Kathryn Mockler's Blog, page 11
April 16, 2025
Your vulva is normal.
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.
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
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 DeadA 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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April 14, 2025
April Gatherings with Junction Reads, Speech Dries Here on the Tongue, I've Been Meaning to Ask You, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Eric Topol and more.
Free and paid subscribers are invited to join the literary amplifier to get their literary posts and events some traction!
My NewsSpeech Dries Here on the Tongue: Poetry on Environmental Collapse and Mental Health
Edited by Rasiqra Revulva, Amanda Shankland & Hollay Ghadery has been listed in the Quill and Quire’s Spring Preview and CBC’s list of 39 spring poetry collections they are excited about.
I’m grateful to have contributed three poems to this anthology.
Order Speech Dries Here on the Tongue
I’m starting a new Send My Love to Anyone interview series called I’ve Been Meaning to Ask You.
But I’m not putting my guests through these questions without doing them myself, so here’s my self-interview to kick of the series.
It gets personal!
Kirby News
For National Poetry Month, sits down with Junction Reads host, Alison Gadsby to “spill the T” on She, Poetry is Queer, their upcoming Fairy, and other queeries. Thursday April 17th 7pm ET on InstagramLive.
What I’m Reading: The Gate of Memory edited by Brynn Saito, Brandon Shimoda. A Magnificent Loneliness Allison Benis White. Love, Joe The Selected Letters of Joe Brainard edited by Daniel Kane.
What I’m ReadingFrom “March on the St. Lawrence,” a new poem by Nyla Mutak in The Walrus
“An imperial literature prefers the realism of showing the imperfect domesticity within an American empire.”
One way to understand the dilemma of contemporary American literature in the age of Donald Trump is to see it as an imperial literature. The United States is a different kind of empire, exerting global hegemonic power through hundreds of military bases and a network of alliances, trade agreements, and financial and legal institutions, which add up to a US-led “international rules based order,” as Joe Biden called it.
For decades, American literature has played its role in this order as an arm of US soft power, showing the domestic life of empire while mostly ignoring the rest of the world. Remember that the aptly named Central Intelligence Agency understood quite well the importance of soft power and the role of art. During the Cold War, the CIA secretly funded or encouraged everything from the promotion of modernism in Europe to the importation of international writers to the United States, where they could be exposed to an American literary aesthetics.
From Viet Thanh Nguyen: Most American Literature is the Literature of Empire in Lit Hub
Global Round Up from
FEMINIST GIANTGlobal Roundup: Transgender Day of Visibility Around the World, Gaza Tent Beauty Salon Provides Self-Care, Grannies Football Tournament, Indigenous Women ArtistsWith the U.S. Capitol in the background, Kali wears a trans equality flag in her hair while attending a rally for the Trans Day of Visibility, on the National Mall, Monday, March 31, 2025, in Washing…Read more9 days ago · 15 likes · Mona EltahawyI also know that his Allahu Akbar here is the lament of a helpless soul. A lament that turns to God in the face of a world that has abandoned his people and says, “You are greater than all of this. Greater than our worries, than our pain, than our suffering. Greater than the bombs they drop, than the aid trucks they block at the border, than the UN vetoes, than the state-sanctioned abductions.”
Read Unpacking Allahu Akbar, beyond the Hollywood hype from
Idea for a story. Two writers, living in two chalets on opposite slopes of the valley, observe each other alternately. One of them is accustomed to write in the morning, the other in the afternoon. Mornings and afternoons, the writer who is not writing trains his spyglass on the one who is writing.
One of the two is a productive writer, the other a tormented writer. The tormented writer watches the productive writer filling pages with uniform lines, the manuscript growing in a pile of neat pages. In a little while the book will be finished: certainly a best seller—the tormented writer thinks with a certain contempt but also with envy. He considers the productive writer no more than a clever craftsman, capable of turning out machine-made novels catering to the taste of the public; but he cannot repress a strong feeling of envy for that man who expresses himself with such methodical self confidence.
from If on a Winter’s Night a Travel by Italo Calvino
Good piece on White Lotus:
It's Not You, It's The Media....because only wealthy White Lives MatterRead more5 days ago · 29 likes · 1 comment · Bhakti ShringarpureAnyway, this is all to say—the game is rigged, it’s been rigged, and yet we still play it. You always get to decide what matters to you and where you spend your money (or not). Is it worth it to you to spend $25 on a Publishers Weekly maybe? Is it worth it to you to spend $500 on ad space on Facebook or in Mother Jones or through a Goodreads giveaway? All up to you (or your publisher, depending!).
