Kathryn Mockler's Blog, page 10

Fantasies are places we briefly visit; we can’t live there. The stories in Widow Fantasies deftly explore the subjugation of women through the often subversive act of fantasizing. From a variety of perspectives, through a symphony of voices, Widow Fantasies immerses the reader in the domestic rural gothic, offering up unforgettable stories from the shadowed lives of girls and women.Support Send My Love to Anyone

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Published on May 03, 2025 20:55

I can’t overstate how much I value attachment to whatever it is that speaks through us while being creative.

I’ve been meaning to ask you is an interview series where Kathryn Mockler invites people to answer questions about being human.

I've been meaning to ask Miranda Schreiber author fo Iris and the Dead

What is your first memory of existing?

One of my first memories is feeling extremely frustrated that all the furniture was made for adults — like, lacking coherence with all the tools and possessions around me because I couldn’t use them properly.

I try really hard to retain some sense of that feeling because I think people sometimes underestimate how annoying it can be to be a child.

What is your first memory of being creative (writing, art making, etc.)?

When I was three I would tell a story called the Lion Queen that went on for about forty-five minutes.

The only person who listened to it from beginning to end was my grandma, who the book is dedicated to, who was basically a genius of love.

What is the best or worst dream you ever had?

My favourite dreams return something lost that we have no chance of getting back while we are awake. This could be people or belongings. But I think it is often very specific emotions prompted by unrepeatable situations.

What do you cherish most about this world?

I think I value intellectual autonomy the most. I really cherish the ability to challenge perceptual manipulation by powerful actors through creation, which is one of the most chaotic, mysterious faculties I think people have.

I can’t overstate how much I value attachment to whatever it is that speaks through us while being creative.

What would you like to change about this world?

I find it scary that AI is discouraging creative thought, which is like a muscle you have to exercise.

If that atrophies I don’t think people will be very hard to control anymore. I really hope people do not outsource the generation of ideas to something owned by oligarchs because that is a really scary dependency.

What advice would you give to your younger self? Your younger self could be you at any age.

It’s not you; it’s capitalism.

I also think I would have found the concept of mansplaining very clarifying.

Do you believe in ghosts? Why or why not?

I would have said no ten years ago. But I can say with confidence that I literally have no idea anymore. There have been too many things I took as obviously true that turned out to be false.

If you could send your love to anyone, who would it be and why?

I would like to send my love to my childhood best friend Leanne, who has this stabilizing effect on everyone that I think reminds people of heaven. She just makes things stand still for people.

But what if I’d just farted in front of him? What if he’d been the sort of person I could fart in front of?

I’ve been meaning to ask you is an interview series where Kathryn Mockler invites people to answer questions on being human.

I've been meaning to ask Susan Sanford Blades author of Fake it So Real

What is your first memory of existing?

This probably isn’t the first memory, but this came to mind: me, a tiny girl walking with my dad in the aisles of Beaver Lumber, taking like twenty little hurried steps for every one gigantic step he took.

What is your first memory of being creative (writing, art making, etc.)?

I was always writing illustrated stories when I was young, and I still have some, but the first actual memory I can conjure is of a pretend magazine article I was writing about my Cabbage Patch Kids going on vacation.

I think it was a travel article about Bermuda, because my parents had recently gone on a trip to Bermuda (without my sister and me—they would go on these “alone” vacations and always come back happier than I’d ever seen them. It led me to believe my sister and I were the source of all of their misery).

I remember dressing my Cabbage Patch Kids (I had five of them) in various outfits and posing them in different scenarios—like eating ice cream cones or riding their “moped,” which I think was a little doll-sized motorbike I’d made with my dad out of wood and an old bicycle seat—and taking photos of them in my basement. This would’ve been with a real film camera, so then I guess I had to wait to get the photos developed and then cut them out and glue them into the travel article I was writing by hand or maybe it was with our IBM computer and dot-matrix printer.

I’m really amazed at the patience I had, not to mention the time and space, for this project.

What is the best or worst dream you ever had?

My dream to be a writer is both the best and worst dream. haha. But really, sometimes I wish I could just have free time like a normal person and not be constantly thinking about a writing project or feeling like I should be writing. To actually relax. Wouldn’t that be nice sometimes?

What is your favourite or significant coincidence story to tell?

This is just a weird indication of my naïveté, maybe, but when my kids were little and in swimming lessons, I was waiting for them on the last day of lessons where sometimes parents sat to wait, on the edge of the hot tub at the Oak Bay Rec. Centre. This man sat next to me and sort of awkwardly tried to engage me in conversation. He said something about the wet edge of the hot tub and then offered his towel to sit on, or maybe he dried a section off with his shirt or something. I remember being a bit grossed out, and not wanting to partake, whatever it was.

Then, when I got home, there was an email from him saying I’m the guy who you met at the pool today. I remember he said something like, “I’m the one who protected you from the wet,” and I remember feeling particularly icky about that phrasing: the wet. It felt very pervy to me. He went on to say, I knew I recognized you from somewhere—I’ve seen you read your writing. And then maybe he asked me to meet him to discuss my work or something.

I was like, what? That’s wild! I’m famous! At that point, I did not have a book published and I don’t even know if I’d ever done a public reading. How did he know I was a writer? I later realized he probably saw my son’s last name on the swimming report card I’d been holding that day at the hot tub and had Googled it and found my blog. Me and my sons are probably the only Sanford Blades in existence.

Do you have a preferred emotion to experience? What is it and why? Or is there an emotion that you detest having and why?

I’m a big fan of enneagram and I’m a true blue 4: the hopeless romantic or the individualist, depending on which source you consult.

I sometimes pretend I wish I wasn’t a 4, but actually that’s such a 4 thing to say—I totally love the fact that I’m guided by my emotions.

A 4’s kryptonite is nostalgia. I love curling up with my diary and wallowing in desire for things to be like they used to be, in the glorified past, when I had the perfect love with my perfect ex-boyfriends (whyever did we split? I dunno) or when my kids adored me and they behaved perfectly or when music was actually good and exciting.

As for an emotion I detest: jealousy. You know why. I mean not you, Kathryn, but like, the bigger you. Has anyone ever enjoyed being on the giving or receiving end of jealousy?

Can you recount a time (that you're willing to share) when you were embarrassed?

Probably all embarrassing stories have to involve farts, right?

This one is an after the fact extreme embarrassment. I had this boyfriend whom I adored but he was so perfect that he never farted in front of me, which meant that I obviously could never fart in front of him. We were together for three years and even travelled together, which made this holding in farts business a bit tricky at times.

