Kathryn Mockler's Blog, page 19
December 1, 2024
The way a frenzied starling / builds her nest in May, / one clutch of twigs / at a time.
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published
Votive
by Annick MacAskillGaspereau Press, 2024Votive considers various forms of devotion and our often fraught attempts to respond to “our confusion, our curiosity.” These are poems concerned with the way we use stories, old and new, to connect our experiences, and the way we persist in our quest for love, hope and meaning when language falters —“What we couldn’t say we found in the skies.” MacAskill’s great gift resides in her facility for coaxing things evasive and intuitive into crisp form and language, in voicing what “so quickly I /knew and knew and knew.”
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!
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November 29, 2024
Read Palestine Week Nov 29-Dec 5, 2024
Check out the 20 free e-books from the Publishers for Palestine website!
See below for resources from Publishers for Palestine:
November 29th, 2024, and today is the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, and the first day of Read Palestine Week.
We are launching the week with a 24-hour global reading that begins in Palestine and will stream live over the course of the day and from multiple locations around the world.
Tune in here:
Image credit: Publishers for Palestine
Image credit: Publishers for Palestine
Get more from Kathryn Mockler in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the app
November 27, 2024
Author Substacks to Follow
collected a wonderful list of The 20 Best Creative Writing Substacks in 2023.
I’m doing a round up of my favourite Turtle Island/Canadian Substacks that I actually read (in alphabetical order) by authors, reviewers, archivists, coaches, and more!
Please note this is not comprehensive—it’s just what I’m reading right now!
Share your favourites with the SMLTA readers in the comments!Art / Life: Scribblings by Michael Bryson is an excellent newsletter for reviews and fiction.
Art / Life: Scribblings by Michael BrysonWriting That Goes Everywhere, ManKerry Clare (author most recently of Asking for a Friend) has been blogging for 23 years! Check out her amazing literary podcast BOOKSPO
Pickle Me ThisA monthly digest of posts from my (23 year old!) blog, including news and book reviews, plus a featured essay for paid subscribers.By Kerry ClareLooking for very short strange fiction? Then you will like George Toles’ Substack! Toles is not only a short fiction writer but also has co-written many of Guy Maddin’s films such as The Saddest Music in the World, Brand Upon the Brain, My Winnipeg and more.George TolesShort fiction by George TolesLilian Nattel’s (author most recently of Only Sisters) new Substack will discuss books by women from around the world. I love Lilian’s reviews on TikTok. Very excited for this new newsletter.
BOOKS AND ROSESThis is Lilian's antidote to despair: finding connection, meaning, beauty in words, art, solidarity, reading books by women around the world. Lilian Nattel has been an international, bestselling novelist with the big five since 1997. By Lilian NattelAward-winning poet ’s beautiful newsletter focuses on poetry, mental health/illness, (im)migration, conflict, the African diaspora.Feud(al)by Tolu OloruntobaBy Tolu OloruntobaKai Cheng Thom’s (author of Falling Back in Love with Being Human Letters to Lost Souls) most recent posts on what What Writers Owe the Dead: On Poetry, Power, Politics & Responsibility and How To Read a Trans Fem Writer are spectacular. 
Kai Cheng ThomLetters from an extremist for love Paul Seesequasis’ (author of Blanket Toss Under Midnight Sun) has brought his 10-year to Substack! Not to be missed!
Indigenous Archival Photo Project All things Indigenous imagery: archival and contemporary By Paul Seesequasis shares reviews and excerpts.
BookwormYour weekly dose of exclusive reviews, book excerpts, and more!By Literary Review of CanadaVery excited for this new Subtack .
Bubble Pop with Rachel GilmoreI'm Rachel Gilmore. I'm your least favourite person's least favourite journalist. Let's pop your bubble✨Rachel Thompson is an author and literary magazine editor whose Substack is a terrific resource for writers demystifying the world of literary magazine publishing. 
Lit Mag LoveI’m Rachel, a literary magazine editor passionate about demystifying the world of literary magazines and helping readers find their place within it. This newsletter is my way of connecting with you, offering practical advice and encouragement.By Rachel Thompson • EditorHabiba’s Substack by focuses on being Palestinian and literary life. A must read!