From “First in My Heart” by Cassie Mannes Murray in .
on What Makes a Good Writing Prompt from The Writer’s Journey
The Writer's Journey with Laura DavisWhat Makes a Great Writing Prompt?You may wonder why you should bother to use writing prompts—let’s face it; a lot of typical ones are boring. You may also assume that prompts are only appropriate for beginners; but I’ve found them invaluable for writers at every level. In my decades responding to prompts and creating and personalizing them for my students, I’ve learned a lot about what makes an effective, compelling, truth-producing prompt…Read morea month ago · 2 likes · 6 comments · laura davison Canadian book retailers lowing “their elbows”
Be sure of one thing though. If/When fascism comes to Canada, it will be cloaked in red maple leaves and facilitated by the “business community”. Every single fascist moment in history has been aided and abetted by elements of the “business community” and Canada is not going to be an exception to this iron law of political history.
Kwame EffCanadian Book Retailers Lower Their Elbows, Break Solidarity With #TeamCanadaThe Cracks In Fortress Canada Are Already Showing…Read more13 days ago · 8 likes · 1 comment · Kwame EffFrom ’s Ground Truths:
Ground TruthsThe Breakthrough Blood Test for Alzheimer's DiseaseRead more2 days ago · 436 likes · 15 comments · Eric TopolCanadian university teachers warned against travelling to the United States
What I’m Listening toBig News in Victoria!The Canadian Association of University Teachers released updated travel advice on Tuesday due to the “political landscape” created by President Donald Trump’s administration and reports of some Canadians encountering difficulties crossing the border.
The Victoria Book Prizes Society is excited and proud to announce the inaugural DC Reid Poetry Prize! Submissions are also open for 2025!!
SMLTA Literary Amplifier | April 14-20, 2025
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SMLTA Literary Amplifier | April 14-21, 2025
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.
SMLTA Literary AmplifierI 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.
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 an opportunity to connect with literary people with whom you feel some connection.
New Note/Post or Old Note/Post - Doesn’t MatterThe note or post does not have to be a new one. For notes and Substack in general, the algorithm works differently on Substack 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 and then include the text of the note or a quote from your post and a link.
GuidelinesWRITERS 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.]
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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 that didn’t get traction
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What you are reading
A funny anecdote
Writing advice you love
Writing advice you hate
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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.
I don’t like the feeling of falling in love.
But I’m not going to ask others these questions without first doing the interview myself, so here are my answers.
While I’ve got my guests lined up and can’t take interview requests, I do have a fundraising draw below that you can enter for a chance to win a one-year paid subscription to Send My Love to Anyone plus an invitation to participate in the interview series.
I’ve been meaning to ask myself …What is your first memory of existing?My first memory of being a person was at the age of two where I found myself buckled in a black rubber portable car seat and placed in our tiny back porch screaming my head off. I was wearing a white shirt and blue pants. This is probably the most vivid memory I have. I remember that back porch smelled like earth and mold and the spongy texture of the rubber on the car seat. I remember feeling hot and itchy. I remember salty snot running down nose and into my mouth.
A few minutes earlier, my mother said, “I’ll be right back” but then she wasn’t.
I remember feeling trapped and panicked and abandoned.
My parents hadn’t quite abandoned me though; they were just a few meters away in the backyard taking photos with my sister and my grandparents. But I could hear them outside which was all the more frustrating. They were so close and didn’t appear to hear me screaming. It felt like one of those nightmares where you scream and nothing comes out.
My father had graduated from teacher’s college that day, which was the cause for celebration, and I guess removing me from the car seat and including me in the photos would have been too much of a hassle.
Even as a little kid when we took out the family albums, I remember being insulted that I wasn’t in the photos.
“Where was I?” I asked even though I knew very well.
“I don’t remember,” my mother said.
“You left me in the back porch,” I told her. “In a car seat.”
“Oh, we wouldn’t have done that,” she said.
“You did.”
“You’d be too young to remember that.”
Oh, I remember.
For most, this wouldn’t be the biggest deal to not be included in a family photo, but my parents rarely took photos of me as a baby or child like they did with my sister.
“Oh we didn’t have a camera,” my mother would say, but sometimes I can’t help but think that my photo exclusion had something to do with the way I looked being born with what was then called “a lazy eye.”
Perhaps that’s what makes this memory vivid and painful.
What is your first memory of being creative (writing, art making, etc.)?My first memory of writing something creative was a rhyming poem about spring. I was probably around 7 or 8. I just wrote it unprompted and drew a little picture of a bird to go along with it.
