Kathryn Mockler's Blog, page 30
February 25, 2024
Gatherings | Issue 34
Gatherings is a recommendation list of what I’m reading, listening to, and watching. Gatherings will now be sent out separately from the monthly newsletter.
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My NewsDoctors Without Borders Canada FundraiserA couple of weeks ago, I created a FB Birthday Fundraiser and raised $500 dollars for Doctors Without Borders Canada. Thanks to everyone who contributed.
Vancouver LaunchI’m getting ready for the Vancouver launch of Anecdotes on February 29, 2024! Hope to see you there!
Register for your free spot on this Eventbrite page, as capacity is limited.
Virtual Reading!On March 3, 2024, I’ll be reading at the Real Vancouver 14th Anniversary Showcase with Alicia Elliott, Steffi Tad-Y, Jess Battis, Joseph Kakwinokansum, and Adrienne Leung!
Hosted by and Sean Cranbury
Sponsored by BC Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts
Join us for this free online event!
Thanks to and for inviting me to chat on their wonderful !
Thanks to Michael V. Smith for including my first book Onion Man in his 49th Shelf list of “Experimental Approaches, or How to Find A Poem”
Gatheringsblackliturgies
A post shared by @blackliturgiesPoems for Palestine from Publishers for Palestine
“It is difficult to find maftoul in Egypt, and Leila’s was good. I felt lucky to taste it with my wife and kids. But, lately, hearing about unprecedented starvation in Gaza, I have felt a sort of hatred for the food in front of me. As I eat simple meals of chicken, rice, salad, and olives with my family, I think of the hunger in my homeland, and of all the people with whom I want to share my meals. I yearn to return to Gaza, sit at the kitchen table with my mother and father, and make tea for my sisters. I do not need to eat. I only want to look at them again.”
Read “My Family’s Daily Struggle to Find Food in Gaza” by Mosab Abu Toha, The New Yorker
“Rich people need life content just like you and I do. Our content is art, poetry, music, film, family time, walks in nature, conversations, food, pets, and so on. Rich people require the same content, believe it or not. But the difference is the relationship to the content. I have seen rich people attempt to express themselves creatively, but the effort is either laughably self-conscious or delusionally narcissistic. Picture a millionaire dancing, rapping, or making a painting. The way they express themselves is both confident and contemptible. Unless they have made their money through the arts, a rich person does not know how to properly express themselves and that is why they look and sound grotesque when they attempt to do so. Because of this, rich people need to live vicariously through artists.”
Read “The Aesthetics of Complicity” by Jay Isaac
A poem by E. D. Watson:
eeedeewatson
A post shared by @eeedeewatsonCorinna Chong in conversation with Alix Ohlin aat University of British Columbia, School of Creative Writing, March 21, 2024 at 7:00pm (PST)
Register for this free virtual event
I am loving this Tik Tok series by Reesa Tessa “Who TF Did I Marry?” about her relationship with a pathological liar.
Also this series is a great lesson in life and storytelling.
@reesamteesaWho TF Did I Marry- Introduction #reesateesa #fyp #series [image error]Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
“Bleeding” by May Swenson, Poets.org
Congrats to Robin Pacific whose collection of personal essays, Skater Girl, is out April 1, 2024 with Guernica Editions.
Skater Girl is a collection of intensely personal essays, an archaeology of the self. Robin Pacific sifts through the midden of consciousness to find shells, potsherds, a broken piece of mirror. Themes of art, spirituality and social justice run like a current through otherwise disconnected pieces and fragments, many as short as one paragraph. Further, ideas about aging, loss and mortality colour many of them. The book is about the formation of Robin Pacific's many selves, about creativity, spiritual seeking, and the dream of a more equal society.
“She unfollowed her ex a long time ago, but this morning she’s drinking coffee and scrolling Twitter when she sees a retweet from a mutual friend. *Book cover reveal *. Her ex’s name as the author. A link to the book’s page on the website of a major publishing house. The cover is apple green, featuring an elegant drawing of a thin, pale man with hair as moulded as a Ken doll’s, gazing out of a window. But there’s something glib about its tone; it reminds her of him. The book’s description takes care to point out that it is a work of literary fiction. She wonders if he suggested they mention that. She wonders if he wrote the copy himself.”
Read “Her Ex Writes a Novel” by Shashi Bhat in Hazlit
Advice Column: ‘I Think My Husband Is Trashing My Novel on Goodreads!’, by Emily Gould in The Cut
Writers’ Union of Canada Short Prose Competition - Deadline February 26, 2024
RIP Lyn Hejinian
Watched Ministry of Fear (1944) by Fritz Lang on Criterion:
The Curse is a terrific and excruciating satire.