Habiba’s SubstackA personal set of reflections, aperçus, anecdotes, and ruminations on #Palestine #BeingPalestinian #literaryfigures #lit_scene #lit_thoughts By Quds Mon AmourThe Reframables hosted by Rebecca Davey and Natalie Davey is a podcast looking for fresh perspectives. Especially loved the conversations with Canisia Lubrin and Claudia Day
Reframeables Podcast and NewsletterA podcast and newsletter from two writer-sisters with soft boundaries. We serve up creative conversations with the best artists and thinkers to make us better. Always looking for fresh perspectives.By Rebecca Davey offers publishing industry insider tips, interviews, blogs, and more. Great for those who are looking for an agent.
The Shit No One Tells You About WritingA twice weekly newsletter chock-full of guidance and support from publishing industry insiders. Expect author interviews, guest blogs, giveaways, and more! By The Shit About Writing Team’s Writer Therapy has long been a favourite. Sonal gives amazing writing advice like how to write after illness and what to do if you’ve been rejected everywhere!
Writer TherapyLike Dear Abby, but for writersBy Sonal ChampseeJessica Johnston (writer, journalist, and past EIC of The Walrus) runs! Lots of tips and expert knowledge!
Writing for People Who Hate WritingWhat I learned as the editor-in-chief of The Walrus and throughout my career as an award-winning magazine and newspaper journalist about writing in the face of defeat.By Jessica JohnsonWhat are your favourite Substacks? Share in the comments:Recommended by SMLTA ReadersOne day left for the virtual auction to raise mutual aid funds for Gaza, Lebanon, and Sudan.
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
November 24, 2024
Clinton and I scream just to hear each other.
Illustration by David PoolmanOnion ManClinton and I take off our motorcycle helmets and have a smoke before we go in. Heat from the tarmac rises like steam from coffee. My feet burn from blisters, from steel-toed boots. The factory doors are as heavy as the doors of Simpson-Sears. The warm air makes our skin damp, and it’s as hard to breathe in here as it is in a bathroom after a hot shower. We walk past the women on the line who wear white coats, plastic gloves, hairnets. We make sure our hard hats are in place in case the foreman sees us. We walk to the warehouse—end of the line. Only three women work here: Clinton’s mom on the computer, Brenda in the lab, and me. Clinton works the Britestack, and I stand across from him for ten hours watching unlabelled cans of corn. I make sure each one is in place so he can move them a thousand at a time with a magnet, off the conveyor belt, and down to the forklift drivers. It is so loud in here. Clinton and I scream just to hear each other. Half the time, I have no idea what he is saying.
PlaylistExtrasAbout Onion ManOnion Man, was my first published full-length book. It was also my first foray into autofictional storytelling. Although it is based on some of my experiences working in a factory, living in London, Ontario, and coping with growing up in an alcoholic home, names, characters, details, and parts of the story have been fictionalized.
Long Path to PublicationOnion Man had a long path to publication. I started writing it in my mid-twenties, but it didn’t get published until I turned forty. I never gave up on the manuscript and continued to edit it and send it out faithfully throughout the years. It was shortlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize and excerpts of it had been published in Canadian literary journals. It received an OAC grant and was nominated for the K.M Hunter Prize. I had just enough hits on this manuscript that kept me going, kept me revising instead of just shoving it in a drawer.
Onion Man had pretty much been rejected by every small Canadian and many US presses until Tightrope Books picked it up in 2011. Shirarose Wilensky who worked at Tightrope at the time edited the manuscript. She was the perfect editor for this book. She provided me with keen editorial insights and shared with me materials about children of alcoholics giving me for the first time (I had not yet embarked on therapy) major insight into how my childhood impacted me as an adult. I will always be grateful for her time and attention to this book and the care with which she handled the subject matter.
The book did reasonably well for a debut. It was longlisted for the Relit Award and got some lovely reviews in journals. Over the years sometimes readers would tell me that they enjoyed it, and often those readers were young women, which always delighted me.
A few years ago Tightrope Books closed as is common in the small press world. The rights were returned to me, and I bought up the remaining copies of the book but haven’t been motivated to sell them. I have long accepted that the book graveyard is part of the publishing process.
Breathing New Life into Onion ManBut a couple of weeks ago, I started thinking about what I could do with this book that was new, so I asked friends on Facebook what they were doing in this situation. The responses ranged from nothing to submitting to another press, to E-book publishing to self-publishing to making an audiobook.
I wasn’t interested in trying to find another publisher as it felt like doing the same thing twice. But I would like to see Onion Man live on in a new format, and that’s when I decided that I would serialize it on Substack and include some extras: audio recordings, new stories, a playlist, photos, and behind-the-scenes notes about the book.