My saving grace, I thought, was the shower. I knew that when I was in the shower, I couldn’t hear anything that was going on outside of the shower, so, for some reason, I thought also that everyone outside of the shower couldn’t hear what I was doing in the shower. I don’t know why I hadn’t figured out yet that this wasn’t the case, I was in my thirties.

Anyway, so whenever I’d shower on all the trips we’d taken or when I’d slept over at his place, I’d fart away all the farts I’d been storing up during our time together, just letting all these super loud farts rip, believing he couldn’t hear me in the next room.

I don’t remember exactly when I realized this wasn’t how it worked. Probably I just heard one of my kids do something in the shower one day and then it hit me like in those montages in movies when a character finally realizes the shit that’s been going down throughout the whole movie, really puts all the pieces together.

I probably had a flashback of all the loud farts I’d let out in all the showers throughout our entire relationship. I was broken up with him by then, but I just realized, oh my god, that whole time, he knew that I farted!

But what if I’d just farted in front of him? What if he’d been the sort of person I could fart in front of? We could still be together today. But he’s not that sort of person, is he?

Can you describe a strange or hilarious memory when something was the opposite of what you anticipated?

This probably fits into the embarrassing moment category too, but it’s sort of funny to me now. But also still sort of not.

In the fall after graduating from high school, there was a day when all the graduated Grade 12s came back to the school to pick up our yearbooks and to have all our former classmates sign them.

I remember asking to trade yearbooks with this boy who was super dreamy and popular. At a party a few months earlier, when we were still in high school, I’d had a moment with him—we were both incredibly drunk, of course—where we’d hung out and he called me Party Girl. This was seared into my memory, of course, because he was dreamy and popular. I, however, was not.

I’d written a message in his yearbook, probably some sort of reminiscence of that night, and signed it Party Girl, but when he handed my yearbook back to me, he’d written something like: I’m not sure what to say, I don’t really know you, but have a nice life.

What do you cherish most about this world?

Those amazing pom-pom cherry blossoms, the sun on my skin, the ocean, whales! Stationery, real paper books, patios, grass, hockey, Edmonton’s river valley in the fall, emotional connections, my children—especially witnessing the love they have for each other.

What would you like to change about this world?

I wish computery technological inventions had stopped with email. I do love that I no longer have to rely on speaking to people over the telephone to communicate, but that’s it. I hate everything else that came after email. Let’s go back and stop at the invention of email. No Blackberry, no smart phones, no apps, no social media, no AI, no robot takeover.

What advice would you give to your younger self? Your younger self could be you at any age.

I’d tell high school me: you are actually really fucking cool. Nobody knows it yet, but you are. Also, you don’t owe the boys who are interested in you anything. Not one fucking thing. It’s not your job to protect boys’ feelings.

Do you believe in ghosts? Why or why not?

Absolutely.

First, because there are so many people with stories. But, just last summer, I was staying in this Air BnB on Galiano Island, and it was its own little cabin on someone’s property. It was super cute, but it was really cheap. Like way too cheap given its location, privacy, amenities, etc. I couldn’t see any reason why it was so cheap, except the bed was super old and saggy and squeaky.

Once night fell, I started feeling a bit creeped out. I went into the bedroom and felt really scared. I noticed there were these creepy dolls on top of the wardrobe—wooden dolls in the shape of a man and a woman with stern, painted-on faces.

I took them out of the bedroom and put them in a closet in the living room but even still, when I went to bed, I felt really uneasy. I couldn’t sleep the whole time I was there. I definitely think that little cabin was haunted.

Maybe those wooden dolls held the spirits of a couple who died in that cabin and they were mad that I hadn’t let them watch me sleep?

If you could send your love to anyone, who would it be and why?

I think I would send my love to my parents. They’re at the age now that I think they might die before I have the relationship I wish I could have with them.

Black and white photo of author Susan Sanford Blades

Susan Sanford BladesSusan Sanford Blades lives on the territory of the Lekwungen peoples, also known as the Xwsepsum and Songhees Nations (Victoria, Canada). Her debut novel, Fake It So Real, won the 2021 ReLit Award in the novel category and was a finalist for the 2021 BC and Yukon Book Prizes’ Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Her short fiction has been anthologized in The Journey Prize Reader: The Best of Canada’s New Writers and has been published in literary magazines across Canada as well as in the United States and Ireland. Her fiction has most recently been published in Gulf Coast, The Malahat Review, The Masters Review, and in Send My Love to Anyone. She runs the Wild Prose Reading Series in Victoria and publishes a quarterly newsletter, Gurls to the Front! which celebrates mostly small-press Canadian books by female and nonbinary writers.My debut novel-in-stories, Fake It So Real, which contains all the bodily functions and fluids you could ever ask for, is available to order from your local, independent bookstore or directly from Harbour Publishing.

Buy Fake It So Real

Publisher’s DescriptionFake It So Real takes on the fallout from a punk-rock lifestyle—the future of “no future”—and its effect on the subsequent generations of one family. In June of 1983, Gwen, a gnarly Nancy Spungen look-alike, meets Damian, the enigmatic leader of a punk band. Seven years and two unplanned pregnancies later, Damian abandons Gwen, leaving her to raise their two daughters, Sara and Meg, on her own.The voices of Gwen, Sara and Meg weave a raw and honest tapestry of family life told from the underbelly, focused on the grey area between right and wrong, the idea that we are all equally culpable and justified in our actions, and the pain and ecstasy that accompany a life lived authentically.Support Send My Love to Anyone

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Published on May 03, 2025 20:31

April 30, 2025

My ghosts are people, obsessions, images, questions, subjects that keep returning, things that mystify me.

I’ve been meaning to ask you is an interview series where Kathryn Mockler invites people to answer questions about being human.

I've been meaning to ask Kyo Maclear author of Unearthing: A story of tangled love and family secrets

What is your first memory of existing?

Sitting in a highchair in a bright kitchen on New King’s Road in London. Perfect soft-boiled egg nested in a blue ceramic cup that looked like a miniature goblet. An even row of ‘toast soldiers’ for dipping. A blurry mum in the background.

What is your first memory of being creative (writing, art making, etc.)?

When we immigrated to Canada, I was five. I chatterboxed my way up and down the airplane aisle and then we landed and I instantly became a different, shyer person. My first teacher in Toronto let me stay inside every lunch hour until I adjusted. We would draw murals on craft paper with oil pastels. The classroom door was always covered with wild new scenes. Miss Lev put her whole body into drawing. I remember her showing me how to blend colours with my fingers and that felt very cool. When I finally found the courage to play outside, she would sit in the sun and bake her face with an old-school, DIY tanning reflector she made from a double-record album covered with aluminum foil.