Podcast GatheringsChristian Nationalism is Reshaping Fertility
From The Balanced Creative: Common mistakes creatives make that keep us dreaming small
and Friends with Jessica Johns
Amy Jones on What Happened Next with Nathan Whitlock
Newsletter Gatherings
Writer TherapyWriting Groups and EnvyDear Sonal, How does one deal with envious people in writing? I once worked on a group writing project with a group of friends. It was fun for a while and have fond memories of working there, but it began getting clearer that the head of the project had something against me. He treated me friendly but when it came working together he never let my ideas …Read more19 days ago · 11 likes · 8 comments · Sonal Champsee
The Art of Flash Fiction Breaking Free of the Ordinary - Flash Immersion - Day FifteenHi friends! Today’s Flash Immersion post is going out to all 6,300+ subscribers. If you’re a free subscriber, consider upgrading to take part in the full Extravaganza experience. We’ve had a lot of fu…Read more11 days ago · 24 likes · 108 comments · Kathy Fish
Sitting in Silence #6 - A Day in the Life of a WriterEnjoy the podcast. :) If you like the show, say “hi.” The American Daughters comes out Tuesday, Feb. 27. We’re having a big book release event in New Orleans. You can register here for the event, which is at Baldwin & Co. The event is free and open to the public. Full tour schedule coming soon… Listen now7 days ago · 4 likes · 2 comments · Sitting in Silence
InnerestingFinding confidenceThis week’s rebroadcast collects together some questions about finding confidence and rebuilding it as needed…Read more5 days ago · 6 likes · Inneresting
Reframeables Podcast and NewsletterReframing Courtney Love: Fighting Gender Bias in Pop Culture with Lisa Whittington-Hill This week on Reframeables, we spoke with author Lisa Whittington-Hill about her new book Girls, Interrupted: How Pop Culture is Failing Women. With Lisa, we jumped right in with a discussion about female rage, considered the failings of media for middle age women and teenage girls, and shared some nostalgic memories of Courtney Love — who Lisa has defen…Read more3 months ago · 2 likes · Rebecca Davey and Natalie Davey
Send My Love to AnyoneSend My Love to Anyone | Issue 33Hello friends, For issue 33 of Send My Love to Anyone, you’ll find two poems by Nyla Matuk, an essay “In Defence of Ambiguity” by Corinna Chong, 3 Things Farzana Doctor learned while writing a self-help book, drawings by David Poolman, “Last Licks” by…Read more16 days ago · 2 likes · Kathryn MocklerSend My Love to AnyoneYou Know What's Great?Read more14 days ago · Kathryn MocklerSupport 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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February 21, 2024
Malcolm Sutton | Issue 34
“The best writing advice I have ever taken was: just write how you write. It was the most freeing, it allowed me to write.”
Four Fiction Manuscripts1.
Occasionally something comes up that is so beyond my everyday, leaving me at my desk still and without words. Even though such a thing might have happened before, I am left disbelieving what is happening now. Almost immediately I want to share it—I want to share it with someone who will be as impressed by it as I am, someone who will be impressed at me for my involvement or implication in it, and I’m at a loss. I write this because of a manuscript that landed in my inbox today, by a writer I think is absolutely amazing. Her last book was my favourite of the year. This one arrives out of the blue, and I get to read it before the rest of the world does. I continue to think about who to tell, and I realise the only one to be impressed in the way that I want to be impressed would be me, but my approximately twenty-eight-year-old self, myself twenty years ago, star-struck by this encounter. And real-struck, as in feeling like I have come to a place where I can encounter the real thing, an arrival at an impossible place beyond how I see myself.
But no matter how meaningful it would be to him, that twenty-eight-year-old self is not able to see it. A day later, I know that that twenty-eight-year-old, if he were allowed the view I want to give him, would feel a rush, but then if allowed more time in my house in 2023, he would have great concerns. He would have a lot of questions, particularly about how things do not match whatever fantasy image of the future he is conjuring. He might ask, what is this place you are living in that seems so distant from the part of the city you should never leave, the centre, and what has happened to you to turn so grey, and what are these responsibilities, and why do you still have the same problems, the same bad posture, the same anxieties, but more acute, shouldn’t you have improved? What of all this?
I really don’t know how he would weigh those big concerns against the manuscript’s glorious arrival.
I look around the house for someone to share the manuscript thing with, and the only one here is my son, who is nine. I look at him and know it could go either way. Sometimes he will read partway through a sentence on my screen and then finish it with “blah, blah, blah.” Many months ago, I saw him reading some of my writing on my left-open laptop. He was supportive then, saying, “Pretty good” without me prompting him. This was the first time I ever considered him a reader of my writing. But for this manuscript that emits such a golden aura—like the accumulation of literary endeavours from the last century—I need more, and I know that a nine-year-old will not care. Nine-year-olds do not have a good sense of history, and auras, and have not lived long enough to reflect on different stages of life, personal change, in the same way that older people do. And then I wonder, why do we adults think we are superior because of this age and because we believe we have a sense of personal change and history? But it is true, that other times we feel overwhelmingly inferior, because a nine-year-old is so much better at living in the present, and their present is likely to be much longer than ours.