What is the best or worst dream you ever had?Mine is a recurring dream where my head is in the clutches of a large dog's jaw.
He’s just pressing his teeth into my scull, but he’s not biting down.
Yet.
What is your favourite coincidence?Favourite isn’t the best word I’m realizing for the coincidence question. A strange and uncomfortable coincidence happened to me.
When I was in my 30s I was stalked by a man in his late 50s who was on my train commute from Toronto to London. The man claimed he taught in the Business school but I doubted it.
He started talking to me, and I quickly realized he was breaking social boundaries by standing too close, sitting in the empty seat beside me without asking, touching my arm, inviting me to his hotel room. Yes, he invited me to his hotel room.
He would approach me the minute I got to the station. I started changing my pattern of getting to the station early so I could get a good spot in line and would instead come late and get on last. I started having panic attacks about travelling and to make matters worse he had befriended all of the VIA employees on the train so I couldn’t even ask to be moved to another car.
One day my boss and few professors were sitting in the common area of the office and I mentioned that I was being stalked. I kind of made a joke about it, but my boss took it seriously and said you are being stalked, and it’s escalating.
He happened to have been to a conference where he learned about how to deal with this kind of behaviour, and he advised me to disrupt the stalking by being rude. He said the man is relying on you being nice and on social norms.
My boss said, “If he touches you, say, don’t touch me, loudly and firmly. If he asks to sit with you, say no. And when he says hello, look away.”
The thought of doing these things horrified me, but I was desperate and his advice was backed by research, so I gave it a try.
The next week, I got to the train station early and stood in line (my old habit that he had disrupted). When the man saw me, he bee-lined over and said hello. I turned my back leaving him standing there looking stupid in front of the other people in line.
And it worked. He walked away.
When we got on the train, he attempted to say hello, and I looked out the window and said nothing. Again he moved on.
The next time I got on the train, I saw a colleague of mine and asked if I could sit with him. And that seemed to be the final straw. The man never talked to me again.
*
Six months later, I was in Ottawa for a film conference. I took the train to the conference, and the the train car I was on had prearranged seating. I was sitting in the window seat and the stalker was seated in the row ahead of me in the aisle seat.
He noticed me right away and kept peering through the crack between the seats and popping his head up to look at me every so often.
He couldn’t sit still.
Because it was such a strange coincidence, I felt like I couldn’t alert the staff or even the person sitting next to me. I feared that I would sound crazy. The train was packed, and there likely wouldn’t be any free seats anyway.
About an hour into the trip, I noticed that the man had a flip cell phone with large text. He kept waving the cell phone around as if to get my attention, which it did.
Through the crack I could see the words “I love you.”
A chill ran through me, and I looked away.
Was he writing this to me? Or was he showing me that he had someone in his life that he was texting who he loved?
In any case, it was creepy.
I completely ignored him for the duration of the train ride, and I never saw him again.
Do you have a preferred emotion to experience? What is it and why? Or is there an emotion that you detest having and why?Perferred EmotionMy favourite emotion is the feeling of being in an ideal conversation with someone who I am totally comfortable with and do not feel judged.
In an ideal conversation I do not go home and replay every single thing I said and did.
In an ideal conversation time passes so quickly and I never want the conversation to never end.
The more far ranging the ideal conversation the better.
It’s also better if we don’t agree on everything but share some core values and respect each other’s point of view.
An ideal conversation is pleasant and exhilarating.
I think there should word for it as it kind of emotion but there isn’t.
Detested EmotionI don’t like the feeling of falling in love.
I like being in love, but the falling in love part is pretty excruciating.
It’s euphoric and then terrifying and then (can be) devastating.
Falling in love has only happened to me two times before I met my now husband 34 years ago which was the last time I fell in love.
So the being in love is pretty great, but the falling in love terrible.
Do not recommend.
Can you recount a time (that you're willing to share) when you were embarrassed?I feel like I am embarrassed most of the time and that being not embarrassed is the exception.
For me the dumbest thing to be embarrassed about is if I say hi the wrong way or if I think I see someone I know and it turns out to be a stranger.
These two things embarrass me most often even though they shouldn’t.
Like who cares?
But one of the most embarrassing things I can remember happened when I was teaching years ago. I had something called h-pylori (a potentially serious bacteria) which gives you a lot of gas and can make your farts smell like death.
Anyway I was teaching a three hour class when and I had to fart so badly all the way through it. It was the kind of gas where I was sweating I was in so much pain and every time I moved I feared the gas would be expelled.