What is the best or worst dream you ever had?

The best (recurring) dream is when my (deceased) parents visit me. Sometimes we share a big meal in my kitchen. I wake up feeling visited and happily full of them.

What is your favourite or significant coincidence story to tell?

It’s not really a story but just after my dad died, I heard ABBA playing everywhere—at the grocery store, from passing cars, while waiting on ‘hold’ during phone calls. This happened at least a half dozen times. My dad really loved ABBA so it felt like he was telling me, with a little Swedish harmonic fervor, that everything was going to be okay.

Do you have a preferred emotion to experience? What is it and why? Or is there an emotion that you detest having and why?

I like the feeling of zanshin (a cat-like state of ‘relaxed alertness’.) I don’t like surprises or the feeling of being surprised. Why? I guess I’ve had a few existential jump scares over the past few years, along with several ill beloveds needing frequent ambulances, alongside the experience of living in a seriously dysregulated and shocking world…so I’ve become a person who gravitates toward a certain flatness and predictability, when it’s within my control. My nervous system easily jangles. (I guess I’ve just defined ‘anxiety’?)

What do you cherish most about this world?

The birds and plants and waterways and the people who—without apparent hesitation, fear, indecision—are going against the extractive, hypernationalist, omnicidal mindset that is killing the planet and the most vulnerable beings on it.

Do you believe in ghosts? Why or why not?

Yes. My ghosts are people, obsessions, images, questions, subjects that keep returning, things that mystify me. I’ve been thinking about the sheet—the one we throw over ghosts, like the Halloween costume with two holes for eyes—and that maybe writing is just a sheet we throw over our otherwise vaporous questions, curiosities and concerns. The sheet may be a fixed form (like a novel or a memoir) but I think it’s mostly a container for holding our hauntings.

Tell me about something you’d like to promote or support.Online Auction for Crips for e-Sims for Gaza

Would love to promote the online auction fundraiser for Crips for eSims for Gaza, organized by Thea and Jody.

What is this auction for?

Since December 2023, the volunteer-run group Crips for eSims has been
crowdfunding to buy and send eSims to Palestinians. People in Gaza are cut
off from the internet by Israel’s bombing and blocking. In order to
communicate with their families, send and receive warnings about attacks,
and document atrocities, many Palestinians in Gaza rely on eSims —
digitally activated cellular voice/data cards. Since they don’t require
physical hardware, eSims can be purchased and topped-up online by anyone,
anywhere.

In a time when moving basic resources like food and cash into
Gaza has become virtually impossible, eSims have remained a direct and
accessible site of support.

Unfortunately, funds for this initiative are now $30k+ in the red, and fundraising has considerably slowed down in the past few months. We’re putting together this auction so writers, artists and readers can directly support Palestinians in staying connected with each other and the rest of the world.

Details of the auction will be forthcoming when available.

Kyo Maclear is an essayist, novelist, children’s author, teacher and cat fan. She lives in Tkaronto/Toronto, on the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the New Credit, the Haudenosaunee, Métis, and the Huron-Wendat.

Unearthing: A story of tangled love and family secrets by Kyo Maclear

Buy Unearthing

For readers of Crying in H Mart and Wintering, an unforgettable memoir about a family secret revealed by a DNA test, the lessons learned in its aftermath, and the indelible power of love.

Three months after Kyo Maclear’s father dies in December 2018, she gets the results of a DNA test showing that she and the father who raised her are not biologically related. Suddenly Maclear becomes a detective in her own life, unravelling a family mystery piece by piece, and assembling the story of her biological father. Along the way, larger questions arise: what exactly is kinship? And what does it mean to be a family?

Thoughtful in its reflections on race and lineage, unflinching in its insights on grief and loyalty, Unearthing is a captivating and propulsive story of inheritance that goes beyond heredity.

What gets planted, and what gets buried? What role does storytelling play in unearthing the past and making sense of a life? Can the humble act of tending a garden provide common ground for an inquisitive daughter and her complicated mother? As it seeks to answer these questions, Unearthing bursts with the very love it seeks to understand.

Support Send My Love to Anyone

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Published on April 30, 2025 21:51

April 25, 2025

What gives me the right to be here, alive and making art, while they are not?

I've been meaning to ask Sydney Hegele | Bird Suit by Sydney Hegele with author photo

I’ve been meaning to ask you is an interview series where Kathryn Mockler invites people to answer questions on being human.What is your first memory of existing?

I have a poem about this exact thing, actually. It’s called “I tell my therapist that memory is a wet wound”, and it was published in my chapbook The Last Thing I Will See Before I Die with 845 Press in 2022.

It isn’t a good memory. I wouldn’t say that the wound is still wet, though. It is healing, slowly. Scabbing over. There are a lot of folks like me–people whose first memories of existence and first memories of violence are the same memories. Meeting some of those other people started that healing process for me.

What is your first memory of being creative (writing, art making, etc.)?

Being five or six years old and filling my pockets with small rocks from around the Forty Mile Creek in Grimsby and drawing faces on them with Sharpie. Then I would sort them into rock families and give each rock doll upsetting-yet-inspiring lore.

What is the best or worst dream you ever had?

This is not exactly answering the question, but I’m obsessed with the phenomenon of “hyper-realistic dreams about people or relationships that don’t actually exist, leaving the dreamers with a profound sense of grief and confusion upon waking”. When I was fifteen, I started regularly having a dream about a baby boy who was not real–a newborn son that I did not have in real life. I still have the dream sometimes now, thirteen years later. The dream is always a little terrifying, because I’m suddenly holding this newborn and I haven’t even been taught how to hold him correctly. I don’t know how to care for him at all. Gradually, as the dream goes on, I get used to having him around. When I wake up, his absence is always kind of shocking, even though I’m immediately aware that what I just experienced was a dream. And there’s grief there–not because I someday want children and don’t have them yet (maybe a bit of that in recent years?) but specifically over this baby, who does not and cannot and will not ever exist as he does in the dream. It feels like taking a nap with something precious in your pocket, and waking up in a different room, to find your pocket empty, and you’re just sort of quietly asking, to no one in particular, “Where did it go? What did I do wrong?”.

Strangely, this is a very commonly shared experience. When someone online makes a video about “the sadness of waking up and not knowing where the baby from your dream has gone”, there are always hundreds of comments saying yes, me too.