Instead of telling him about the manuscript, I tell him that he’s in the book I’m writing, and I ask him if I can interview him. That excites him. That is sort of what I was looking for.
2.
Reviewing a manuscript, considering if I would like to work with it and its author. That a stranger’s writing is sometimes very familiar, like you are reviewing your own writing but what you wrote twenty or twenty-five years ago. You feel close to the current manuscript: the closeness of familiarity, the remembrance of self-loathing. The wince of hearing your voice played back on a recording. Writing from a time in which you were under the spell of a famous writer. You read the present submission full of these thoughts about a style that you ultimately rejected, perhaps because you saw others doing it in a more surprising or deeper way. Or when you saw those others doing it you realized how profoundly inauthentic your version of this style was, how thin it was, because you did not take it further, on a path through your own experiences to a place of clear insight and truth. If voice is what we have, one’s own voice, it is worth letting go of a dead-end version of it. The best writing advice I have ever taken was: just write how you write. It was the most freeing, it allowed me to write. I scroll up and down through the pages of this submitted manuscript. Perhaps this is the younger writer’s authentic voice, not under the spell of a famous writer. I will have to do something, as it is my job to do so, and the reality is to be fair, which means to throw out all of these reflections on my own trajectory. It is not my writing, it has other concerns, it comes at another time in history, another generation of writers, it has an authentic voice. At very least it deserves that.
3.
A manuscript that reminds me of writing that I loved twenty years ago. A style built on constraints, where formal play is foregrounded and the author’s life story is background or entirely absent. It is well written. It works. But I would only want to read this present manuscript for reasons of personal nostalgia, to take me to a certain time when I was a different person and enthralled by writing that used constraints. And then I realize even that is not true. Because nostalgia, that loss that feels good insofar as it makes you really feel something heavily, that shoots through you and you are helpless to it, requires a return to the same, the very same book of twenty years ago. I can recall the room where I read the book, the couch I lay on with afternoon sun coming in, the used bookstore I bought it from on the small street by campus, the people I might run into. This current manuscript leaves me without all of that. It is misplaced in time, out of a shared sequence of writing events, and without a quality of nostalgia. I don’t know whether it is of any use to tell a writer that their work feels dated. That could hurt them so much. I am left to sit with the unhappy task of judging the value of something against the backdrop of whatever is going on right now in literature, at our historical moment, when in fact an individual like me can only absorb a thin slice of present reality that best suits them or that they just happen to encounter. That slice then becomes universal – we universalize our little slice – at the moment we send a rejection letter. If we look to pop music for confirmation of this approach, we will see that it’s bad, because we are surrounded by super-popular throwback music. What is old for an older person is new to a younger person. But writing is not pop music. It has a different relationship to history. So, no it is.
4.
Working on a final edit on a novel that is largely based on the writer’s life. The writer is meticulous, a joy to work with. We meet up at a cafe to go over those last changes, mostly things that she is flipping back and forth on without landing firmly. In one instance she asks if she should include “more” or just leave it as “miraculous.” “More miraculous” or just “miraculous.” Either makes sense in the context of the sentence. I sound out the sentence in my head. I speak the two alternatives out loud, with and without “more.” I add some of the adjacent sentences and try it out loud again. I listen for rhythmic differences and think about whether the inclusion of “more” is too much or just right. In our editing process we have tended to simplify in order to make meanings less explicit, less determined by the writer, more open for the reader. I stare at my screen and wonder if one way is better than the other. But at a time like this I keep feeling that they are simply different, one not better, one not more appropriate. I finally say that I like “more,” maybe because it adds the slightest amount of strangeness to the sentence and that slight strangeness attracts me as a reader. But I don’t feel that the meaning changes.
With a novel, there is a definitive edition, the one that gets published. I recall the story, probably told by Barthes in one of his essays, about Flaubert constantly changing words in his drafts, not for improvement, but because he needed the sentences to keep feeling new to him. I have done that to my own writing. One always wants the spark of surprise of that first encounter.
Thank you for reading Send My Love to Anyone. This post is public so feel free to share it.
Malcolm Sutton works as a writing instructor at University of Toronto Scarborough. He is the fiction editor at Book*hug Press, where he also designs many books. His fiction and articles have appeared in Maisonneuve, Joyland, C Magazine, and Border Crossings. He is the author of the novel Job Shadowing and is currently finishing a book on listening to improvised music in Toronto.
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February 17, 2024
Ben Robinson | Issue 34
Thank you for reading Send My Love to Anyone. This post is public so feel free to share it.
© 2023 Excerpt from The Book of Benjamin by Ben Robinson published with permission of Palimpsest Press.
Ben Robinson is a poet, musician and librarian. His first book, The Book of Benjamin, an essay on naming, birth and grief was published by Palimpsest Press in 2023. His poetry collection, As Is, is forthcoming from ARP Books. He has only ever lived in Hamilton, Ontario on the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas. You can find him online at benrobinson.work.