Once the class left and room and was empty, I let out a bunch of very loud, very stinky farts. Like I had a condition and I’d been holding them in for three hours.
Just as I had relieved my gas, a student walked in as asked if she could talk to me. She had been waiting until the other students had left. Of course I said yes but was utterly morified as we tried to talk seriously over the stench of my very very eggy fart.
Mortifying.
Can you describe a strange or hilarious memory when something was the opposite of what you anticipated?I worked the night shift at a corn canning factory one summer when I was eighteen which incidentally was the subject of my first poetry book, Onion Man. I worked on a machine called a Brite stack where my job was to look at cans moving along the conveyor belt, and if they fell out of place, I would poke at them with an iron rod.
While staring that these cans one night, a poem popped into my head. I was not a writer at this time, so it was quite surprising to me and something I absolutely did not expect to happen during my shift which was normally pretty boring.
I wrote the poem out on the inside flap of my Player’s cigarette pack and then typed it up when I got home.
I don’t have the poem anymore, but it was about my grandfather who was dying of Alzheimer’s.
Typing up the poem was very satisfying, and I remember feeling good about what I had written. I didn’t write again until three years later when I went to university.
What do you cherish most about this world?My family and friends but also large bodies of water. The ease I get when standing by the water is unlike any other feeling in the world.
What would you like to change about this world?It feels like humanity is dust.
Maybe it never existed.
I would like there to be humanity in this world.
What advice would you give to your younger self? Your younger self could be you at any age.This could be advice to me at any age: You’re not doing yourself any favours by hating yourself so much.
Put your energy into something else.
Literally doing anything else including picking your nose would be a better way to spend time.
Do you believe in ghosts? Why or why not?Yes.
I once lived in an apartment with my sister. I regularly felt the presence of ghosts there.
She saw a ghost in that apartment. It was definitely haunted.
If you could send your love to anyone, who would it be and why?I am sending my love to the people of Palestine.
Please consider donating to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund.
If you donate at least $20 to the PCRF, send me a receipt by email or direct message, you’ll be entered in a draw. The winner will receive a year’s subscription to Send My Love to Anyone and be invited to do the I’ve Been Meaning to Ask You interview.
Join in the conversation!Pick your favourite question and answer it in the comments! I’d love to hear your stories and anecdotes!Kathryn Mockler is the author of the story collection Anecdotes (Book*hug Press, 2023), which won the 2024 Victoria Butler Book Prize and was a finalist for the 2024 Trillium Book Award, 2023 Danuta Gleed Literary Award, 2024 Fred Kerner Award, and 2024 VMI Besty Warland Between Genres Award. She co-edited the print anthology Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House Books, 2020). She runs the literary newsletter Send My Love to Anyone.My debut story collection, Anecdotes is available from Book*hug Press.
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When I was in my 30s I was stalked by a man in his late 50s who was on my train commute from Toronto to London.
But I’m not going to ask others these questions without first doing the interview myself, so here are my answers.
While I’ve got my guests lined up and can’t take interview requests, I do have a fundraising draw below that you can enter for a chance to win a free paid subscription to Send My Love to Anyone plus an invitation to participate in the interview series.
I’ve been meaning to ask myself …What is your first memory of existing?My first memory of being a person was at the age of two where I found myself buckled in a black rubber portable car seat and placed in our tiny back porch screaming my head off. I was wearing a white shirt and blue pants. This is probably the most vivid memory I have. I remember that back porch smelled like earth and mold and the spongy texture of the rubber on the car seat. I remember feeling hot and itchy. I remember salty snot running down nose and into my mouth.
A few minutes earlier, my mother said, “I’ll be right back” but then she wasn’t.
I remember feeling trapped and panicked and abandoned.
My parents hadn’t quite abandoned me though; they were just a few meters away in the backyard taking photos with my sister and my grandparents. But I could hear them outside which was all the more frustrating. They were so close and didn’t appear to hear me screaming. It felt like one of those nightmares where you scream and nothing comes out.
My father had graduated from teacher’s college that day, which was the cause for celebration, and I guess removing me from the car seat and including me in the photos would have been too much of a hassle.
Even as a little kid when we took out the family albums, I remember being insulted that I wasn’t in the photos.
“Where was I?” I asked even though I knew very well.
“I don’t remember,” my mother said.
“You left me in the back porch,” I told her. “In a car seat.”
“Oh, we wouldn’t have done that,” she said.
“You did.”
“You’d be too young to remember that.”
Oh, I remember.
For most, this wouldn’t be the biggest deal to not be included in a family photo, but my parents rarely took photos of me as a baby or child like they did with my sister.