I’m sure there is symbolism there. I’m sure there are plenty of connections to be made between this particular dream of mine and my childhood experiences. But I am less interested in the symbolism of it all, and more interested in what it means to feel real grief after losing something in a dream, and why so many of us have experienced it.

Do you have a preferred emotion to experience? What is it and why? Or is there an emotion that you detest having and why?

I think that, for a long time, my favourite emotion was awe. I’m partial to a kind of quiet happiness, these days. Feeling at-peace.

Can you recount a time (that you're willing to share) when you were embarrassed?

In the first three years of my undergrad, I had this terrible habit of writing entire research papers and essays in a single night. This was before I was properly diagnosed and medicated for my aggressive ADHD. If an essay was due to be handed in for an 11am class on a Tuesday, I would start the essay at 10pm on Monday night, stay up all night writing it, edit it quickly from 9am to 10:30am, while sleep-deprived, and send it to the printer to pick up before my class began.

Once, I did this for an English course, and I ended up getting a 96% on the essay (I probably should not have gotten this grade). The embarrassing part was that 4% had been docked because I somehow managed to spell my own first and last name wrong. Both of them.

Honestly, just recounting my undergrad essay all-nighters is making me embarrassed now. Nineteen-year-old me was fearless, I’ll give them that.

What do you cherish most about this world?

That there are still a small handful of places on earth that remain untouched by humans. I hope that they stay unexplored forever. I hope that they outlive me by millions of years.

What would you like to change about this world?

I want Palestine to be free. For the Palestinian people to have lives untouched by Israel’s hatred, cruelty, and desolation. It is humiliating and disgraceful to have to dream up a “utopia” in which the US and Canada are not actively helping Israel burn journalists alive in their tents and murder five-year-old children travelling in ambulances. Israel has killed entire families of multiple generations. They’ve tortured and murdered aid workers. IDF soldiers have arrested innocent Palestinian men and literally sexually assaulted them to death.

What gives me the right to be here, alive and making art, while they are not? My life is not worth more than any of theirs.

What advice would you give to your younger self? Your younger self could be you at any age.

You are not inherently bad. Nothing inside you is rotting or ruined. It was not your fault.

Do you believe in ghosts? Why or why not?

Sort of? I definitely believe that when people commit abominable acts, that hatred and trauma soaks into landscapes and floorboards and children several generations later. I believe in hauntings. I believe in a lot of things that I have never seen.

If you could send your love to anyone, who would it be and why?

My husband, Christian.

Trans kids everywhere, both alive and long gone.

My friend Calvin, who is in Seattle for a conference this week.

I don’t know! All the people who need love. All of them, everywhere. That’s not very practical, but it’s what I want.

Sydney Hegele grew up in the Greenbelt in Southern Ontario. They are the author of Bird Suit (Invisible Publishing, 2024) and The Pump (Invisible Publishing 2021), which was the winner of the 2022 ReLit Literary Award for Short Fiction and a finalist for the 2022 Trillium Book Award. Their essays have appeared in Catapult, Electric Literature, and EVENT, and have been featured by Lithub, The Poetry Foundation, and Psychology Today. Their essay collection Bad Kids: A Polyphony is forthcoming with Invisible in Fall 2026. They live with their husband and French Bulldog in Tkaronto (Toronto).

Buy Bird Suit

A tourist town folk tale of stifled ambition, love, loss, and the bird women who live beneath the lake.

Every summer the peaches ripen in Port Peter, and the tourists arrive to gorge themselves on fruit and sun. They don’t see the bird women, who cavort on the cliffs and live in a meadow beneath the lake. But when summer ends and the visitors go back home, every pregnant Port Peter girl knows what she needs to do: deliver her child to the Birds in a laundry basket on those same lakeside cliffs. But the Birds don’t want Georgia Jackson.

Twenty years on, the peaches are ripening again, the tourists have returned, and Georgia is looking for trouble with any ill-tempered man she can find. When that man turns out to be Arlo Bloom—her mother’s old friend and the new priest in town—she finds herself drawn into a complicated matrix of friendship, grief, faith, sex, and love with Arlo, his wife, Felicity, and their son, Isaiah. Vivid, uncanny, and as likely cursed as touched by grace, their story is a brutal, generous tale as sticky and lush as a Port Peter peach.

Support Send My Love to Anyone

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Published on April 25, 2025 12:22

April 21, 2025

“The best way to beat your enemy is to learn their language.”

Excerpt of A Mouth Full of Salt

In the year that she had lived in Khartoum, Nyamakeem had seen very few Southerners except for a few soldiers retired from the Egyptian army who now lived on the far end of El Diyoum. The British government had not wanted the Arab Muslims infiltrating the South, corrupting the people and spreading their despised “Mohamedanism” into the rest of Africa. So, they had enacted a closed territory policy in the South, replacing Arab infantry in the military with the Equatorian Corps, relocating all Northern Sudanese administrators to the North, and pushing out Northern merchants.

Only those with a permit were allowed to enter and stay in the South with the assurance that they were there only for commercial purposes with no intention of preaching their Muslim religion. Hassan had been one such person, and that’s why it had been a surprise for Nyamakeem to see him in Doleib Hill when virtually all Northerners had been expelled for many years. In fact, he had been the first Northerner she had ever seen up close.

Coming to Doleib Hill elementary school had been against her will. She had resisted as loudly as she could, but she was no match for her father and could not understand his insistence on her education even when he explained it to her:

“The best way to beat your enemy is to learn their language.”

The Shilluk people—proud, powerful warriors and raiders that had once reigned all the way to the confluence of the White and Blue Niles in the North—had never overcome their defeat and subjugation by the British. The tribes of the South had put up a gallant resistance to occupation, but in the end spears and canoes were no match for fire power and steamers. They remained hostile to the invaders, their animosity and mistrust compounded by the raging slave trade. Although it was first run by the Turkish government, the British turned a blind eye when it was supposed to have been abolished.

And so Nyamakeem found herself deposited in the Doleib Hill boarding school for girls, away from her family and pac for the first time. The whole place was strange and new to her: while her teacher in the village school had been a young Chollo man who taught them in their own language and dialect, the teachers here were white-skinned nuns who spoke English and an array of Nilotic languages. The work was so much more difficult: arithmetic, English, Christian studies, and sewing. They were reprimanded constantly and not allowed an hour of idleness. Nyamakeem hated it, and more than once she thought of escape. But she had no idea how to get back home and was fearful of facing her father’s wrath should she be successful.

