Kathryn Mockler's Blog, page 20

Lost & Found

Photo by Jozsef Hocza on UnsplashWriting Prompt

Make a list of five objects, people, or animals that you have lost and have not 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 and found the object.

Use this anecdote as the basis of a story, poem, play, or essay.

Let’s drink plastic and smile while the world burns. Let’s laugh like we don’t have a care or at least like we aren’t choking on smoke. The army's bored and firing at children they don’t think are human. A worm has eaten everyone’s brains and I’m holding my breath waiting for whatever's going to happen next. It likely won’t be good, but in the meantime, I will like your sunflower post, if you like my roses—even though most of the petals have fallen to the floor. I had planned to dry out the flowers and place them in a thick book where I wouldn't have to think about them again. Too late for that now. I suppose I do have regrets. After all, flowers are tragic. Help us, help us, help us from ourselves!

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Published on November 17, 2024 22:23

Flowers Are Tragic

Flowers are Tragic

Let’s drink plastic and smile while the world burns. Let’s laugh like we don’t have a care or at least like we aren’t choking on smoke. The army's bored and firing at children they don’t think are human. A worm has eaten everyone’s brains and I’m holding my breath waiting for whatever's going to happen next. It likely won’t be good, but in the meantime, I will like your sunflower post, if you like my roses—even though most of the petals have fallen to the floor. I had planned to dry out the flowers and place them in a thick book where I wouldn't have to think about them again. Too late for that now. I suppose I do have regrets. After all, flowers are tragic. Help us, help us, help us from ourselves!

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Published on November 17, 2024 22:23

Q&A

Hello SMLTA Subscribers,

I’m starting a new section on Send My Love to Anyone where every couple of months, I invite paid subscribers to ask me questions about writing, the writing process, publishing, book marketing, craft, how to give feedback, or something else, which I will do my best to answer.

I deeply appreciate your support of Send My Love to Anyone, and the next phase of this newsletter for me is to invest some time in supporting and developing the SMLTA community.

So if you have a burning question, please send it my way.

Also let me know what you’ve been up to in the comments below. I’d love to hear about your writing news or upcoming events or what you’ve been reading.

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Shower

Photo by Trude Jonsson Stangel on Unsplash

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Shower

—This shower is gruesome.

—Mom, what’s gruesome about it?

—It is hard to get in and out of the tub.

—Should we get more bars or someone to help?

—No! If you do, I will refuse.

—Okay.

—I am complaining, but I don’t want anything done about it. Give me the right to complain.

—Okay.

—Thank you for helping me out, Kathryn.

—Yeah.

—You’re supposed to say you’re welcome.

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Published on November 16, 2024 23:38

Time Traveler

Skylight view of a dark futuristic structure with a uniform series of tiny lightbulbs

Time Traveler is one of my favourite writing exercises. It can be used for all genres of writing and can generate some unusual results.

I’ve used this exercise in experimental writing, poetry, and fiction workshops.

Merriam-Webster has a section on their website called Time Traveler where they post words that were added to the dictionary according to the year they were added.

For example, when you select the year 2005, you’ll see that the words: butt-dial, glamping, truther, microblogging were added that year (among others).

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.

Writing Prompt

Click onto Time Traveler and pick a year that you want to work with. It can be your birth year, the birth year of someone special in your life, or another significant year.

Once you select a year, you’ll be given a list of works that were added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary in that year.

Pick one or more of the words from this year and free write for 10 minutes.

Using some of the material that you generated, write a poem, a story, a play, or a script.

Enjoy and let me know how this prompt worked for you!

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For Inspiration

“Wednesday’s Child” by Yiyun Li, The New Yorker

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Published on November 16, 2024 15:26

How are you? I’ve never liked the question.

How are you?

I’ve never liked the question. Never trusted it. Associate it mostly with doctors, professionals who I rarely if ever go to. I mean anyone close to me (my chosen intimates) will already know because they’re close to me, but others, what exactly are they asking as if they really want to know, and if they’re just being sociable/courteous buy me a drink.

The worst time being asked this question (in a room full of literary people I’d rather not) while standing there purchasing a reading poet’s title from them, a bookseller pointedly asked me how “things were going” knowing I had lost my own shop as though they ever spoke a word, cared even a smidge before then. Nope. Just being deliberately Toronto. ([Why] does anybody go out anymore? Is it just me?)

Decades ago, I made the mistake of thinking people went out to enjoy themselves. Boy, was I wrong.

When a circle of friends rallied day to day combating illnesses related to AIDS, this question was never asked. It was “What do you need, hon?” only to find out upon arrival everything’s changed. Meeting people where they are… giving/receiving a shampoo over the sink, fixing a meal together, dishing, spooning.

On a more recent visit, Andrew Steeves at Gaspereau Press in Kentville, NS asked, “Kirby, have you had a meal today?”

I didn’t know if he had a soup on he was offering, or suggesting we step out for a grilled cheese, but no, this was his way of asking if things were okay. If I had a meal today.

“Yes, Andrew, I’m good.”

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How Are You, Kirby?

How are you?

I’ve never liked the question. Never trusted it. Associate it mostly with doctors, professionals who I rarely if ever go to. I mean anyone close to me (my chosen intimates) will already know because they’re close to me, but others, what exactly are they asking as if they really want to know, and if they’re just being sociable/courteous buy me a drink.