“Oh we didn’t have a camera,” my mother would say, but sometimes I can’t help but think that my photo exclusion had something to do with the way I looked being born with what was then called “a lazy eye.”
Perhaps that’s what makes this memory vivid and painful.
What is your first memory of being creative (writing, art making, etc.)?My first memory of writing something creative was a rhyming poem about spring. I was probably around 7 or 8. I just wrote it unprompted and drew a little picture of a bird to go along with it.
What is the best or worst dream you ever had?Mine is a recurring dream where my head is in the clutches of a large dog's jaw.
He’s just pressing his teeth into my scull, but he’s not biting down.
Yet.
What is your favourite coincidence?Favourite isn’t the best word I’m realizing for the coincidence question. A strange and uncomfortable coincidence happened to me.
When I was in my 30s I was stalked by a man in his late 50s who was on my train commute from Toronto to London. The man claimed he taught in the Business school but I doubted it.
He started talking to me, and I quickly realized he was breaking social boundaries by standing too close, sitting in the empty seat beside me without asking, touching my arm, inviting me to his hotel room. Yes, he invited me to his hotel room.
He would approach me the minute I got to the station. I started changing my pattern of getting to the station early so I could get a good spot in line and would instead come late and get on last. I started having panic attacks about travelling and to make matters worse he had befriended all of the VIA employees on the train so I couldn’t even ask to be moved to another car.
One day my boss and few professors were sitting in the common area of the office and I mentioned that I was being stalked. I kind of made a joke about it, but my boss took it seriously and said you are being stalked, and it’s escalating.
He happened to have been to a conference where he learned about how to deal with this kind of behaviour, and he advised me to disrupt the stalking by being rude. He said the man is relying on you being nice and on social norms.
My boss said, “If he touches you, say, don’t touch me, loudly and firmly. If he asks to sit with you, say no. And when he says hello, look away.”
The thought of doing these things horrified me, but I was desperate and his advice was backed by research, so I gave it a try.
The next week, I got to the train station early and stood in line (my old habit that he had disrupted). When the man saw me, he bee-lined over and said hello. I turned my back leaving him standing there looking stupid in front of the other people in line.
And it worked. He walked away.
When we got on the train, he attempted to say hello, and I looked out the window and said nothing. Again he moved on.
The next time I got on the train, I saw a colleague of mine and asked if I could sit with him. And that seemed to be the final straw. The man never talked to me again.
*
Six months later, I was in Ottawa for a film conference. I took the train to the conference, and the the train car I was on had prearranged seating. I was sitting in the window seat and the stalker was seated in the row ahead of me in the aisle seat.
He noticed me right away and kept peering through the crack between the seats and popping his head up to look at me every so often.
He couldn’t sit still.
Because it was such a strange coincidence, I felt like I couldn’t alert the staff or even the person sitting next to me. I feared that I would sound crazy. The train was packed, and there likely wouldn’t be any free seats anyway.
About an hour into the trip, I noticed that the man had a flip cell phone with large text. He kept waving the cell phone around as if to get my attention, which it did.
Through the crack I could see the words “I love you.”
A chill ran through me, and I looked away.
Was he writing this to me? Or was he showing me that he had someone in his life that he was texting who he loved?
In any case, it was creepy.
I completely ignored him for the duration of the train ride, and I never saw him again.
Do you have a preferred emotion to experience? What is it and why? Or is there an emotion that you detest having and why?Perferred EmotionMy favourite emotion is the feeling of being in an ideal conversation with someone who I am totally comfortable with and do not feel judged.
In an ideal conversation I do not go home and replay every single thing I said and did.
In an ideal conversation time passes so quickly and I never want the conversation to never end.
The more far ranging the ideal conversation the better.
It’s also better if we don’t agree on everything but share some core values and respect each other’s point of view.
An ideal conversation is pleasant and exhilarating.
I think there should word for it as it kind of emotion but there isn’t.
Detested EmotionI don’t like the feeling of falling in love.
I like being in love, but the falling in love part is pretty excruciating.
It’s euphoric and then terrifying and then (can be) devastating.
Falling in love has only happened to me two times before I met my now husband 34 years ago which was the last time I fell in love.
So the being in love is pretty great, but the falling in love terrible.
Do not recommend.
Can you recount a time (that you're willing to share) when you were embarrassed?I feel like I am embarrassed most of the time and that being not embarrassed is the exception.
For me the dumbest thing to be embarrassed about is if I say hi the wrong way or if I think I see someone I know and it turns out to be a stranger.