And then she made a friend—a Dinka girl by the name of Alek—and life became more tolerable at the school. She was even happy to return the year after, and the year after that. When the four years were drawing to an end, the nuns asked her if she would be interested in teaching at one of the new schools in her village. A teacher? Nyamakeem had never considered such a thing.

“I think you would make a great teacher,” Alek told her as they walked side by side under the shadows of the palm trees. “It’s better than going back and doing nothing after everything you’ve learned here.”

While boys had the option of going to secondary schools in Juba and Uganda, and training to be clerks, carpenters, and tailors, girls had no such opportunities. They were such a small percentage of students that it wasn’t deemed worth the expense. The majority of Southern tribes still saw no need to send their daughters to the missionary schools.

Despite her initial hatred of the school, Nyamakeem could see the attraction of a teaching position, especially since she would be the first and only girl in her village to be one. The years at boarding school and the change in routine had removed her from her family life. When she went home during the holidays she still helped in the gardens and the kitchen, but she no longer saw the dancing and battling shadows of the cows in the firelight. She just saw shadows.

Nyamakeem and Alek had circled the mission and crossed the long yard, coming up to the small hospital building. This was Nyamakeem’s favourite place, and she came here whenever she could. They watched the missionary nurses bustling in and out of the wards, talking to the only elderly doctor, bossing the patients back into their beds. Through the windows Nyamakeem could see them placing equipment in boiling water. She knew the needle with the sharp tip was used to administer their medicines. She admired the starched, white uniforms they wore and the serious looks on their faces.

“Don’t look now, but there’s a strange-looking man staring at you. I think he’s a Northerner.”

In her surprise Nyamakeem turned and looked directly where she had been told not to, drawing an exasperated “tsk!” from Alek. Sure enough, looking at them out of one of the windows was a light-skinned man with markings on his cheeks. He was smiling at them—at her. Nyamakeem stared back at him in curiosity. He looked as if he had been trodden on by a water buffalo; his head was bandaged, he had a black eye, and his arm was tied up in a bit of cloth. Then he spoke to them.

“Good morning!”

It was actually late afternoon, and hearing his broken Chollo and mispronunciation half-shouted at them across the yard made both girls laugh. They ventured closer to the building.

“What’s your name?” Nyamakeem asked. The man answered directly; he appeared to be used to this question.

“Hassan.”

“Assa?” Alek repeated the strange name with a laugh.

The man laughed with her.

“H-assa-nnn,” he corrected.

“Ha-san,” Nyamakeem said. A strange name for a strange man.

“The school?” the man asked, leaning on the window with a wince and nodding his head in the direction of the school.

“Yes, we’re from the school. Where are you from?”

He said something that sounded like shshh, which they couldn’t understand. He sensed their confusion and stated the obvious: “from up north.” He told them that he had been in Malakal for two years, and in Wau for four years before that. He recognized Alek as a Dinka and asked her where her family was from: Dinka Bor? Dinka Agak? Nyamakeem sensed that he was showing off his knowledge of the South. His Dinka was much better than his Shilluk, though the latter was not that bad.

A nurse appeared behind Hassan carrying a tray with the needle, which Hassan looked at with horror. She glared at the girls through the window and dismissed them back to the school. Hassan called out after them to come back tomorrow.

Reem Gaafar is a writer, physician and filmmaker. Her writing has appeared in African Arguments, African Feminism, Teakisi Magazine, Andariya and 500 Words Magazine, among others. Her short story ‘Light of the Desert’ was published in I Know Two Sudans where it was awarded an Honourable Mention. Her short story ‘Finding Descartes’ was published in Relations: An Anthology of African and Diaspora Voices. A Mouth Full of Salt is her debut novel and Winner of the Island Prize 2023.

A Mouth Full of Salt by Reem Gaafar Winner of the Island Prize

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Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published A Mouth Full of Salt by Reem GaafarInvisible Publishing, 2025

Winner of the Island Prize in 2023, Gaafar’s debut novel follows three women as they navigate life in South Sudan and reveals the evolution of a country through different colonial eras.

When a little boy drowns in the treacherous currents of the Nile, the search for his body unearths further disaster for his northern Sudanese village, exposing secrets that had been buried for generations.

Three women try to make their way through a world that wants to keep them back, separated from each other by time but bound together by the same river that weaves its way through their lives, giving little and taking much more.

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Published on April 21, 2025 22:58

April 20, 2025

SMLTA Literary Amplifier | April 21-27, 2025

Photo by Jens Mahnke

The Send My Love to Anyone Literary Amplifier is for both free and paid SMLTA subscribers.

Please subscribe to Send My Love to Anyone if you’d like to participate.

Join the weekly SMLTA Literary Amplifier so we can support each other’s notes, newsletters, publications, events, or literary activities.

The weekly Send My Love to Anyone Literary Amplifier will be posted on Mondays and will be open for a week.

It’s hard to find other literary and/or small or independent press writers on Substack. I’m trying to a build a supportive community of writers with shared values.

SMLTA Literary Amplifier

I got the idea from Substack Writers at Work with Sarah Fay Notes Boost Challenge where she has been hosting a daily challenge for the past two months.

The SMLTA Literary Amplifier will be focused on all things literary—from anecdotes and daily musings to literary events, writing tips, and newsletter publications.

I’m also trying to connect with small press and #CanLit authors especially authors who are interested in collective liberation and anti-oppression.

Support other SMLTA writers by liking, sharing, or commenting.

Ensure that you actually are engaged with the work you are sharing.

This is not a tit for a tat but rather an opportunity to connect with literary people with whom you feel some connection.

New Note/Post or Old Note/Post - Doesn’t Matter

The note or post does not have to be a new one. For notes and Substack in general, the algorithm works differently than on other social media outlets.

Often notes will get traction weeks after they are posted.

Post up to one note per day for seven days.

It’s ideal to give us a sense of the subject matter of your post or note at the top and then include the text of the note or a quote from your post and a link.

For example, this is how I would share a note in the Amplifier:

NEWSLETTER ANECDOTE

One thing everyone should know about my newsletter is that THERE WILL BE TYPOS!

Notes or post link: [post your link]

Guidelines

WRITERS in the comments below, indicate the subject of your note or post, include the text of your note or an excerpt from your post, and a link to the note or the post. [You can find the note link by clicking on the three dots in the right hand corner of your original note.]

AMPLIFIERS please don’t engage with the note in the comments (that defeats the purpose of amplifying it). Click the LINK and engage with the note itself.