Onion Man was first presented as a novel-in-verse, but I will be recreating it here as prose. I’m also giving myself creative license to make any changes, including adding some pieces that were cut and writing new ones, so this will be an Onion Man, 2.0.
Why Now?There are themes in this book that are still relevant—addiction, mental health, bodily autonomy, climate crisis (yes some of us were worried about the environment in the late 80s), intimate partner violence, class, Alzheimer’s.
Description of Onion ManOnion Man is a sparse and intense series of linked poems told from the point of view of an eighteen-year-old girl working for the summer at a corn-canning factory in the 1980s. The poems follow her relationships with her factory job, her boyfriend, her alcoholic mother, her terminally ill grandfather, and the man who every night “peels an onion and eats it as if it were an apple.
© Copyright 2024 | Kathryn Mockler | All rights reserved.
Thanks for reading Send My Love to Anyone! This post is public so feel free to share it.
» Continue to Episode 2 (Coming Soon)
All EpisodesIf you like Onion Man, you might like Anecdotes by Kathryn Mockler, winner of the 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.
Enter this book giveaway to help Palestinian families in Gaza for a chance to win a copy of Anecdotes.
November 23, 2024
Why was it rejected so much?
Mom: I could never write creatively.
Me: Well neither could I. But I just kept doing it and failing and doing it and failing and doing it failing and then getting rejected and getting rejected and getting rejected. You know my first book was rejected over 50 times. And if it wasn’t 50, it felt like 50.
Mom: What book was that?
Me: My first poetry book.
Mom: Why was it rejected so much?
Me: I don't know.
Mom: How dare they?
Joyce Mockler (1950s)Thanks Mom! Do you have a rejection story? Share in the comments.
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
November 22, 2024
Gatherings: Murray Sinclair, Francesca Albanese, Writers' Trust Speeches, Public Domain Movies, Farzana Doctor, Between the Covers, Science Fiction and the Alt-Right, Onion Man 2.0., and more
Send My Love to Anyone got some new followers and subscribers from the above post.
Welcome! I’m glad you’re here. I’m also glad you have a sense of what this newsletter is all about!
You can find out more about Send My Love to Anyone in the About section. I don’t like to flood inboxes, so I only send the newsletter out once or twice per month—once for the issue and once for the Gatherings section.
However, I do update the website a couple times a week if you’re looking for something to read or a writing prompt.
Gatherings is a section of Send My Love to Anyone where I share what I’ve been reading, watching, listening to, or appreciating over the past month. I also share contributor news (when they send it to me—please send it to me contributors!) and literary events in Canada or online.
I’m curious about the ways in which literary arts connect with the world, our humanity, and our environment.
And I have a particular interest in how protest and resistance intersects with literary and art communities. I’m writing a novel about surveillance and protest, so some of those interests and research are reflected in my selections for Gatherings.
I also love all things creativity, writing process, film, music, art, small press, and book marketing.
I’ve started a new podcast on SMLTA where I’m serializing my first book Onion Man, an autofictional novel-in-verse about living in an alcoholic home and working at corn canning factory in the late 1980s. You can have a sneak peek at Episode 1 of Onion Man 2.0.
Hope you enjoy!
Kathryn
Send My Love to Anyone is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support this project, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
GatheringsSome GoodnessI’m participating in this auction:
LibroI just switched from Audible to Libro for audiobooks where my purchases support Another Story Bookshop. You can pick any independent bookstore that you want. So far it’s a great alternative to the Amazon monster.
Indie BookstoresHere’s a link for Canadian’s to shop at Indie Bookstores!
EventsCensorship in Newsrooms anotherstorybookshop
A post shared by @anotherstorybookshopToronto Event - Another Story Bookshop and West End Phoenix present a not-to-be-missed evening of conversation around Censorship in Newsrooms.
With Pacinthe Mattar, Emma Paling, Shree Paradkar and Olivia Bowden. Moderated by Stacy Lee Kong.
Many of us have been alarmed by the censorship occuring in our newsrooms around reporting on the horrors out of G*za. Reporters who push back against this often face professional consequences - and it seems to be more often women and women of colour who are willing to speak up. Another Story Bookshop and the West End Phoenix are hosting a conversation at It's Ok* Studios with Toronto reporters to discuss their experiences.
$10, no one will be turned away at the event for lack of funds. All proceeds will go towards venue rental and speaker honorariums.
Visit link in IG post to register.