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published
The Book of Benjamin
by Ben RobinsonPalimpsest Press, 2023Like an obsessive baby name book with only one entry, The Book of Benjamin establishes links between identity, birth, and grief. Braiding the story of his stillborn sister with the Biblical account of Benjamin to explore how names and their etymologies might shape our self-understanding, Benjamin Robinson resists the individual focus of the memoir, while investigating new forms of masculinity. The Book of Benjamin is the testament of both a son and a father, contrasting genealogy with larger communal narratives.
Praise for The Book of Benjamin :
“Just how many Benjamin Robinsons are there? Actually, how many of any of us are there and how does our own name name us? With thoughtful, tender, wry intelligence, open to the strange attractors of names and naming, of language and self, of culture, family and story, The Book of Benjamin is as simple and complex as a name, as revealing, telling and enticing. I could call Benjamin Robinson every name in the book and, you name it, it’d all be high praise.”—Gary Barwin, author of The Most Charming Creatures
“I love The Book of Benjamin‘s quiet upheaval of our beliefs around names as linguistic markers of selves and others. In distilled language, Robinson has threaded his profound questions through tender, funny, and devastating family memories that gather until the fabric is turbulent with meanings.”—Sadiqa de Meijer, author of alfabet/alphabet
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February 12, 2024
You Know What's Great?
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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February 9, 2024
Send My Love to Anyone | Issue 33
Hello friends,
For issue 33 of Send My Love to Anyone, you’ll find two poems by Nyla Matuk, an essay “In Defence of Ambiguity” by Corinna Chong, 3 Things Farzana Doctor learned while writing a self-help book, drawings by David Poolman, “Last Licks” by Kirby, and a gathering of what I’m reading and listening to this month.
The Vancouver launch of Anecdotes is on February 29, 2024 at Upstart and Crow. The event is free but registration is required because capacity is limited.
Hope you enjoy Issue 33!
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.
We arrive in Ramallah at dusk.
Swells of purple hills from my hotel room window.","size":"lg","isEditorNode":true,"title":"Nyla Matuk | Issue 33","publishedBylines":[],"post_date":"2024-01-29T01:07:15.069Z","cover_image":"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f... My Love to Anyone","publication_logo_url":"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f...
My short story collection, The Whole Animal, begins with an epigraph taken from an interview with the great photographer, Sally Mann. When discussing what she strives for in creating a photograph, Mann says, “If it doesn’t have ambiguity, don’t bother to take it.” I first came across this interview when I was an eighteen-year-old,…","size":"md","isEditorNode":true,"title":"Corinna Chong | Issue 33","publishedBylines":[{"id":21201715,"name":"Kathryn Mockler","bio":"Kathryn Mockler's is a writer, professor, and publisher and author of the story collection Anecdotes (Book*hug Press). ","photo_url":"https://substack-post-media.s3.amazon... My Love to Anyone","publication_logo_url":"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f...
1) Creatives and helper-types have something in common When I started telling other writers about 52 Weeks to a Sweeter Life for Caregivers, Activists and Helping Professionals, A Workbook of Emotional Hacks, Self-Care Experiments and…","size":"md","isEditorNode":true,"title":"Farzana Doctor | Issue 33","publishedBylines":[],"post_date":"2024-02-02T21:16:43.901Z","cover_image":"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f... My Love to Anyone","publication_logo_url":"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f... the ArchivesFrom Issue 32Support Send My Love to Anyone
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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February 5, 2024
Gatherings | Issue 33
Vancouver launch on February 29, 2024!
Register for your free spot on this Eventbrite page, as capacity is limited.
On March 3, 2024, I’ll be reading at the Real Vancouver 14th Anniversary Showcase with Alicia Elliott, Steffi Tad-Y, Jess Battis, Joseph Kakwinokansum, and Adrienne Leung!
Hosted by Dina Del Bucchia and Sean Cranbury
Sponsored by BC Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts
Join us for this free online event!
In these days when reviews in mainstream outlets are in short supply, I absolutely cherish when writers take their reviews to social media!
Here’s what some friends have to say about Anecdotes.
There’s a primal chittering in my body whenever I read brain-meltingly good books that defy easy structural definitions. I feel immediate, deep respect for authors who break genre conventions with intelligence and intention and style. This book has plenty of all three.
—Hollay Ghadery, author of Fuse, Rebellion Box, and Widow Fantasies
—Kimmy Beach, author of Nuala: A Fable and The Last Temptation of Bond
Kirby News"Just finished @themockler's brilliant new collection of stories. Dark twisty tales which might seem cyncial on first glance but really are deeply compassionate and empowering. I love how formally inventive they are. A range of forms and lots of surprising turns. Also, they implicitly illustratrate how life isn't a series of story arcs, epiphanies and "life lessons" but rather an accumulation of experiences which sum together over the span to make our life what it is. Five out of five thumbs up."
