
11 min readDecades before typewriters became a hipster trend, T Kira Madden learned how to type on her great-grandmother’s IBM Selectric. Writing letters and stories at her family’s dining room table in South Florida, she found comfort in the thundering momentum of the keys, and though she eventually switched to using electric machines due to carpal tunnel syndrome, this energy—and the lack of internet distractions—remains essential to her drafting process. “I can’t make corrections or go backwards on a typewriter,” the award-winning memoirist and novelist, now 37, tells me over Zoom. “I just move forward.”
Process is everything to Madden, who is now based in Central New York. She writes the entire first draft of each of her books on a new typewriter, one that aligns with the book’s “vibe”—working in the dark, heat blasting to the point of sweating—and doesn’t stop for the day until she’s arrived at “three surprises.” When the draft is finished, she takes her time transcribing the manuscript to a computer, allowing sentences, passages, and even scenes to fall away if they don’t feel urgent enough. She uses color-coded sticky notes for different characters and timelines, and she reads her work aloud often. It’s fastidious, but Madden feels “far too superstitious” to change a discipline that resulted in both her acclaimed 2019 debut memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, and her highly anticipated first novel, Whidbey, out March 10.
Madden has “north star” texts for each of her characters, which she uses to help her connect with voice and theme. To get her into the spirit of Whidbey’s feisty, disenfranchised, grieving mother Mary Beth Boyer, Madden would, for instance, read Joy Williams before writing Mary Beth’s sections of the book. Another ritual is decorating her desk with objects designed to bring her into the world of the book she’s writing. For Long Live, a coming-of-age story about identity, desire, trauma, and forgiveness set in the 1990s and 2000s, those items included a baby blue Smith Corona typewriter, multiple lava lamps, glossy magazines, slinkies, Tamagotchis, and Gak slime. She wrote Whidbey—which follows three women connected through their experience with a child sexual abuser in the aftermath of his murder—on a blocky bright red IBM Selectric II, alongside a “spooky” stained glass lamp, driftwood from the real Whidbey Island, models of banana slugs, and a picture of Monica Lewinsky.
“So much of life is out of our control and messy, and writing is a place where I get to step into this ritual,” Madden says. “At its best, it’s like you’re casting a spell. Like you’re stating your intentions.”
She’s “completely obsessive” with her work, building characters and arranging sentences until the world makes complete sense to her. Ultimately, Madden leaves hundreds of thousands of pages of character background (personality types, star charts, favorite TV shows, childhood lunch preferences, how they have sex, how long they sit on the toilet) on the cutting room floor. Every word and punctuation mark is intentional. She takes so much time with this process that, by the end, she’s memorized every line of whatever new project she’s working on. At public readings and events, she reads from a sheet of paper, but she swears she doesn’t have to; she knows every word by heart.
In Whidbey, Madden shares this desire for control with her characters. The book opens with the first scene she wrote of this narrative, which began as a short story in 2017. It’s also the only part of the book that pulls autobiographical details directly from Madden’s own life. That year, while attending the Hedgebrook Writer-in-Residence program on Whidbey Island outside of Seattle, Madden had to interrupt her residency to travel to South Florida so she could establish a restraining order against the man who sexually assaulted her when she was 12. The court schedule required her to take the ferry to the Washington mainland, then a plane to South Florida, and then do it all in reverse, multiple times, before the matter was resolved. She describes the journeying as “both metaphorically and literally moving between these two shores of the place that I grew up, that I have tried desperately to leave, and this place that was supposed to be an oasis where I could forget myself.”
For more than a decade, Madden hadn’t told anyone except a best friend about the childhood abuse, yet when a stranger on one of those ferry rides asked why she looked sad, she shared everything. In a moment that can only be described as Hitchcock-ian, he asked—perhaps lightheartedly, she adds—if she wanted him to kill her abuser. She ended the conversation and, in the immediate aftermath, considered it a bizarre interaction, even a funny one. But as time went on, she “became obsessed with not only what it would have felt like to say ‘yes,’ to give the name of this person and indulge in this fantasy of revenge, but also with what made me step out of character so much that I would tell a stranger these things I hadn’t told my own family.”