Recommended ViewingRIP Murray Sinclair, the first Indigenous judge appointed in Manitoba and chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).
Habiba’s SubstackPalestinian American poet Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, 2024 winner of the National Book Award (U.S.A.)Read more4 days ago · 15 likes · 1 comment · Quds Mon AmourFrancesca Albanese at the University of TorontoAlbanese is an Italian international lawyer and academic and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories.
Speeches from the Writers’ Trust Awards.Saeed Teebi introducing Atwood-Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize:
Madeleine Theinwriterstrust
A post shared by @writerstrustRita Wongwriterstrust
A post shared by @writerstrustSarah O’Learywriterstrust
A post shared by @writerstrustKagiso Lesego MolopeLet’s not forget Kagiso Lesego Molope’s brave words and stance earlier this year at the Politics and the Pen event where she was kicked out.
legshernandez
A post shared by @legshernandezRead Palestinian Director Rashid Masharawi on Producing 22 Short Films in Gaza During the War by John Bleasdale in VarietyPublic Doman Movies
At the Taormina Film Festival, Palestinian film director Rashid Masharawi presented “From Ground Zero,” a compilation of 22 short films, shot by filmmakers inside the Gaza Strip during the current war. He spoke with Variety about the process of making the film and what it means to face appalling conditions with art.
“I was born and grew up in Gaza, I made many films in Gaza as a director and producer, and this time after I saw all what’s going on, I said, ‘No, I am not going to make a film, instead, I’m going to give the chance to the Palestinian filmmakers, and filmmakers who are in Gaza now, sharing what’s going on with the people,'” Masharawi said.
Public Domain MoviesClassic Movies in the Public Domain. Best Feature Films, Videos and Cartoons - Full MoviesBy Frank 🎥Artist Basel Elmaqosui: “ Don’t Cry for Gaza….Cry for yourself.”basel_elmaqosui“Jabalia camp... So we don't forget... Mountains the heart is bleeding .... I paint with love .. I don't paint with war, I paint to try to stay an awake and sensitive human being and that war does not remove my dignity and humanity #مازال_عايشين Don't Cry for Gaza... Cry for yourself, don't cry for Gaza... Cry to yourself”
A post shared by @basel_elmaqosuiDennis Cooper and Derek McCormack:Recommended ListeningRIP Dorothy Allison. Farzana DoctorListen to 5 Steps To Unblend When Feeling Overwhelmed by Farzana Doctor
Between the Covers with Lidia Yuknavitch:Recommended ReadingRead Jody Chan’s Boycott Giller Speech, “Here, today, we throw our labour into the gears of the death machine.” is on Substack! Yay!
On Monday night, the gala for the Giller Prize, Canada’s most prestigious literary award, took place at Toronto’s Park Hyatt hotel. The Giller Foundation has been for over a year due to its corporate sponsors’ ties to Israel’s largest arms manufacturer, the Israeli Defense Forces, and an Israeli real estate company with investments in West Bank settlements.
Ahead of this year’s gala, more than 200 Canadian authors refused to submit their books for Giller Prize consideration or participate in any Giller-related publicity until the Foundation committed to dropping their partnerships with these corporate sponsors.
Bubble Pop with Rachel GilmoreI'm Rachel Gilmore. I'm your least favourite person's least favourite journalist. Let's pop your bubble✨Read Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide by Fargo Tbakhi in Protean (with thanks to for the h/t)Above all, Craft is the result of market forces; it is therefore the result of imperial forces, as the two are so inextricably bound up together as to be one and the same. The Craft which is taught in Western institutions, taken up and reproduced by Western publishers, literary institutions, and awards bodies, is a set of regulatory ideas which curtail forms of speech that might enact real danger to the constellation of economic and social values which are, as I write this, facilitating genocide in Palestine and elsewhere across the globe. If, as Audre Lorde taught us, the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house, then Craft is the process by which our own real liberatory tools are dulled, confiscated, and replaced. We believe our words sharper than they turn out to be. We play with toy hammers and think we can break down concrete. We think a spoon is a saw.
Writers are freaking out about this with good reason:
Read HarperCollins is selling their authors’ work to AI tech by Drew Broussard in Lit HubOn Friday, author Daniel Kibblesmith posted a series of screenshots on Bluesky in order to share a concerning email he received from the agency who’d repped him on his children’s book Santa’s Husband: the book’s publisher, HarperCollins, was offering $2,500 (non-negotiable) for the right to use the book in an AI training deal that they’d signed with an anonymous “large tech company.”
