Kartika Budhwar
Kartika Budhwar is a Senior Editor at Ripe Fiction and the South Asian Avant-Garde (SAAG) Collective. She is a Teaching Fellow and PhD candidate in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Houston and an educator at Writers in the Schools (WITS). She has been teaching fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and yoga at universities, to groups, and to individuals for over a decade. Her prose and poetry has received awards and publications in Arts & Letters, Blue Mesa Review, and Indiana Review, among other journals. She was also a Finalist for the Frank McCourt Memoir Prize. She has received the Albert L. Walker Excellence in Literature Award, the Research Excellence Award, the Hogrefe Excellence Grant for Creative Writing and a Teaching Excellence Award.
TO THE MOTHERS OF THE SUPERGENERATION OF MONARCH BUTTERFLIES
You rest in unlikely places. Ash trees, spindlier than most.
Abandoned homesteads. You will die before you go home
But you birth the ones who make it back.
The Sierra Madre waits for them, her volcano keening gold.
They love you in Texas. They are learning to love you better.
Though it chokes the cucumbers, they are letting the Milkweed live.
Only Milkweed will do for your babies.
You lay an egg on each leaf, careful, quiet, pale.
Your babies hatch and eat what was world. After they scarf their own
Eggs, they consume Milkweed poison. They become
Noxious and beautiful. They are plusher, stronger,
Slower to love and leave this land than you.
Your young know what you and your mothers knew: how
To find kin, summon them from air or nothing,
Thousands of you, a cloud of flame.
They will rest on the same Cedar, Fir and Ash as you did.
So many of you at night that the dark drips warmth
And the branches whimper and crack with the weight of love.
Teach me too, mothers, grandmothers.
Praise for work:
“Welcome to Iowa: Letters to Carp and Other Immigrants” assembles epistolary musings and memories, reflections and poems, about what it means to be placed against the swift-flowing waters of America’s dominant culture. Even as the narrator is sexualized, exorcized, and othered, she finds solace in the natural world, coming to regard the animals that surround her as companions, teachers, and above all, fellow immigrants. Through her willingness to take formal risks, Budhwar offers us new ways of thinking about identity, legacy, and myth.
-Francisco Cantú, author of The Line Becomes a River, winner of the 2018 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction
Recommended Books for Aspiring Writers:
Student Testimonials:
“I've never been good at English and Kartika teaches you not to think so hard and to just express yourself through your writing. Truly an amazing teacher that transforms your writing!”
“Kartika is amazing. Without a doubt THE best English professor I have ever had. She breaks down the usual avenues for anxiety and stress when writing….also showed the class some really fantastic pieces of writing.”
Teaching/Workshop Philosophy
Writing can be lonely work. It certainly was for me. For too long, I did it in the dark with little pleasure– fumbling and straining– no spark to ignite me, no reason to continue, no nourishment when I ran empty, and no witness in the after. It was a decade before I found a community, mentors, workshops–a freer, more pleasurable, more fertile and expansive environment for my heart, intellect and words. Since then, I have devoted my life to bringing pleasure, freedom and nourishment to other writers.
I bring diverse texts into my workshops, texts that play with language, that disrupt language, that honor and remake language, texts that voice the writers’ uncertainties, that lay bare the writers’ fraught writing processes, texts that offer ease and light, texts that engage, texts that invite the reader to be a willing, active participant. I bring my workshop groups texts that will inspire their own writing, show them possibilities, and help them develop their own aesthetics and sensibilities.
Through free-writing exercises—both prompted and discovery-driven– and rituals, discussions, play, invocations, and revision, I seek to create safe, instructional, communal spaces for writers to break past their limitations and develop writing processes that free them to generate a mess, ignoring mechanics, organization, and style for a moment, and then deliberately reorganizing and revising with an eye on saying something full, seamless, and meaningful—a fruitful strategy for novice and seasoned writers alike.
No matter what I teach, I make room for writers to explore and express the linguistic, social, cultural identities they are grappling with, as well as the desires, tensions, ambitions, that come with that exploration. To insist that writing remain divorced from the self, and devoid of all that informs and motivates it, is to turn writing into an oppressive act that only inspires fear and apathy. Rather than allowing myself or my students to be limited to or paralyzed by a siloed, small self, I encourage a progression from a healthy, rooted personal identity and self into a fulfilling and expansive negotiation with their communities and worlds. I help writers write their way home to themselves and to write out into imagined, fantastical imaginaries.