These two things embarrass me most often even though they shouldn’t.
Like who cares?
But one of the most embarrassing things I can remember happened when I was teaching years ago. I had something called h-pylori (a potentially serious bacteria) which gives you a lot of gas and can make your farts smell like death.
Anyway I was teaching a three hour class when and I had to fart so badly all the way through it. It was the kind of gas where I was sweating I was in so much pain and every time I moved I feared the gas would be expelled.
Once the class left and room and was empty, I let out a bunch of very loud, very stinky farts. Like I had a condition and I’d been holding them in for three hours.
Just as I had relieved my gas, a student walked in as asked if she could talk to me. She had been waiting until the other students had left. Of course I said yes but was utterly morified as we tried to talk seriously over the stench of my very very eggy fart.
Mortifying.
Can you describe a strange or hilarious memory when something was the opposite of what you anticipated?I worked the night shift at a corn canning factory one summer when I was eighteen which incidentally was the subject of my first poetry book, Onion Man. I worked on a machine called a Brite stack where my job was to look at cans moving along the conveyor belt, and if they fell out of place, I would poke at them with an iron rod.
While staring that these cans one night, a poem popped into my head. I was not a writer at this time, so it was quite surprising to me and something I absolutely did not expect to happen during my shift which was normally pretty boring.
I wrote the poem out on the inside flap of my Player’s cigarette pack and then typed it up when I got home.
I don’t have the poem anymore, but it was about my grandfather who was dying of Alzheimer’s.
Typing up the poem was very satisfying, and I remember feeling good about what I had written. I didn’t write again until three years later when I went to university.
What do you cherish most about this world?My family and friends but also large bodies of water. The ease I get when standing by the water is unlike any other feeling in the world.
What would you like to change about this world?It feels like humanity is dust.
Maybe it never existed.
I would like there to be humanity in this world.
What advice would you give to your younger self? Your younger self could be you at any age.This could be advice to me at any age: You’re not doing yourself any favours by hating yourself so much.
Put your energy into something else.
Literally doing anything else including picking your nose would be a better way to spend time.
Do you believe in ghosts? Why or why not?Yes.
I once lived in an apartment with my sister. I regularly felt the presence of ghosts there.
She saw a ghost in that apartment. It was definitely haunted.
If you could send your love to anyone, who would it be and why?I am sending my love to the people of Palestine.
Please consider donating to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund.
If you donate at least $20 to the PCRF, send me a receipt by email or direct message, you’ll be entered in a draw. The winner will receive a year’s subscription to Send My Love to Anyone and be invited to do the I’ve Been Meaning to Ask You interview.
Join in the conversation!Pick your favourite question and answer it in the comments! I’d love to hear your stories and anecdotes!Kathryn Mockler is the author of the story collection Anecdotes (Book*hug Press, 2023), which won the 2024 Victoria Butler Book Prize and was a finalist for the 2024 Trillium Book Award, 2023 Danuta Gleed Literary Award, 2024 Fred Kerner Award, and 2024 VMI Besty Warland Between Genres Award. She co-edited the print anthology Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House Books, 2020). She runs the literary newsletter Send My Love to Anyone.My debut story collection, Anecdotes is available from Book*hug Press.
Support Send My Love to AnyoneSupport Send My Love to Anyone by signing up for a monthly or yearly subscription, liking this post, or sharing it
Big heartfelt thanks to all of the subscribers and contributors who make this project possible!
ConnectBluesky | Instagram | Archive | Contributors | Subscribe | About SMLTA
I've been meaning to ask you
But I’m not going to ask others these questions without first doing the interview myself, so here are my answers.
What is your first memory of existing?My first memory of being a person was at the age of two where I found myself buckled in a black rubber portable car seat and placed in our tiny back porch screaming my head off. I was wearing a white shirt and blue pants. This is probably the most vivid memory I have. I remember that back porch smelled like earth and mold and the spongy texture of the rubber on the car seat. I remember feeling hot and itchy. I remember salty snot running down nose and into my mouth.
A few minutes earlier, my mother said, “I’ll be right back” but then she wasn’t.
I remember feeling trapped and panicked and abandoned.
My parents hadn’t quite abandoned me though; they were just a few meters away in the backyard taking photos with my sister and my grandparents. But I could hear them outside which was all the more frustrating. They were so close and didn’t appear to hear me screaming. It felt like one of those nightmares where you scream and nothing comes out but you can hear yourself screaming.
My father had graduated from teacher’s college that day, which was the cause for celebration, and I guess removing me from the car seat and including me in the photos would have been too much of a hassle.