Jess Maginity reviews Jordan S. Carroll’s Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right.
Read Whose Future Is It Anyway? by Jess Maginity in the LA Review of BooksIN THE 1970s, a group of French right-wing intellectuals coalesced around the idea that cultural influence, not direct political action, determines the future. Led by Alain de Benoist, the Research and Study Group for European Civilization (GRECE) borrowed heavily from communist intellectual Antonio Gramsci to promote the ideas of what would become the French Nouvelle Droite (New Right). At the time Gramsci was writing, communist doctrine theorized culture as something emergent from the economy, and not something with a distinct impact on the organization of a given society. Gramsci disagreed. He argued that ideas, politics, and economics are each active forces in society and while they all impact each other, none of them simply emerges from another. The New Left embraced this paradigm through countercultural movements in the 1960s; what is often overlooked in history books is how a New Right was not far behind. The use of culture as a vehicle for politics (referred to as metapolitics) belongs to neither the Right nor the Left; a culture war needs two adversaries.
—Han Kang from Human Acts“Some memories never heal. Rather than fading with the passage of time, those memories become the only things that are left behind when all else is abraded. The world darkens, like electric bulbs going out one by one. I am aware that I am not a safe person. Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves this single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, damaged, slaughtered–is this the essential fate of humankind, one which history has confirmed as inevitable?"
Read Are Universities Failing the Accommodations Test? by Simon Lewsen in The Walrus shares tips for organizing and protest:As instructors struggle to meet the complex needs of students, schools are leaving both to fend for themselves
The QuerentThis Country Is Still That CountryFor the last few months as readers of this blog know, I have been reading blog drafts from my old blogs as a part of researching my own past. I came across a fragment that stayed with me from a 2008 New Dramatists fundraiser for my friend the playwright Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, who had broken his clavicle…Read more14 days ago · 70 likes · 4 comments · Alexander CheeLove this post by !
sweater weathertroubled sleepFirst, I would like to bring your attention to a title I acquired and edited. Open Up by Thomas Morris is a brilliant collection of surreal fiction that explores loss, family, masculinity, and the strangeness of contemporary life. It has one of the very very very VERY best stories I’ve ever read. It’s his American debut, and it would mean a lot if you c…Read more16 days ago · 183 likes · 17 comments · Brandon interviews Wayde Compton
Archipel | Cara Waterfall#9: An Interview with Wayde ComptonWelcome to Archipel, an ongoing dialogue between me (Cara Waterfall) and other poets and creatives of all kinds, celebrating the ways we connect through mentorship, community and transitions.If you are interested in participating, please send me an email by replying to this newsletter or click…Read morea month ago · 5 likes · Cara WaterfallFrom , How to Read a Trans Fem Writer
Kai Cheng ThomHow To Read A Trans Fem WriterWhat you are about to read is an essay, an instruction manual, a trans fem writer manifesto, a plea, and a prayer. Written by Maya Deane and Kai Cheng Thom, two notoriously brazen trans woman authors, and citing a number of contemporary trans feminine writers, this piece is an intervention into systemic hostility against trans fem literature. This is a …Read more21 days ago · 3 likes · Kai Cheng ThomWriting PromptsHere’s an excellent prompt from Poets & Writers
Prompt from the Poet’s & Writers Magazine series From the Start on 10:23:24Where Do I Start? PromptsBook Giveaway“In the title story of Saeed Teebi’s 2022 debut collection, Her First Palestinian (House of Anansi Press), a new romance begins with the main character, Abed, acknowledging what is involved in getting to know another person: “Not long after the first joys of finding each other had settled, Nadia asked me if I would teach her about my country. It was inevitable. The walls of my Toronto apartment were conspicuously covered with Palestinian artifacts, and donation brochures featuring Gazan children were often lying around.”
What are your gatherings? What have you been reading, watching, or listening to. Please share your news in the comments.
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
Gatherings: Murray Sinclair, Francesca Albanese, Writers' Trust Speeches, Public Domain Movies, Farzana Doctor, Between the Covers, Science Fiction and the Alt-Right, and more
Send My Love to Anyone got some new followers and subscribers from the above post.
Welcome! I’m glad you’re here. I’m also glad you have a sense of what this newsletter is all about!
You can find out more about Send My Love to Anyone in the About section. I don’t like to flood inboxes, so I only send the newsletter out once or twice per month, but I do update the website a couple times a week if you’re looking for something to read or a writing prompt.
