Local playwright remembers her youth in writing

Kathy Coudle-King wrote the first short story that's part of her book, Wannabe, for a UND Writers Conference open mic. Then, the summer just after the 1997 flood, she wrote more, early in the morning each day, making herself assignments to write about the first's for the characters in the novel. At yesterday's session of Literary Lunches, she read an excerpt from that novel, Kissing 101, a sort of primer on kissing delivered by the young girls of the work.

The girls King hung out with when she was growing up in Cuban-American neighborhood in New Jersey served as the models for the characters in the novel, though she said in novel the characters are about 25 percent non-fiction and 75 percent fiction.  These girls, King said, sort of raised one another, because their parents worked long hours. As a result, those girls, "grew up very, very fast."

She said of the girls she hung out with, "We started out at strong girls, but as we grew up, I watched the girls lose their voices. It took them a long time to get their voices back again."

Still, King, typically a playwright, said, "I never set out to write a novel..."

King, who teaches writing and Women's Studies at UND, has a BFA in playwrighting from NYU and an MA in English from UND.