As part of our commitment to collective possibility, we are launching our first-ever online workshop series, Creative Contagion. Featuring Kaya writers, translators, editors, and community members, we seek to create an accessible and open space to experiment, generate new work, and sow the seeds of new possibilities.

Workshops will be hosted on Zoom and are open to writers and readers of all experience levels at a sliding fee scale. Sign up below and email info@kaya.com with any questions. After you sign up, you’ll receive a confirmation email and the private zoom link will be sent out three days before the workshop. All workshops will be recorded to be shared with registered participants only. We can’t wait to create with you!

Sowing Pennies with Anelise Chen – Saturday, August 8th from 10-11:30 am pst / 1-2:30 pm est via Zoom. 

Workshop Description: 

One of my favorite books of all time is Annie Dillard’s nature writing classic, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It’s a book I return to whenever I need a reminder that the world we live in is full of wonder and worthy of description. Weather, seasons, animals and insects, yes, but also the light that comes through the window while you’re just sitting at the kitchen table. What fills you with wonder? How do you translate mundane experience into something rapturous and ecstatic? For Dillard, the key to wonder is to become like a child again, delighted to find a mere penny, then translating that joy into language so others can discover it. She calls this practice “sowing pennies.” We will read some short passages together and write about our metaphorical pennies–the small and unremarkable things that we love–so that we can also feel rewarded and enriched, for very little, for nothing at all.

Anelise Chen is the author of Clam Down: A Metamorphosis, a 2026 Pulitzer Finalist in Memoir or Autobiography, a New York Times Editor’s Choice selection, and named one of the best books of the year by Chicago Tribune, Vulture, and Electric Lit. Based on her stint as the Paris Review’s “mollusk correspondent, Clam Down is a hybrid memoir about a woman who turns into a clam, and goes on a quest to learn more about her clam-lineage, including interviews with her father who disappeared for a decade to write a mysterious accounting software he called Shell Computing.

Chen is a 5 under 35 Honoree from the National Book Foundation. Her experimental novel So Many Olympic Exertions (2017), a meditation on winning and losing, failure and perseverance, was a finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. She has written most recently about trees, birds, parking lots, and talking vegetables for venues like The Atlantic, Believer Magazine, McSweeney’s, Arnoldia, and The Baffler. She is an associate professor of fiction at Columbia University, and lives with her family in New Haven, Connecticut.