Gatherings is a section of Send My Love to Anyone where I share what I’ve been reading, watching, listening to, or appreciating over the past month. I also share contributor news (when they send it to me—please send it to me contributors!) and literary events in Canada or online.
My values are grounded in the anti-war, anti-genocide, the climate crisis, and human rights.
I’m curious about the ways in which literary arts connect with the world, our humanity, and our environment. And I have a particular interest in how protest and resistance intersects with literary and art communities. I’m writing a novel about surveillance and protest, so some of those interests and research are reflected in my selections for Gatherings.
I also love all things creativity, writing process, film, music, art, small press, and book marketing.
Hope you enjoy!
Kathryn
Send My Love to Anyone is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support this project, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
GatheringsSome GoodnessI’m participating in this auction:
I just switched from Audible to Libro for audiobooks where my purchases support Another Story Bookshop. You can pick any independent bookstore that you want. So far it’s a great alternative to the Amazon monster.
Here’s a link for Canadian’s to shop at Indie Bookstores!
EventsCensorship in Newsrooms anotherstorybookshop
A post shared by @anotherstorybookshopToronto Event - Another Story Bookshop and West End Phoenix present a not-to-be-missed evening of conversation around Censorship in Newsrooms.
With Pacinthe Mattar, Emma Paling, Shree Paradkar and Olivia Bowden. Moderated by Stacy Lee Kong.
Many of us have been alarmed by the censorship occuring in our newsrooms around reporting on the horrors out of G*za. Reporters who push back against this often face professional consequences - and it seems to be more often women and women of colour who are willing to speak up. Another Story Bookshop and the West End Phoenix are hosting a conversation at It's Ok* Studios with Toronto reporters to discuss their experiences.
$10, no one will be turned away at the event for lack of funds. All proceeds will go towards venue rental and speaker honorariums.
Visit link in IG post to register.
Recommended ViewingRIP Murray Sinclair, the first Indigenous judge appointed in Manitoba and chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).
Habiba’s SubstackPalestinian American poet Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, 2024 winner of the National Book Award (U.S.A.)Read more2 days ago · 15 likes · 1 comment · Quds Mon AmourFrancesca Albanese at the University of Toronto. Albanese is an Italian international lawyer and academic and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories.
Speeches from the Writers’ Trust Awards.Saeed Teebi introducing Atwood-Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize:
writerstrust
A post shared by @writerstrustwriterstrust
A post shared by @writerstrustwriterstrust
A post shared by @writerstrustLet’s not forget Kagiso Lesego Molope’s brave words and stance earlier this year at the Politics and the Pen event where she was escorted out.
legshernandez
A post shared by @legshernandezRead Palestinian Director Rashid Masharawi on Producing 22 Short Films in Gaza During the War by John Bleasdale in Variety
At the Taormina Film Festival, Palestinian film director Rashid Masharawi presented “From Ground Zero,” a compilation of 22 short films, shot by filmmakers inside the Gaza Strip during the current war. He spoke with Variety about the process of making the film and what it means to face appalling conditions with art.
“I was born and grew up in Gaza, I made many films in Gaza as a director and producer, and this time after I saw all what’s going on, I said, ‘No, I am not going to make a film, instead, I’m going to give the chance to the Palestinian filmmakers, and filmmakers who are in Gaza now, sharing what’s going on with the people,'” Masharawi said.
Found a cool film site:
Public Domain MoviesClassic Movies in the Public Domain. Best Feature Films, Videos and Cartoons - Full MoviesBy Frank 🎥Artist Basel Elmaqosui “ Don’t Cry for Gaza….Cry for yourself.”
basel_elmaqosui“Jabalia camp... So we don't forget... Mountains the heart is bleeding .... I paint with love .. I don't paint with war, I paint to try to stay an awake and sensitive human being and that war does not remove my dignity and humanity #مازال_عايشين Don't Cry for Gaza... Cry for yourself, don't cry for Gaza... Cry to yourself”
A post shared by @basel_elmaqosuiDennis Cooper and Derek McCormack:
Recommended ListeningRIP Dorothy Allison.
Listen to 5 Steps To Unblend When Feeling Overwhelmed by Farzana Doctor
Between the Covers with Lidia Yuknavitch:
Recommended ReadingRead Jody Chan’s Boycott Giller Speech, “Here, today, we throw our labour into the gears of the death machine.”