Even as a little kid when we took out the family albums, I remember being insulted that I wasn’t in the photos.
“Where was I?” I asked even though I knew very well.
“I don’t remember,” my mother said.
“You left me in the back porch,” I told her. “In a car seat.”
“Oh, we wouldn’t have done that,” she said.
“You did.”
“You’d be too young to remember that.”
Oh, I remember.
What is your first memory of being creative (writing, art making, etc.)?My first memory of writing something creative was a rhyming poem about spring. I was probably around 7 or 8. I just wrote it unprompted and drew a little picture of a bird to go along with it. I know it had the words “spring is a time” but that’s all I remember.
What is the best or worst dream you ever had?Mine is a recurring dream where my head is in the clutches of a large dog's jaw.
He’s just pressing his teeth into my scull, but he’s not biting down.
Yet.
What is your favourite coincidence?Favourite isn’t the best word I’m realizing for the coincidence question. A strange and uncomfortable coincidence happened to me.
When I was in my 30s I was stalked by a man in his late 50s who was on my train commute from Toronto to London. The man claimed he taught in the Business school but I doubted it.
He started talking to me, and I quickly realized he was breaking social boundaries by standing too close, sitting in the empty seat beside me without asking, touching my arm, inviting me to his hotel room. Yes he invited me to his hotel room.
He would approach me the minute I got to the station. I started changing my pattern of getting to the station early so I could get a good spot in line and would instead come late and get on last. I started having panic attacks about travelling and to make matters worse he had befriended all of the VIA employees on the train so I couldn’t even ask to be moved to another car.
One day my boss and few professors were sitting in the common area of the office and I mentioned that I was being stalked. I kind of made a joke about it, but my boss took is seriously and said you are being stalked and it’s escalating.
He happened to have been to a conference where he learned about how to deal with this kind of behaviour, and he advised me to disrupt the stalking by being rude. He said the man is relying on you being nice and on social norms.
My boss said, “If he touches you, say, don’t touch me, loudly and firmly. If he asks to sit with you, say no. And when he says hello, look away.”
The thought of doing these things horrified me, but I was desperate and his advice was backed by research, so I gave it a try.
The next week, I got to the train station early and stood in line (my old habit that he had disrupted). When the man saw me, he bee-lined over and said hello. I turned my back leaving him standing there looking stupid in front of the other people in line.
And it worked. He walked away.
When we got on the train, he attempted to say hello, and I looked out the window and said nothing. Again he moved on.
The next time I got on the train, I saw a colleague of mine and asked if I could sit with him. And that seemed to be the final straw. The man never talked to me again.
Six months later, I was in Ottawa for a film conference. I took the train to the conference, and the the train car I was on had prearranged seating. I was sitting in the window seat and the stalker was seated in the row ahead of me in the aisle seat.
He noticed me right away and kept peering through the crack between the seats and popping his head up to look at me every so often.
He couldn’t sit still.
I had a panic attack, but I felt like I couldn’t alert the staff or even the person sitting next to me. I feared that I would sound crazy. The train was packed, and there likely wouldn’t be any free seats anyway.
About an hour into the trip, I noticed that the man had a flip cell phone with large text. He kept waving the cell phone around as if to get my attention which it did.
Through the crack I could see the words “I love you.”
A chill ran through me, and I looked away.
Was he writing this to me? Or was he showing me that he had someone in his life that he was texting who he loved.
In any case, it was creepy.
I completely ignored him for the duration of the train ride, and I never saw him again.
Do you have a preferred emotion to experience? What is it and why? Or is there an emotion that you detest having and why?Perferred EmotionMy favourite emotion is the feeling of being in an ideal conversation with someone who I am totally comfortable with and do not feel judged.
In an ideal conversation I do not go home and replay every single thing I said and did.
In an ideal conversation time passes so quickly and I never want the conversation to never end.
The more far ranging the ideal conversation the better.
It’s also better if we don’t agree on everything but share some core values and respect each other’s point of view.
An ideal conversation is pleasant and exhilarating.
I think there should word for it as it kind of emotion but there isn’t.
Detested EmotionI don’t like the feeling of falling in love.
I like being in love, but the falling in love part is pretty excruciating.
It’s euphoric and then terrifying and then (can be) devastating.
Falling in love has only happened to me two times before I met my now husband 34 years ago which was the last time I fell in love.
So the being in love is pretty great, but the falling in love terrible.
Do not recommend.
Can you recount a time (that you're willing to share) when you were embarrassed?I feel like I am embarrassed most of the time and that being not embarrassed is the exceptation.