This is the literal and emotional place in which we meet another of Whidbey’s three main characters, Birdie Chang: desperate for agency over her own life and an escape from years of trauma; saying “yes” to that stranger; and seeking solace on Whidbey Island. According to Madden, some readers have questioned the authenticity of Birdie so readily sharing her story. Writing Whidbey, Madden found her answer to why Birdie opened up and why she must have, too: “I think it comes down to this essential need to have your suffering seen or acknowledged. The people who love you only regard you a certain way, or they want you to move on. And for me, in that moment, I was able to tell someone new of my suffering, to get to see them react to that, to hold that.”
Before she considered writing a novel—one that would ultimately turn into Whidbey—Madden wrote another short story from the perspective of a child sexual abuser’s mother, who was waiting for her son to be released from prison. By 2020, that woman became Whidbey protagonist Mary Beth. Her son became Calvin. Combining those two stories helped Madden to recognize that she had a novel on her hands. “The doors kept swinging open instead of closing,” she says. “I love when you have really tapped something where, no matter what you’re doing, cooking or chores, you hear the voice.”
Madden added one more main character, Linzie King, who was also abused by Calvin, but who seeks validity for her pain in a very different manner from Birdie. She writes a memoir called My Turn, the majority of which Madden herself drafted as background, in order to better understand Linzie.
To best convey the women’s distinct perspectives, Madden alternates narrating Whidbey from all three points of view, plus a Beckett-esque, gossipy omniscient narrator in the final section. She intermixes different types of informational texts, such as excerpts from Linzie’s memoir, letters from Calvin, and an intake form from the halfway house where Calvin lives. In addition to these approaches to perspective and structure—her knowledge of which was nurtured by her mentor and former MFA thesis advisor, novelist Suzanne Hoover, to whom Whidbey is dedicated—it was important to Madden to include details about the criminal justice system that seemed too “unbelievable” to be real. For example, as the novel depicts, there was a time when sex offenders were sent to live in a colony under a bridge in Miami after their prison sentences. And, like Birdie, Madden experienced that a survivor of sexual abuse needed to prove an explicit threat in order to receive attention from a probation officer.
This connects to a further ambition Madden had for the book: to challenge readers to ask questions of their own, perhaps about the systems in place for both survivors and offenders, their judgment of the characters, or the media’s role in perpetuating exploitation and suffering. Although she doesn’t want the book to feel prescriptive, questions she tried to cultivate with these multiple perspectives, texts, and facts include, “What’s actually in place to so-called ‘protect children,’ which everybody says they want to do?” she says. “Does a person have to be likeable or remember accurately to be believed? What realms of formality make something more ‘of the record’ or believable? Did I judge that person too soon?”
Readers might expect that, based on Madden’s own experience within the criminal justice system, she might refuse to extend any empathy to perpetrators or their families in the “survivors versus abusers” dichotomy. She’d be well within her rights. But, she says, “as a survivor, as a Jane Doe, and also as someone who has worked within re-entry, rehabilitation, and correctional facilities, I’ve sat on both sides of the table.” On the other hand, she understands how often the criminal justice system fails all parties involved. “As someone who has stood federal trial, there were not structures in place for me for safety outside of that system,” she says. “I had nowhere else to look. In the same way, these characters have nowhere to look but desperation and revenge.” This ability to see humanity everywhere may explain her approach to the very concept of an “unlikeable character.”
She continues, “I wanted to challenge what it takes for someone to be believed and cared for, regardless of how dishonest, ruthless, violent, unlikable, bitter, or jealous they are. I hope we would do that for our fellow person, fictional or not, in the world.” Her fear is that readers won’t want to spend time with these characters; her hope is that they will recognize the intentionality behind their unlikability, understand that many of their desires—including for revenge—come from desperation, and acknowledge that they’re still worthy of our attempts to see their humanity. This is one spell Madden is casting.
Another is the way she complicates the true-crime formula that the vast majority of Americans consume, wherein the climax of the story is violence and the ending fails to consider the long-term impact on the people involved. Instead, Madden tells a story that begins immediately following a violent crime, and in which readers stick around to witness the pain felt in the aftermath. To true-crime enthusiasts who’ve said her book is difficult to stomach, she replies, “I think the reverse is too dark—to not actually look at the humanity of the families and people who are impacted by these crimes and instead to consume it through comedy or a Dateline special when these are real people.” (If you haven’t put it together yet, that’s why a picture of Monica Lewinsky sits on Madden’s desk.)