On Monday night, the gala for the Giller Prize, Canada’s most prestigious literary award, took place at Toronto’s Park Hyatt hotel. The Giller Foundation has been for over a year due to its corporate sponsors’ ties to Israel’s largest arms manufacturer, the Israeli Defense Forces, and an Israeli real estate company with investments in West Bank settlements.
Ahead of this year’s gala, more than 200 Canadian authors refused to submit their books for Giller Prize consideration or participate in any Giller-related publicity until the Foundation committed to dropping their partnerships with these corporate sponsors.
is on Substack! Yay!
Bubble Pop with Rachel GilmoreI'm Rachel Gilmore. I'm your least favourite person's least favourite journalist. Let's pop your bubble✨Read Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide by Fargo Tbakhi in Protean (with thanks to for the h/t)Above all, Craft is the result of market forces; it is therefore the result of imperial forces, as the two are so inextricably bound up together as to be one and the same. The Craft which is taught in Western institutions, taken up and reproduced by Western publishers, literary institutions, and awards bodies, is a set of regulatory ideas which curtail forms of speech that might enact real danger to the constellation of economic and social values which are, as I write this, facilitating genocide in Palestine and elsewhere across the globe. If, as Audre Lorde taught us, the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house, then Craft is the process by which our own real liberatory tools are dulled, confiscated, and replaced. We believe our words sharper than they turn out to be. We play with toy hammers and think we can break down concrete. We think a spoon is a saw.
Writers are freaking out about this with good reason:
Read HarperCollins is selling their authors’ work to AI tech by Drew Broussard in Lit HubOn Friday, author Daniel Kibblesmith posted a series of screenshots on Bluesky in order to share a concerning email he received from the agency who’d repped him on his children’s book Santa’s Husband: the book’s publisher, HarperCollins, was offering $2,500 (non-negotiable) for the right to use the book in an AI training deal that they’d signed with an anonymous “large tech company.”
Read Giller protests sparked a literary movement to end ‘art-washing’ of Israeli crimes by Nour Abi-Nakhoul in The BreachIt’s often known as “art-washing,” in which arts and culture is used to distract people from, or legitimize, the human rights abuses or unethical practices of a state or institution.
Jess Maginity reviews Jordan S. Carroll’s Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right.
Read Whose Future Is It Anyway? by Jess Maginity in the LA Review of BooksIN THE 1970s, a group of French right-wing intellectuals coalesced around the idea that cultural influence, not direct political action, determines the future. Led by Alain de Benoist, the Research and Study Group for European Civilization (GRECE) borrowed heavily from communist intellectual Antonio Gramsci to promote the ideas of what would become the French Nouvelle Droite (New Right). At the time Gramsci was writing, communist doctrine theorized culture as something emergent from the economy, and not something with a distinct impact on the organization of a given society. Gramsci disagreed. He argued that ideas, politics, and economics are each active forces in society and while they all impact each other, none of them simply emerges from another. The New Left embraced this paradigm through countercultural movements in the 1960s; what is often overlooked in history books is how a New Right was not far behind. The use of culture as a vehicle for politics (referred to as metapolitics) belongs to neither the Right nor the Left; a culture war needs two adversaries.
—Han Kang from Human Acts“Some memories never heal. Rather than fading with the passage of time, those memories become the only things that are left behind when all else is abraded. The world darkens, like electric bulbs going out one by one. I am aware that I am not a safe person. Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves this single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, damaged, slaughtered–is this the essential fate of humankind, one which history has confirmed as inevitable?"
Read Are Universities Failing the Accommodations Test? by Simon Lewsen in The WalrusAs instructors struggle to meet the complex needs of students, schools are leaving both to fend for themselves
shares tips for organizing and protest:
The QuerentThis Country Is Still That CountryFor the last few months as readers of this blog know, I have been reading blog drafts from my old blogs as a part of researching my own past. I came across a fragment that stayed with me from a 2008 New Dramatists fundraiser for my friend the playwright Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, who had broken his clavicle…Read more12 days ago · 70 likes · 4 comments · Alexander CheeLove this post by !