—Gary Barwin, author of Nothing the Same Everything Haunted and Yiddish for Pirates
”Last Licks” by Kirby on Bandcamp
GatheringsA gathering of what I’m reading, listening to, and watching“My dissociation has become more norm than exception: I walk down Metropolitan Avenue in Brooklyn as though I’m gliding, as though someone is transporting my body through sheer will. I enter rooms and freeze, stop speaking mid-sentence, forgetting where I’d begun. My grief is dormant during the day, masked by alternating helplessness and frenetic bursts of energy.”
Read ‘I am not there and I am not here’: a Palestinian American poet on bearing witness to atrocity by Hala Alyan in the Guardian
Israeli Damage to Archives, Libraries, and Museums in Gaza, October 2023–January 2024
"The League’s leadership team has been profoundly shaken by the genocidal violence in Palestine and the waves of Islamophobic and antisemitic hatred that have surged in its wake. We extend our deepest sympathy and compassion to all those grieving, and we stand with our community in calling for an end to the violence."
Read the League of Canadian Poets statement on censorship and activism
“I’ve always been attracted to things that are a little bit different,” she said in a phone interview on a grey day in January ahead of the publication of her new book, “Code Noir.” “What I try to go to is the authentic expression of something and that seems to always take me toward innovation. I think there is a tendency for us as a species (to) get used to things, and the more ordinary and commonplace they are, the more invisible they tend to become.”
Read Deborah Dundas’ interview with Canisia Lubrin about her debut fiction collection, Code Noir
Catherine Hernandez watercolors
author
Catherine Hernandez on Instagram: “My process as of late. Share or comment if you feel the same. This is a #watercolor #watercolors #watercolours #watercolour #watercolorpainting of a family sleeping side by side, screen capture from a video on @zainab_fitforallah profile.”January 29, 2024I missed the Grammys but found some key performances!
Stevie Wonder doing tribute to Tony Bennett
Joni Mitchell “Both Sides Now”
Annie Lennox singing “Nothing Compares to You” and says “Artists for ceasefire. Peace in the World.”
Carl Wilson on this year’s Grammy Awards for Slate
Another Indigenous Curator Leaves Art Gallery of Ontario, Hyperallergic
Inuk-Scottish curator Taqralik Partridge’s exit follows the resignation of Wanda Nanibush, the Toronto museum’s inaugural curator of Canadian and Indigenous art.
Lecture: ‘Dionne Brand: Writing Against Tyranny and Toward Liberation’ (2017)
Pamenar Press Book Launch - Join us for an online collective book launch by Pamenar Press, featuring readings from recent poetry collections by Sally-Shakti Willow, Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi, Rhys Trimble, and J.R. Carpenter.
February 17th, 6 PM GMT / 1 PM EST.
Lisa Robertson and Julie Joosten reading at Type Books on Feb 18, 2024
On the radio,
a singer born in a place where children watch the sky
for bombs is trying to sell me on love
as something akin to war.
I have no lie to offer as treacherous as this one.
Read “The Prestige” by Hanif Abdurraqib, Poets.org
Mirabel wants to learn to swim, but she’s been told her whole life she’d just sink to the bottom and that swimming is not only a risk to her, but also to the lifeguards who might have to retrieve her extra-large body from the deep end of a pool.
Read “The Deal With Roger” by Alison Gadsby, Ex-Puritan
On Zoozve, Radio Lab
Sad to hear Glass Bookshop is closing.
Check out the amazing faculty for the Sage Hill Writing Summer Courses. I attended a fiction workshop with Diane Warren way back in 2000. It was a great experience.
“There’s a particular kind of feeling to describe preparing and planning for a literary event, only to show up and find the room empty, or nearly empty. You keep looking at the door hoping the passers-by will stop and come inside. It’s worse being a host and having a sense of responsibility for your readers, and the feeling that you’ve wasted their time when no one shows up. I briefly touched on this sentiment in a column for Open Book last summer on Being an Author during a book tour, but I wanted to spend a column on the topic of the “empty event.” This was an experience I thought was unique to me until I saw posts by prominent writers about experiencing the same.”
Read “Facing (the Failure of) an Empty Event” by Manahil Bandukwala on Open Book
Recommended Newsletters
Hmm That's Interestingthe internet is too monetizable nowApologies for coming in with nostalgia on a Thursday evening, but I miss how the Internet used to be. I'd sit at my desk-bookcase-stereo-unit (you know the one) and go on my little websites — Meg Cabot's author page, or IMDb, or Miami-Dade library's online catalogue, from where I was constantly requesting cute inter-library loans with which to terrorize…Read more4 days ago · 141 likes · 24 comments · ClaraGeorge TolesGiggles of GoodnessGiggles O'Hearn was sitting up in bed trying to think of a good deed she had done. Someone calling herself Anonymous had posted a long list of such praiseworthy deeds online. Suddenly one came back to her. A woman with a walker had left her purse behind on her chair in the restaurant. Giggles had noticed and retrieved it for her. Not only did the woman …Read more6 days ago · 2 likes · 1 comment · George TolesSupport 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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February 3, 2024
Corinna Chong | Issue 33
My short story collection, The Whole Animal, begins with an epigraph taken from an interview with the great photographer, Sally Mann. When discussing what she strives for in creating a photograph, Mann says, “If it doesn’t have ambiguity, don’t bother to take it.” I first came across this interview when I was an eighteen-year-old, fresh-out-of-high-school university student, and it has stuck with me ever since. Hearing it set off a spark in me, though I didn’t fully understand why at the time. I felt strangely seen, as though Mann had articulated something I had always known to be true but had never been aware of until I’d heard it acknowledged. It became a guiding principle for the way I look at art and the approach I take to my own writing.