If you post a note, be sure to like, comment, or reshare at least 3-5 other notes.

The idea is that we are helping the writer get their note some traction on the Notes and Substack app and by doing so you are also helping yourself get traction.

This will be particularly helpful for small or independent press literary writers who are drowning out here in Substackland!

Not sure what to post or share?

Here are some ideas:

An old note or post that didn’t get traction

An excerpt from an older post

What you are reading

A funny anecdote

Writing advice you love

Writing advice you hate

A take down of some so-called writing rule

A description and link of a literary event you’re participating in

A recent publication you’re excited about

Remember to put the link in the comment so we can engage with it off this discussion. The point of this is to AMPLIFY you work outside this discussion thread.

The literary amplifier is for free or paid subscribers of Send My Love to Anyone.

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Published on April 20, 2025 23:22

April 19, 2025

I would like us to look up to the world, not down on it.

I’ve been meaning to ask you is an interview series where Kathryn Mockler invites people to answer questions on being human.

I've been meaning to ask Michael V. Smith author of Soundtrack

What is your first memory of existing?

I have about two dozen or more memories from age three and younger. I think the earliest is standing in my playpen, wanting to be picked up.

The best one from that time is a water fight we had in and out of our basement apartment. I remember we climbed through the windows onto the grass. Someone must have helped me up.

What is your first memory of being creative (writing, art making, etc.)?

In grade five we were asked to write a story, and then anyone who finished would get help making it into a little book. I started writing mine on a typewriter but didn't get more than five lines. It was about a boy crush I had. I never finished. I remember two girls in the class finished, so they got little books produced. I felt humiliated by my failure. I was already sure that I was going to be a writer.

What is the best or worst dream you ever had?

The weirdest dream was a sex dream with an alien, when I was still a kid, about ten maybe, before I knew anything about sex. If you want details, you have to read my new book.

Do you have a preferred emotion to experience? What is it and why? Or is there an emotion that you detest having and why?

My favourite emotion is gratitude, because that leads to joy. Gratitude helps with grief too. I've had a heavy year of grief. Being grateful for the time we did have together, grateful that I'm still here to sing their praises and tell their stories. That helps.

Can you describe a strange or hilarious memory when something was the opposite of what you anticipated?

I have a weird story that's the inverse, a hilarious anticipation of a memory. While writing Soundtrack, I went looking in my journals to see if I could find the first song I ever danced to in a gay bar.

I have such clear memories of that night. How nonplussed I was. My first gay bar was just a dance club, like other dance clubs. The second bar was a little cruisier.

But in my journal I'd written all about my fear that gay people would be making out in the bar. How gross that was. Then talking about the second bar, I complained about the gay porn on TV sets. I was such a prude.

But I don't really remember any of that attitude. Like, I barely remember that person as me. I became such a slut in my 20s. It's like my superego wrote the original account, but my memory only recorded what I really thought, deeper down. My memory kept mostly the horny stuff.

What do you cherish most about this world?

My community, for sure. My husband, my big family of queer and original family, the little five-year-old kid that we're helping her mother raise, my creative and university communities, my students, all the kids in our life. I cherish kids and pets and gardens, all those things I can nurture.

What would you like to change about this world?

What we invest in, what we think is important and valuable, what we think gives us purpose. I would like us to look up to the world, not down on it.

What advice would you give to your younger self? Your younger self could be you at any age.

I'd tell my younger self how amazing he is, just for being alive, just as he is, in that genderqueer skin.

I do this little therapy trick where I'll invite my younger self into my life, and tour him around. I'm trying to show that young terrified kid that he can relax. There's a world in which he thrives, I've found friends like him. I'm living the dream of being queer around other queers.

Do you believe in ghosts? Why or why not?

I have definitely had the most trippy paranormal experience with a ghost in a hotel room in Lisbon. I shit you not. Weird, weird ghost story. There's no unknowing an experience like that.

If you could send your love to anyone, who would it be and why?

I'd send my love to all the powers that be who are leading the world to extinction. If you knew love, you wouldn't destroy the world that sustains it.

About Michael V. SmithMichael V. Smith works across many creative genres. A writer, filmmaker and performer, he has been publishing books, doing drag, and making videopoems for over twenty-five years. A full professor in Creative Studies at UBC’s Okanagan campus, Smith teaches poetry, fiction, spoken word, editing and publishing, and writing with digital media. Smith lives on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded tm̓xʷúlaʔxʷ (land) of the syilx / Okanagan people.

Soundtrack: A Lyric Memoir by Michael V. Smith

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Is a song enough
to hold all the truths we cannot bear
without it?

From award-winning writer Michael V. Smith comes a poetic memoir about growing up gay in the shadow of AIDS. Embodying an elusive part of queer history, these song and album-inspired poems capture the last three decades of the millenium and reveal how music has an uncanny ability to remind us not just where we were at a given moment in time but who we were.

With his signature humour and tenderness, and guided by the music of the era, Smith catalogues social prejudices, court rulings, and medical breakthroughs, alongside personal devastations, triumphs, and the search for community. From a first crush toting a Michael Jackson Thriller cassette, to falling in love to the music of Jane Siberry, to dancing at a gay bar to “Groove is in the Heart,” Soundtrack is a moving personal record of a man who survived the lost generation and a vital document of queer joy.

Praise for Soundtrack

“Michael V. Smith is at it again. Soundtrack gives us an arc we so rarely get, one in which all our preteen longings, our teenage mistakes, our frailties and traumas are just the first verse of a killer song, and it’s building to a delirious, cocky, ecstatic final chorus.” —Marcus McCann, author of Park Cruising

“Michael V. Smith’s Soundtrack is a songbook that thrums with heart, hilarity, and moments of brilliance so sharp, wise, and tender I’ll carry them with me forever. Soundtrack is a testament to the poetics of living and the power of music through Michael V. Smith’s essential kaleidoscope of lenses: queer artist, activist, writer, radical, drag diva, humourist, poet, documentarian, and personal DJ.” —Andrea Warner, author of We Oughta Know: How Céline, Shania, Alanis, and Sarah Ruled the ’90s and Changed Music

“Looking back in time through the prism of music Michael V. Smith crystallizes moments from life, homing in on the safe space music makes for a queer kid, enhancing details or bearing witness to trauma or just letting us live forever even during a plague. This collection is like pulling a well-loved vinyl record from the sleeve and knowing even before you drop the needle you are going deep.” —Brent Bambury, CBC broadcaster

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Published on April 19, 2025 22:53

April 18, 2025

There’s so much love and kindness and goodness.