sweater weathertroubled sleepFirst, I would like to bring your attention to a title I acquired and edited. Open Up by Thomas Morris is a brilliant collection of surreal fiction that explores loss, family, masculinity, and the strangeness of contemporary life. It has one of the very very very VERY best stories I’ve ever read. It’s his American debut, and it would mean a lot if you c…Read more15 days ago · 183 likes · 17 comments · Brandoninterviews Wayde Compton
Archipel | Cara Waterfall#9: An Interview with Wayde ComptonWelcome to Archipel, an ongoing dialogue between me (Cara Waterfall) and other poets and creatives of all kinds, celebrating the ways we connect through mentorship, community and transitions.If you are interested in participating, please send me an email by replying to this newsletter or click…Read morea month ago · 5 likes · Cara WaterfallFrom , How to Read a Trans Fem Writer
Kai Cheng ThomHow To Read A Trans Fem WriterWhat you are about to read is an essay, an instruction manual, a trans fem writer manifesto, a plea, and a prayer. Written by Maya Deane and Kai Cheng Thom, two notoriously brazen trans woman authors, and citing a number of contemporary trans feminine writers, this piece is an intervention into systemic hostility against trans fem literature. This is a …Read more19 days ago · 3 likes · Kai Cheng ThomWriting PromptsHere’s an excellent prompt from Poets & Writers
Prompt from the Poet’s & Writers Magazine series From the Start on 10:23:24Where Do I Start? PromptsSupport Send My Love to Anyone“In the title story of Saeed Teebi’s 2022 debut collection, Her First Palestinian (House of Anansi Press), a new romance begins with the main character, Abed, acknowledging what is involved in getting to know another person: “Not long after the first joys of finding each other had settled, Nadia asked me if I would teach her about my country. It was inevitable. The walls of my Toronto apartment were conspicuously covered with Palestinian artifacts, and donation brochures featuring Gazan children were often lying around.”
Support 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!
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November 18, 2024
Solidarity is our strength
I am participating in Solidarity Is Our Strength, a virtual auction to raise mutual aid funds for Gaza, Lebanon, and Sudan. Group auction starts November 18, 2024: DONATE and/or BID!
I have two things I’m donating:One two book pack: Anecdotes (Book*hug Press, 2023) and Watch Your Head (Coach House Books, 2020)
One 1-hour online Coaching Session on writing, publishing, screenwriting, writing life, or teaching.
There are many beautiful items, offers, books, etc. It’s very moving to see people come together in this way.
The auction will close at 1pm EST on Thursday, November 28th
To get involved to donate or bid, join the FB group Solidarity is Our Strength
A few notes:If you would like to bid on items:
- The auction is open now and will close at 1pm EST on Thursday, November 28th
- Items are officially closed for bidding once the moderated has confirmed its closed on each item
- The winner can then e-transfer the donation
- All bids are made in CAD $
- Physical items will only be send to Turtle Island (north America)
All money will be split evenly between Gaza Mutal Aid Solidarity, Lebanon Solidairty Collective, Sudan Solidairty Collective, and Yahya & Friends Gaza Mutual Aid. Organizers will post receipts for transparency.
Organized by guelph4palestine.
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
Solidarity is Our Strength
I am participating in Solidarity Is Our Strength, a virtual auction to raise mutual aid funds for Gaza, Lebanon, and Sudan. Group auction starts November 18, 2024: DONATE and/or BID!
I have two things I’m donating:One two book pack: Anecdotes (Book*hug Press, 2023) and Watch Your Head (Coach House Books, 2020)
One 1-hour online Coaching Session on writing, publishing, screenwriting, writing life, or teaching.
There are many beautiful items, offers, books, etc. It’s very moving to see people come together in this way.
The auction will close at 1pm EST on Thursday, November 28th
To get involved to donate or bid, join the FB group Solidarity is Our Strength
A few notes:If you would like to bid on items:
- The auction is open now and will close at 1pm EST on Thursday, November 28th
- Items are officially closed for bidding once the moderated has confirmed its closed on each item
- The winner can then e-transfer the donation
- All bids are made in CAD $
- Physical items will only be send to Turtle Island (north America)
All money will be split evenly between Gaza Mutal Aid Solidarity, Lebanon Solidairty Collective, Sudan Solidairty Collective, and Yahya & Friends Gaza Mutual Aid. Organizers will post receipts for transparency.
Organized by guelph4palestine.
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
Writing about what's lost and found
Photo by Jozsef Hocza on UnsplashWriting PromptMake a list of five objects, people, or animals that you have lost and have not found.
Make a list of five objects, people, or animals that you have lost and have found.
Pick one of these objects and situations and write about what happened before and after you lost the object or before and after you lost or found the object.
Use this anecdote as the basis of a story, poem, play, or essay.
For Inspiration“When Things Go Missing” by Kathryn Schultz, Personal History, The New Yorker
Let me know how this prompt worked for you!
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