Indeed, ambiguity is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the literary works I most admire. One of my favourite short stories of all time, and one I often teach in creative writing classes, is Lorrie Moore’s “How to Become a Writer.” One reason I like to teach it is for the clever trick it plays on readers with its title, which suggests that what follows will be instructional and methodical, like a manual, only to initiate instead a fragmented second-person narrative charting the protagonist’s unlikely journey toward becoming a writer—a journey full of self-doubt and debilitating uncertainty. The surprise of this is refreshing, but also unsettling for the reader. Another reason is the ending. In the closing paragraph, the protagonist, Francie, having embraced the self-punishment that being a writer entails, describes what her life has become:
Occasionally a date with a face blank as a sheet of paper asks you whether writers often become discouraged. Say that sometimes they do and sometimes they do. Say it’s a lot like having polio.
“Interesting,” smiles your date, and then he looks down at his arm hairs and starts to smooth them, all, always, in the same direction.
In the most recently published version of the book, this closing paragraph happens to fall at the end of the page. My students often ask if that’s really the ending, or if perhaps I accidentally missed a page in the photocopy. Surely that can’t be the actual ending, they often say. What follows is a discussion about the possible reasons for this choice, which inevitably involves a careful analysis of the diction, phrasing, and imagery. Not only do these final lines evoke Francie’s continued (perhaps even growing) inability to connect with the world outside her stories, but they seem emblematic of the monotony and predictability of these real-world encounters. The structure of the final phrase, particularly the resonance created by “all, always” is notable and certainly intentional. Moore seems adamant to emphasize the repetitive pattern of the smoothing action, which, if you want to stretch, could speak to a kind of conformism that is constantly being pushed upon Francie by her mother, her roommate, her classmates in workshop. But writing for Francie is an act of quiet resistance—one that, ironically, she doesn’t even seem to have control over. Ultimately, Francie isn’t striving to become a writer; rather, despite her desperation to “be something, anything else,” she cannot help but become a writer.
For me, this is the perfect kind of resolution for a short story. I think the best short stories end with a sense and a rhythm of finality, but resist giving tidy fixes to the problems the characters face. Instead, they shine a light on the layers of meaning that the writer has built across the story as a whole, and bring us to a new level of understanding of the profound complexity of the story’s central conflict. I get immense joy out of being able to discuss at length the potential implications of the final lines of a story; when I do this in the classroom with my students, I can sometimes see their eyes light up with the realization that wow—a few words on the page have the power to truly move us as readers, to make us think and feel so deeply!
Stories like Moore’s are the inspiration behind the way I approach endings in my own writing. My hope is to give my readers the same kind of feeling that Moore gives me—a rush of goosebumps as I read the final lines and marvel at how richly and carefully constructed the story is.
I concede, however, that not everyone appreciates endings like these. I hear the term “open-ended” often applied with derision to books or movies that resist tidy conclusions. Some readers, it seems, feel cheated when they encounter an ending that leaves too much to interpretation. The criticism is often that the writer “didn’t know how to end it,” or got lazy by the time they reached the end. It’s difficult for me not to take offence to comments like these, even when they’re directed at someone else’s work. While, of course, I’ll admit that there are plenty of bad endings out there, I would argue that rather than being unskilful or lazy, some of these endings are intentionally and painstakingly designed to resonate with ambiguity. Ambiguity, in my view, is different from vagueness. A vague ending is murky, tentative, and abstract, and fails to indicate a change of state. Thus, it feels stagnant, like a rock dropped into a swamp. In contrast, an ambiguous ending feels like a bird taking flight. It lifts off into new territory, charged with possibility, but respects the reader enough to let them envision what that territory could look like, based on what the story has already offered them. An ambiguous ending lets uncertainty stand as something valuable and meaningful in its own right.