Having faced major loss myself in the past year, I ask Madden how it’s possible to live alongside grief. She tells me she doesn’t have a great answer, but she does have an offering: “All of us are living with suffering and pain every day, and we should give ourselves more credit for that,” she says. “We have lost beloved people, animals, land. We’ve lost things. We’ve survived things. We’ve watched the news every day, and are witness to horrific violence around the world. We all do just simply move forward, living side by side with suffering, and then we focus our attention on how are other people healing? But we are doing it.”
It’s that forward momentum—the ability to look to the next day or the next step—that Whidbey’s Birdie, Linzie, and Mary Beth can’t yet engage with. They can only live in the past or the present. They can only worry about survival in the here and now. Making this difficult choice “felt true to those characters and their trauma,” but Madden hopes they can arrive at the future in time.
Given the dark subject matter of both Whidbey and Long Live, people tend to assume that Madden’s personality is equally dark. This is one of the biggest misunderstandings about her, she says: “I’m actually a very joyful, optimistic person.”
She cooks obsessively. She reads cookbooks nightly, “like they’re novels,” immersing herself in other cultures, places, and flavors—but she won’t use the exact recipes, or anyone else’s recipes, in her dishes. Her indigenous identity as Kanaka ’Oiwi of Hawaii has inspired her to take classes in her native language over the past decade, and many of her pastimes, including cooking, storytelling, land restoration work, and lei-making, are “in service of perpetuating our indigenous practices.”
She and her spouse, poet and editor Hannah Beresford, have two dogs, two horses, and two donkeys, and Madden feels “lucky to be able to take care of these animals.” She loves going to the movies and watching television, especially reality TV. She’s fascinated by hero and villain narratives, which is reflected in Whidbey, and is particularly intrigued by reality TV’s harnessing of these archetypes—including, she recently learned from her students, on ESPN.
Madden’s approach to her work is often not as serious as readers might think, either. “Even the hardest scenes, the hardest stories that I’ve written in fiction and nonfiction, it’s all play,” she says. “Writing is not something I can do quickly, so I have to change it up every day and find different ways of feeding my obsession for the long haul that it takes to write a book.”
This can be at her beloved desk or beyond—even while she’s teaching. Currently an assistant professor in creative writing and Indigenous literatures at Hamilton College, Madden began teaching 16 years ago, while in graduate school for creative writing. As an exercise for her writing students, she once asked a group to walk through grocery store aisles and create lists of what their characters would buy, down to the brand. “That kind of work you can do to get to know your characters is really fun, and it makes the work more alive,” she explains. “Writing doesn’t have to be every day you sit down, you hit this many words. For me, the work is more about being able to touch that moment again in a tangible, sensory way, rather than just conceptualizing it or writing through intellect or ideology.” She distinctly remembers writing Mary Beth’s grocery list during this exercise and realizing that, since Mary Beth has experienced poverty for much of her life, her shopping would be impacted by her bad teeth.
Another assignment Madden gives her students is to practice daily observations, not only noting what they hear, see, and feel that’s striking, but also to come up with a question related to each observation. If they notice a bird singing, they also might wonder: What kind of bird was it? Who was it singing to? What was it trying to communicate? Alongside this, students present on topics that aren’t related to literature, yet have taught them something about the literary techniques they’re learning. The aforementioned ESPN, tent and shade structures, and krummholz trees—how the wind shapes their growth—are a few recent presentation topics.
For Madden, these urgent, connective exercises demonstrate to her students—and to herself—that “narrative is alive in everything. It’s in the things that I see and know and the things that I don’t know anything about.” Whether she’s working on a book or not, “these are all new ways for me to access loving and being in awe of the world, recognizing that things around us can feed our storytelling at all times.”
This orientation toward the world, full of curiosity, intentionality, and attunement, offers Madden that much-needed sense of control. “It’s probably not a coincidence that many writers and artists are people who have had tumultuous lives in some way,” she says. “Writing is a place where, for better or worse, we can decide what happens.”