The worst time being asked this question (in a room full of literary people I’d rather not) while standing there purchasing a reading poet’s title from them, a bookseller pointedly asked me how “things were going” knowing I had lost my own shop as though they ever spoke a word, cared even a smidge before then. Nope. Just being deliberately Toronto. ([Why] does anybody go out anymore? Is it just me?)

Decades ago, I made the mistake of thinking people went out to enjoy themselves. Boy, was I wrong.

When a circle of friends rallied day to day combating illnesses related to AIDS, this question was never asked. It was “What do you need, hon?” only to find out upon arrival everything’s changed. Meeting people where they are… giving/receiving a shampoo over the sink, fixing a meal together, dishing, spooning.

On a more recent visit, Andrew Steeves at Gaspereau Press in Kentville, NS asked, “Kirby, have you had a meal today?”

I didn’t know if he had a soup on he was offering, or suggesting we step out for a grilled cheese, but no, this was his way of asking if things were okay. If I had a meal today.

“Yes, Andrew, I’m good.”

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Congratulations to Chimwemwe Undi

Congrats to all the winners and finalists!

It was an honour to serve on the peer assessment committee for poetry with Heather Nolan and

Big congrats to Chimwemwe Undi whose beautiful book Scientific Marvel (House of Anansi Press) won the GG Award for Poetry.

“Balanced between lyricism and experimentation, Scientific Marvel takes an incisive and wide-ranging approach to observation, navigating modern concerns with wit, beauty and sensitivity. Crafting poetry from sources as disparate as case law and interpersonal relationships, Undi explores facets of belonging and place with rigour and a refreshingly bold voice.”

—Peer assessment committee: Kathryn Mockler, Heather Nolan and Tolu Oloruntoba

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Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published Scientific Marvel by Chimwemwe UndiHouse of Anansi Press

Buy the book!

Publisher’s Description

Marked by rhythmic drive, humour, and surprise, Undi’s poems consider what is left out from the history and ongoing realities of Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Firmly grounded in the local, the arresting poems in Chimwemwe Undi’s debut collection, Scientific Marvel, are preoccupied with Winnipeg in the way a Winnipegger is preoccupied with Winnipeg, the way a poet might be preoccupied with herself: through history and immigration; race and gender; anxieties and observation. Marked by rhythmic drive, humour and surprise, Undi’s poems consider what is left out from the history and ongoing realities of Winnipeg, Manitoba, and the west. Taking its title from a beauty school in downtown Winnipeg that closed in 2017 after nearly 100 years of operation, Scientific Marvel approaches the prairies from the point of view of a person who is often erased from the prairies’ idea of itself. “I mean my country the way / my country means my country / and what else is there to say? / I am bad and brown / and trying. Nothing here / belongs to me or could / or ever will.”

This is poetry that touches on challenging topics—from queerness and colonialism to racism, climate rage, and decolonization, while never straying far from specific lived experience, the so-called ‘smaller’ questions: about self, art, dance parties and pop culture, relationships and love.

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Published on November 13, 2024 09:59

Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative by Isabella Hammad

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Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative by Isabella Hammad is a beautiful and fascinating analysis of narrative turning points and recognition where Hammad connects novels and literature, Edward Said’s writings and observations, Aristotle’s Poetics, and the climate crisis with the Palestinian cause and humanity.

Originally a speech Hammad delivered for the Edward Said Memorial Lecture in September of 2023, the audiobook also includes an afterword from Hammad about the current genocide in Gaza and what narrative recognition means in this context.

This book reaffirms for me why writing and narrative is vital to not only the survival of the world but also our humanity.

David Naimond interviews Isabella Hammad for his Tin House podcast, Between the Covers.

Isabella Hammad: The other day, I was in a conversation with a writer there called Mahmoud [Rashed], who’s been unable to leave, you may know about him, you’re nodding. He said lots of things, but he said, “It’s not enough to feel with us. You have to talk about us,” which I think when we prioritize that, when we return to this as the priority here, it’s okay to have all this unease and to talk about the difficulties of speaking, the compromises of inherent in speech, the lies we tell ourselves about the power of language and how that’s bound up within industry and particularly in this country, in the US, and balance that with actually the importance of continuing to speak. Those things exist at the same time and we can engage with that and talk more about that. But the most important thing is to keep talking about them. I find that helpful. It also humbles you a bit. It’s like, yes, you’re out of your head a bit about what’s the value of saying anything? But we do have to continue to speak because this is significant, not only for those people who are there who’ve been slaughtered, who are being slaughtered, and not only physically but in their minds, I don’t know how they’re surviving mentally under that, being moved from place to place, being starved, being imprisoned, being assaulted, being so frightened they can’t sleep. But the significance is huge for everybody on the planet. The fact that a population can be so disposable is terrifying. To me, it’s very linked with the ways in which we’re destroying the planet as well. It’s this kind of savage removal of any boundaries or any pretenses or the pretenses have been worn away. That’s really frightening and should frighten people very seriously for themselves.

Read Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide by Fargo Tbakhi:

What does Palestine require of us, as writers writing in English from within the imperial core, in this moment of genocide? I want to offer here some notes and some directions towards beginning to answer this question.

I use “Craft” here to describe the network of sanitizing influences exerted on writing in the English language: the influences of neoliberalism, of complicit institutions, and of the linguistic priorities of the state and of empire. Anticolonial writers in the U.S. and across the globe have long modeled alternative crafts which reject these priorities, and continue to do so in this present moment. Yet Craft still haunts our writing; these notes aim to clarify it, so we can rid ourselves of its influence.