I’ve been meaning to ask you is an interview series where Kathryn Mockler invites people to answer questions on being human.

I’ve been meaning to ask Sadi Muktadir …What is your first memory of existing?

When I was like 3, I would go to the park all the time with my older brother and there would be this other kid slightly younger who would always try to chase me and bite me. His older brother and my older brother would watch and laugh hysterically. I was so afraid of that kid catching me even though I was older. One day he cornered me in a baseball field dugout and finally bit me hard on the forearm.

What is your first memory of being creative?

My dad would bring home giant piles of scrap paper from work for me and my brothers to doodle on. I must have been no more than five or six, and it was so fun seeing a fresh giant pile he’d bring home to fill with colours and ninja turtles and stuff.

What is the best or worst dream you ever had?

When I was in high school, I had this dream that Hitler attacked my high school with tanks and an army and had blockaded the high school, not letting anyone escape and just starving us out.

Because it was a humanitarian thing, he wouldn’t fire on us (this was in Canada for some reason — dream logic).

Anyways, I found a secret tunnel in our basement and led the entire school out through this tunnel to the neighbouring high school. Once we were out, we surrounded Hitler’s army with a real army and defeated him or arrested him or something.

What is your favourite or significant coincidence story to tell?

One time I had a crush on a girl, and I didn’t know she had the exact same birthday as me.

Do you have a preferred emotion to experience and why?

Sadness for sure. I don’t know how else to say it, but I’m a bit of a problem. I’m addicted to misery and feel it so much stronger than any version of happiness I’ve ever felt. It’s so strong that I like it.

Can you recount a time when you were embarrassed?

One time when I was a kid, we were in gym class doing stretches and jumping jacks and stuff and my pants ripped, and the whole class heard it and started laughing.

The worst part was the teacher told me it was totally okay, but she put a hand over her mouth and started laughing too.

You were supposed to be on my side!! You’re a teacher!

Can you describe a strange memory of when something was the opposite of what you anticipated?

When I was a kid one time my dad told me he loved eating these sugar candies when he was a kid, and that you couldn’t find them here in Canada. He said that he’d beg his aunts and grandma to buy them for him, and he’d cherish each one as this delicious snack.

He was normally a pretty dour or regular guy who wasn’t really effusive about food, so I really wanted to try one, but he said you couldn’t get one here.

Anyways one day he came home excited and said he found them. He handed them to me and my brothers, and they looked like shining crystals. We ate them and they tasted like shit. They were just sugar cubes. He grew up in destitute poverty, and we grew up under Mr. Christie and Cadbury and stuff.

What do you cherish most about this world?

Honestly, so much. The way kids play soccer in the afternoon on a school playground, so organized, so disorganized. The way a toddler bursts out of an elevator in an office building, dragging his mom to play hooky. The way I don’t know what happens tomorrow. The way sometimes babies pose like old people. The way sometimes monkeys look like they know what they’re doing. When really old people strike up conversations with strangers like me. There’s so much love and kindness and goodness.

What would you like to change about this world?

I would delete the internet. I would delete AI too obviously. I would put a cap on how much money people could make but without telling them, because some people are only motivated by how much money they can make, and we need their money. I’d just take all their excess money and give it away to people who need it. Basically you have excess money if you start buying clothes for your dog. Create a rotating dictatorship too. Normal stuff.

What advice would you give to your younger self?

Move out as soon as possible and be kinder to yourself. It’s okay to believe in good things.

Do you believe in ghosts? Why or why not?

I believe in something. Not the dead ever coming back to visit us or send us messages, but we are stupid if we think that all we can see with our eyes is all that there is.

If you could send your love to anyone, who would it be and why?

Anybody who looks at me like I’m a human being and deserving of love and good things. I promise to earn it. I might fail but I’m trying.

Sadi MuktadirSadi Muktadir is a writer from Toronto. His debut novel, Land of No Regrets, was published by HarperCollins Canada and Hanover Square Press on May 21st, 2024. His short stories have appeared in Joyland Magazine, the Humber Literary Review, Blank Spaces, The New Quarterly and other places. He is a two-time finalist for the Thomas Morton Memorial Prize in Literary Excellence and twice shortlisted for the Malahat Open Season Awards for best short fiction. He works as an Editor, and continues to read and write. Find him online at @sadi_muktadir on both Twitter and Instagram.

Land of No Regrets A Novel by Sadi Muktadir

Buy Land of No Regrets

Publishers Description Nominated for the Toronto Book AwardA heart-wrenching story of four students who find hope and kinship amidst the challenges of growing up at a harrowing madrasa in rural Ontario.Nabil, freshly plucked from middle school in Scarborough, is struggling to find his place at Al Haque Islamic Academy. Between the intense religious studies and the new rules, he still longs for his past life of baseball, video games, comic books and girls. When he stumbles upon two students doing something they shouldn’t be doing, he quickly falls into their company and joins them in their misdeeds. Together with the new transfer student and unruly class clown, Farid, the group executes their rebellion.One day, while exploring the madrasa at night, the boys discover the diary of a student who lived on the grounds when it was an all-girls’ Catholic school. Cynthia Lewis’s words connect them to a bygone era and inspire them to hatch a plot to escape. They form a pact, and together, their ultimate decision sends them hurtling down a path that changes their lives forever.Strikingly original, and as poignant as it is humorous, Land of No Regrets is a vibrant, compassionate exploration of faith, friendship and the true value of freedom.Support Send My Love to Anyone

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Published on April 18, 2025 21:01

April 16, 2025

After I paid the ransom, I delivered my best seventeen-year-old lecture on ethics.

Kingdom of SlobsThis is a monthly(ish) newsletter about grief, mental health, books, neurodivergence, past and future goats, pop culture, love, pain, death, parenting, and whatever else my lazy/obsessive brain is occupied with. By Chelsea Wakelyn

I’ve been meaning to ask you is an interview series where Kathryn Mockler invites people to answer questions on being human.

I’ve been meaning to ask Chelsea Wakelyn …What is your first memory of existing?

I have a memory of waking up from a nap in my crib and watching light rippling in the leaves outside for a long time while I sucked my thumb.

What is your first memory of being creative (writing, art making, etc.)?

My mom would scribe stories for me, and she helped me fasten pages of my "books" together with yarn.

All of the books were some variation of: a princess runs away from home to live in the wilderness, and when she goes back her parents have forgotten she ever existed.

Also, in Grade 4, I came in second place in a district-wide writing contest, and I had an epic meltdown in the car on the way home from the ceremony because I was infuriated that I hadn’t won. My parents lectured me about being gracious. It worked. Now I’m gracious.