Can you describe a strange or hilarious memory when something was the opposite of what you anticipated?I worked the night shift at a corn canning factory one summer when I was eighteen which incidentally was the subject of my first poetry book, Onion Man. I worked on a machine called a Brite stack where my job was to look at cans moving along the conveyor belt, and if they fell out of place, I would poke at them with an iron rod.
While staring that these cans one night, a poem popped into my head. I was not a writer at this time, so it was quite surprising to me and something absolutely did not expect to happen during my shift which was normally pretty boring.
I wrote the poem out on the inside flap of my Player’s cigarette pack and then typed it up when I got home.
I don’t have the poem anymore, but it was about my grandfather who was dying of Alzheimer’s.
Typing up the poem was very satisfying, and I remember feeling good about what I had written. I didn’t write again until three years later when I went to university.
What do you cherish most about this world?My family and friends but also large bodies of water. The ease I get when standing by the water is unlike any other feeling in the world.
What would you like to change about this world?It feels like humanity is dust.
Maybe it never existed.
I would like there to be humanity in this world.
What advice would you give to your younger self? Your younger self could be you at any age.This could be advice to me at any age: You’re not doing yourself any favours by hating yourself so much.
Put your energy into something else.
Literally doing anything else including picking your nose would be a better way to spend time.
Do you believe in ghosts? Why or why not?Yes.
I once lived in an apartment with my sister. I regularly felt the presence of ghosts there.
Her partner also saw a ghost in that apartment. It was definitely haunted.
If you could send your love to anyone, who would it be and why?I am sending my love to the people of Palestine.
Please consider donating to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund.
Kathryn Mockler is the author of the story collection Anecdotes (Book*hug Press, 2023), which won the 2024 Victoria Butler Book Prize and was a finalist for the 2024 Trillium Book Award, 2023 Danuta Gleed Literary Award, 2024 Fred Kerner Award, and 2024 VMI Besty Warland Between Genres Award. She co-edited the print anthology Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House Books, 2020). She runs the literary newsletter Send My Love to Anyone.My debut story collection, Anecdotes is available from Book*hug Press.
Support Send My Love to AnyoneSupport Send My Love to Anyone by signing up for a monthly or yearly subscription, liking this post, or sharing it
Big heartfelt thanks to all of the subscribers and contributors who make this project possible!
ConnectBluesky | Instagram | Archive | Contributors | Subscribe | About SMLTA
April 10, 2025
I've been meaning to ask you
I’ve Been Meaning to Ask You is a new interview series where Kathyrn Mockler asks people questions on being human.
While I’ve got my guests lined up and can’t take interview requests, I do have a fundraising draw that you can enter for a chance to win a one-year paid subscription to Send My Love to Anyone plus an invitation to participate in the interview series.
Donate at least $20 to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund and send me your donation receipt by DM or email to be entered into the draw!
One winner will be chosen monthly.
Here are a couple of recent interviews:
Support Send My Love to AnyoneSupport Send My Love to Anyone by signing up for a monthly or yearly subscription, liking this post, or sharing it
Big heartfelt thanks to all of the subscribers and contributors who make this project possible!
ConnectBluesky | Instagram | Archive | Contributors | Subscribe | About SMLTA
April 7, 2025
SMLTA Literary Amplifier | April 7-13, 2025
Photo by Jens MahnkeThe 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.
SMLTA Literary AmplifierI 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.
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 an opportunity to connect with literary people with whom you feel some connection.
New Note/Post or Old Note/Post - Doesn’t MatterThe note or post does not have to be a new one. For notes and Substack in general, the algorithm works differently on Substack 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 and then include the text of the note or a quote from your post and a link.
GuidelinesWRITERS 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 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
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.
SMLTA Literary Amplifier | April 7, 2025
Photo by Jens MahnkeThe 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.
I will posted it to the website and in the chat.
It will not go out by email as I don’t flood inboxes.
SMLTA Literary AmplifierI 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.
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 an opportunity to connect with literary people with whom you feel some connection.
New Note/Post or Old Note/Post - Doesn’t MatterThe note or post does not have to be a new one. For notes and Substack in general, the algorithm works differently on Substack than on other social media outlets.
Often notes will get traction weeks after they are posted.
We’ll start with four notes per week per writer!
GuidelinesWRITERS in the comments below, copy your note and a link to the note. 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 three 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 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
Remember to put the link in the comment so we can engage with it off this discussion.
The literary amplifier is for free or paid subscribers of Send My Love to Anyone.