More recently, I’ve come to realize that my impulse to defend ambiguity goes much deeper than I had initially realized. I think part of the reason that Sally Mann’s words struck me so deeply as a young adult is that ambiguity has always been a central part of who I am. As a biracial person, I learned from a young age that ambiguity is unsettling for most people, and therefore often treated as a problem to be solved. I grew accustomed to being questioned about my race whenever I met new people. What are you? they would often ask, or, the slightly more sensitive, Where are you from? When I’d reply that I’m Canadian, the questioner would shift gears with additional questions, eventually gleaning the information that satisfied them: my dad is Chinese, my mom is German. The conversation would often end with some expression of satisfaction that the truth had finally come to the surface, or an explanation like “I thought maybe you were Hawaiian/Filipino/Inuit,” etc. As a child, I often came away from these exchanges feeling intensely awkward and alienated. I hated that my appearance inspired people to probe me with questions, as though I wasn’t allowed to simply exist as someone whose race couldn’t be immediately pinned down.
I like to believe that multiracial kids today no longer get questions like these. After all, multiracial families are far more common these days than they were when I was growing up. But at the same time, I think the assumption that any kind of ambiguity is problematic prevails, and has its roots in the narrow way of seeing I faced as a child. I believe that the fact that people continue to be uncomfortable with ambiguity makes it imperative for artists to keep exploring it. After all, what is art for but to challenge us, to take us out of our comfort zones, so that we can gain a richer understanding of and empathy for experiences that lie outside our own?
An integral part of my growth as a writer and as a person has been coming to the conviction that there is, in fact, great power and beauty in ambiguity, and that finding a way to communicate this through my writing—to intentionally cultivate an uncertainty that can stand as an authentic encapsulation of the story as a whole—is a worthy goal. I won’t claim that I’m even close to mastering this in the ways that Sally Mann and Lorrie Moore have, but, like Francie in “How to Become a Writer,” trying to do so has become an act of resistance that undergirds the fundamental reason why I write: to illuminate the complexity of human experience, and thereby challenge the idea that all stories should be molded into an immediately recognizable shape.
I would even go so far as to say: if it doesn’t have ambiguity, why bother?
Works CitedMoore, Lorrie. “How to Become a Writer.” Self-Help. Vintage, 2007, pp. 117-26.“Sally Mann in ‘Place.’” Art21, 21 Sep. 2001, https://art21.org/watch/art-in-the-twenty-first-century/s1/sally-mann-in-place-segment/.Thank you for reading Send My Love to Anyone. This post is public so feel free to share it.
Corinna Chong‘s first novel, Belinda's Rings, was published by NeWest Press in 2013, and her reviews and short fiction have appeared in magazines across Canada. The Whole Animal, a collection of short stories, was published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2023, and includes “Kids in Kindergarten,” which won the 2021 CBC Short Story Prize, and “Love/Cream/Heat,” which was selected for The Best Canadian Stories 2024, published by Biblioasis. Bad Land, her second novel, will be released in Fall 2024 with Arsenal Pulp Press. Corinna lives in Kelowna, BC and teaches English, creative writing, and fine arts at Okanagan College.
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The Whole Animal: Stories
by Corinna ChongArsenal Pulp Press, 2023A refreshingly original debut collection of short stories that grapple with the self-alienation and self-discovery that make us human.
For fans of Souvankham Thammavongsa, Lynn Coady, and Lisa Moore comes a striking debut collection of short stories that explore bodies both human and animal: our fascination with their strange effluences, growths, and protrusions, and the dangerous ways we play with their power to inflict harm on ourselves and on others.
Throughout The Whole Animal, flawed characters wrestle with the complexities of relationships with partners, parents, children, and friends as they struggle to find identity, belonging, and autonomy. Bodies are divided, often elusive, even grotesque. In "Porcelain Legs," a pre-teen fixes on the long, thick hair growing from her mother's eyelid. In "Wolf-Boy Saturday," a linguist grasps for connection with a young boy whose negligent upbringing has left him unable to speak. In "Butter Buns," a college student sees his mother in a new light when she takes up bodybuilding.
With strange juxtapositions, beguiling dark humour, and lurid imagery, The Whole Animal illuminates the everyday experiences of loneliness and loss, of self-alienation and self-discovery, that make us human.
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February 2, 2024
Farzana Doctor | Issue 33
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1) Creatives and helper-types have something in commonWhen I started telling other writers about 52 Weeks to a Sweeter Life for Caregivers, Activists and Helping Professionals, A Workbook of Emotional Hacks, Self-Care Experiments and Other Good Ideas, I heard a lot of I need this! enthusiasm.
I hadn’t expected this reaction and hadn’t included writers in the (already incredibly long) title. Of course, some of them are also caregivers, activists or helping professionals, but many aren’t.
Now I wish I had added “creatives” to the title. While researching the book, I learned about psychologist Elaine Aron, who coined the term Highly Sensitive Person, a category of people who are more attuned to and affected by others’ feelings, as well as stimuli such as noise, smells and light. She believes that HSPs make up about 15–20% of the population and tend to gravitate to the arts and helping professions. I relate to the HSP label. Perhaps most of the writers I know would too? (See www.farzanadoctor.com/52Weeks and look for Week 19’s Deeper Dive for a link to an HSP self-test if you’re curious).