I seek to help writers make their work gleam. I seek to help them make their writing become its truest, most burnished self. I seek to help writers trust, honor, and delight in themselves and their writing.
TO THE MOTHERS OF THE SUPERGENERATION OF MONARCH BUTTERFLIES
You rest in unlikely places. Ash trees, spindlier than most.
Abandoned homesteads. You will die before you go home
But you birth the ones who make it back.
The Sierra Madre waits for them, her volcano keening gold.
They love you in Texas. They are learning to love you better.
Though it chokes the cucumbers, they are letting the Milkweed live.
Only Milkweed will do for your babies.
You lay an egg on each leaf, careful, quiet, pale.
Your babies hatch and eat what was world. After they scarf their own
Eggs, they consume Milkweed poison. They become
Noxious and beautiful. They are plusher, stronger,
Slower to love and leave this land than you.
Your young know what you and your mothers knew: how
To find kin, summon them from air or nothing,
Thousands of you, a cloud of flame.
They will rest on the same Cedar, Fir and Ash as you did.
So many of you at night that the dark drips warmth
And the branches whimper and crack with the weight of love.
Teach me too, mothers, grandmothers.
Praise for work:
“Welcome to Iowa: Letters to Carp and Other Immigrants” assembles epistolary musings and memories, reflections and poems, about what it means to be placed against the swift-flowing waters of America’s dominant culture. Even as the narrator is sexualized, exorcized, and othered, she finds solace in the natural world, coming to regard the animals that surround her as companions, teachers, and above all, fellow immigrants. Through her willingness to take formal risks, Budhwar offers us new ways of thinking about identity, legacy, and myth.
-Francisco Cantú, author of The Line Becomes a River, winner of the 2018 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction
Recommended Books for Aspiring Writers:
- Bird by Bird by Annie Lamont
- remembered rapture: the writer at work by bell hooks
- A Poet’s Companion by Dorianne Laux and Kim Addonizio
- A Writer's Book of Days: A Spirited Companion and Lively Muse for the Writing Life by Judy Reeves
Student Testimonials:
“I've never been good at English and Kartika teaches you not to think so hard and to just express yourself through your writing. Truly an amazing teacher that transforms your writing!”
“Kartika is amazing. Without a doubt THE best English professor I have ever had. She breaks down the usual avenues for anxiety and stress when writing….also showed the class some really fantastic pieces of writing.”
Teaching/Workshop Philosophy
Writing can be lonely work. It certainly was for me. For too long, I did it in the dark with little pleasure– fumbling and straining– no spark to ignite me, no reason to continue, no nourishment when I ran empty, and no witness in the after. It was a decade before I found a community, mentors, workshops–a freer, more pleasurable, more fertile and expansive environment for my heart, intellect and words. Since then, I have devoted my life to bringing pleasure, freedom and nourishment to other writers.
I bring diverse texts into my workshops, texts that play with language, that disrupt language, that honor and remake language, texts that voice the writers’ uncertainties, that lay bare the writers’ fraught writing processes, texts that offer ease and light, texts that engage, texts that invite the reader to be a willing, active participant. I bring my workshop groups texts that will inspire their own writing, show them possibilities, and help them develop their own aesthetics and sensibilities.
Through free-writing exercises—both prompted and discovery-driven– and rituals, discussions, play, invocations, and revision, I seek to create safe, instructional, communal spaces for writers to break past their limitations and develop writing processes that free them to generate a mess, ignoring mechanics, organization, and style for a moment, and then deliberately reorganizing and revising with an eye on saying something full, seamless, and meaningful—a fruitful strategy for novice and seasoned writers alike.
No matter what I teach, I make room for writers to explore and express the linguistic, social, cultural identities they are grappling with, as well as the desires, tensions, ambitions, that come with that exploration. To insist that writing remain divorced from the self, and devoid of all that informs and motivates it, is to turn writing into an oppressive act that only inspires fear and apathy. Rather than allowing myself or my students to be limited to or paralyzed by a siloed, small self, I encourage a progression from a healthy, rooted personal identity and self into a fulfilling and expansive negotiation with their communities and worlds. I help writers write their way home to themselves and to write out into imagined, fantastical imaginaries.
I seek to help writers make their work gleam. I seek to help them make their writing become its truest, most burnished self. I seek to help writers trust, honor, and delight in themselves and their writing.