What is the best or worst dream you ever had?

The best dream I ever had was in childhood—I was six or seven. My mom was an RN, and she was on strike at the time.

I dreamed that the entire cast of Cheers came to my house and picketed in my driveway. I was their helper, there to serve them lemonade and snacks. They all loved me, but Cliff and Norm loved me the most. They thought I was adorable. Carla was scary but nice.

What is your favourite or significant coincidence story to tell?

This is a story that I rarely tell because it’s so unbelievable, but I love it so much that I’m going to share it now.

In 1999, when I was seventeen, I worked as a child-care attendant in a refugee camp in Tirana, Albania. I had to take a ferry from Bari, Italy to get to Albania. On the ferry, my passport was confiscated. There was a lot of corruption in Albania at the time because they were still in post-Soviet chaos, and their entire economy had basically been obliterated by a pyramid scheme. Anyway, the cops on the ferry held my passport for ransom. The Canadian consulate didn’t help me very much, and I decided to just pay the money. I took the bus back to Durres and went to some office, and it involved walking for a long time in the hot sun, and by the time I got there, I was feeling tired and self-righteous and ready to serve some cunt (which is my favourite Gen Z expression and I would like to thank my daughter for introducing me to it.)

After I paid the ransom, I delivered my best seventeen-year-old lecture on ethics. One of the cops who took my payment wasn’t much older than me, and he just laughed. He was handsome, which made it so much worse.

Six weeks later, I was on the ferry back to Italy. It was an overnight trip, and I didn’t have money for a cabin/bed, so I was trying very hard to sleep on the floor, when who should spawn before me but the handsome young passport thief cop, now in civilian clothes. He introduced himself (I wish I remembered his name) and apologized. He asked to buy me dinner, and I let him, and we ate together in the cafeteria. He said he’d quit his cop job and was heading to Italy to work in construction. I wondered if my lecture on ethics had worked, and assumed it must have.

Then he offered for me to sleep in his cabin. I said no, that’s weird. He said that what he meant was that he would give me his cabin.

He did. He gave me his cabin. He left me alone just as he’d promised, and I got a lovely night of unbothered sleep. In the morning when we docked, he walked me from the ferry all the way through the city of Bari and saw me off on the train, and as we were leaving he handed me this really big, square, ugly gold ring—the kind you see on tough grandpas. He didn’t ask for my email address or my phone number, he just gave me the ring and said goodbye.

I remind myself of this experience every time I start to believe that humans suck across the board.

Do you have a preferred emotion to experience? What is it and why? Or is there an emotion that you detest having and why?

I’m in a glass-half-empty mood, so I’ll share that I really dislike how I feel when I make a self-deprecating joke and someone takes it seriously and says, “awwwwww, no, don’t say that! Don’t be so mean to yourself!” And then I feel like I have to be grateful and smiley and shrink back into myself, when what I really want to say is, “Just fuck off, Brittany.”

Can you recount a time (that you're willing to share) when you were embarrassed?

I am embarrassed constantly, but one of the worst times was when I was at this gala for work with a bunch of physicians who were all presenting their quality improvement projects. I was new in the job, and my boss was introducing me around to all the Important People. I went to the bathroom, had a quick, normal pee, came out and continued to mingle in my highly anxious way.

I really do not enjoy forced social proximity with strangers or any expectation of graciousness or witty banter, but that night, I really felt like I was doing okay.

Then this woman tapped me on the shoulder, pulled me aside, and pointed out that the back of my dress was tucked into my sheer nylons and I had a ribbon of toilet paper hanging out the waistband. I was wearing a thong and had just exposed my full ham to a room full of Victoria’s most data-driven physicians of 2018.

What do you cherish most about this world?

I cherish my solitude and the little life I’ve built with my kids.

And I cherish great music in my headphones (in a Nina Nastasia phase right now.)

And books, because books are portals.

What would you like to change about this world?

I think a lot about the public school system. It failed me, and it has utterly failed my kids.

The concept of “inclusion” for neurodivergent people is lovely in theory, but it rarely happens in practice. I could go on with specific examples, but instead I’ll just say that I feel strongly that Western bureaucratic institutions as a whole traumatize and dehumanize individuals and perpetuate hierarchy and harm at a massive scale, and the public education system is most people’s first encounter with that harm.

Coming from a health care world, where there are teams dedicated to transformation and improvement, it astonishes me that parallel initiatives don’t exist in the public education system.

I want to see true pedagogical innovation: new models, new thinking, systems that actually meet kids where they’re at instead of trying to bend or crush them into shape.

What advice would you give to your younger self? Your younger self could be you at any age.

Your vulva is normal.

Do you believe in ghosts? Why or why not?

I would love to believe in ghosts, but I don’t. I have explicitly requested to be haunted. I am very open to haunting, but my dead beloveds have not haunted me, which means they either can’t be arsed or the universe does not allow such shenanigans.

About Chelsea WakelynChelsea Wakelyn's first novel, What Remains of Elsie Jane (Dundurn, '23) was shortlisted for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. She is currently at work on her third novel. She lives in Nanaimo with her two kids, two cats, and a doodle named Marceline the Vampire Queen. Her day job is in health care, and she writes a (very) sporadic and depressing newsletter on Substack called Kingdom of Slobs.

What Remains of Elsie Jane by Chelsea Wakelyn

Buy What Remains of Elsie Jane

Publisher’s Description“A poignant, laugh-out-loud funny, weird, and heartbreaking window into being bereft and being in love… a striking reminder that there can be beauty in devastation.” — EMILY AUSTIN, author of Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead

A heartbreaking and darkly funny portrait of a woman unravelling in the wake of tragedy.

Sam is dead, which means that Elsie Jane has just lost the brilliant, sensitive man she planned to grow old with. The early days of grief are a fog of work and single parenting. Too restless to sleep, Elsie pores over Sam’s old love letters, paces her house, and bickers with the ghosts of Sam and her dead parents night after night. As the year unfolds, she develops an obsession with a local murder mystery, attends a series of disastrous internet dates in search of a “replacement soulmate,” and solicits a space-time wizard via Craigslist, convinced he will help her forge a path through the cosmos back to Sam.

Examining the ceaseless labour of motherhood, the stigma of death by drug poisoning, and the allure of magical thinking in the wake of tragedy, What Remains of Elsie Jane is a heart-splitting reminder that grief is born from the depths of love.Support Send My Love to Anyone

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