2) Writing my first novel changed my life, but not in the way I expectedWhen I was thirty-two, I went to see a naturopath for insomnia and frequent colds. I wasn’t convinced he could help me, but my employee benefits covered four sessions, so I figured I’d give it a try. During his assessment, he asked, “do you take a lunch break every day?”
I peered at him. What did a lunch hour have to do with anything? I answered that I usually ate in front of my computer. Most of my colleagues did the same. It was normal.
He told me that my sympathetic nervous system was in overdrive and that it was essential that I learned to slow down. Then he leaned in and said, in what I imagined to be his best guru voice, “You have the power to manifest a different reality.”
I manifested this internal dialogue instead: obviously you don’t know what it’s like to work at a large mental health hospital, manage two addiction programs, facilitate groups, have a caseload of individual clients, and travel around the province teaching 2SLGBTQ cultural competency to other service providers while trying to change the homophobic, transphobic organization from within.
While I liked many aspects of my job, it stressed me out. I didn’t yet have a strategy for managing the trauma I was absorbing from clients. I didn’t know how to say ‘no’, or delegate or ask for help, and the workplace rewarded overwork by piling more on. I had a toxic manager. The bureaucracy, like most conservative hierarchies, was oppressive.
I didn’t make a second appointment. That same day, I stayed late at work to make up for the time “lost” at the naturopath’s. Overtired, I went home, was argumentative with my partner and ate microwave popcorn for dinner.
I didn’t tell Dr. Manifestor (who was right about lunch breaks, by the way) that I was also attempting to write my first novel, which I wrote on weekends, early mornings or while on “vacation.” Many writers with full-time jobs and/or parenting responsibilities have this sort of writing schedule, and I don’t think we talk enough about the strain it can cause. I wasn’t resting enough; even in my time off, I was working (because writing is work).
After another few years of this tedious routine, I quit the job and started a private practice. My biggest conscious motivation for this difficult decision was that I wanted autonomy over my time so I could finally finish Stealing Nasreen. I have so much gratitude to those characters for helping me step off my hamster wheel.
But quitting didn’t give me the quick or immediate relief I’d hoped for. It was during this slow period of building a private practice that I realized I was burned out: I felt sad much of the time, needed to sleep well beyond my alarm. I was angry that my previous job had left me washed out. At the same time I was disoriented without the workplace structure and teams that had organized me for a dozen years.
In hindsight I’d probably experienced milder waves of burnout in my twenties, which I’d pushed back by switching jobs, hoping that “a change was as good as a rest”. Likely the impacts of overwork and vicarious trauma were accumulating in my body, the way a dripping faucet slowly and almost imperceptibly fills a tub.
Gradually, with the support of my friends, I restarted my own therapy, exercised more, tried meditation. Sometimes I managed it consistently, sometimes not so much. I created a writing routine that didn’t involve vacation writing. The burnout lifted.
And…it would return again in my forties, in a different context, for similar personal and structural reasons, but that’s a longer story.
I’ve shared my experience in this book to destigmatize burnout because I’ve learned that each time I share it with a burned out helper or activist it provides relief. Let’s normalize that caregiving, activism and helping work (really, just existing in this world) has an emotional impact, both positive and negative. There’s no shame in suffering burnout or vicarious trauma. Perhaps we can look at these experiences in the way we address physical conditions like carpal tunnel syndrome, through prevention, rest and compassionate treatment.
3) Writing A Self-Help Book Was My Self-HelpThis was the first book that felt calming to write. Yes, there was self-doubt and deadlines, but each time I did a round of edits I revisited the book’s reminders about boundaries, resisting internalized capitalism, reaching out to community, dealing with sticky feelings, settling the nervous system, and so on. I have also been actively using the book’s ideas as I’ve witnessed and protested the genocide in Palestine, and I hope they are useful to others engaged in social justice work too.
This was also the first writing project that brought together parts of myself—activist, therapist, and writer—that tend to work more separately. Of course, readers of my novels will recognize the therapist and activist hanging out in the background, influencing my plots and prose. As a therapist, I put the writer part on the shelf (though the activist is always whispering in my ear). It’s felt liberating to deliberately call in all these parts in one book.
This book has also made me understand myself better. I processed and included memoir-ish elements. I shared vulnerable anecdotes, like how I first used self-hypnosis at age eleven, shortly after my mother’s death, or how activism left me with vicarious trauma, or how I began to give myself permission to take lunch breaks. And how, many years later, I finally took that naturopath’s advice and began working towards manifesting a sweeter life for myself.
52 Weeks to a Sweeter Life for Caregivers, Activists and Helping Professionals, A Workbook of Emotional Hacks, Self-Care Experiments and Other Good Ideas will be on bookshelves March 2024 in Canada (September/October for US/UK readers). Pre-order now. And save the date for the Toronto launch: March 21, 7pm at Caversham Books.
Farzana Doctor is a Tkaronto-based author, activist and psychotherapist. She has written four critically acclaimed novels including Stealing Nasreen, Six Metres of Pavement, All Inclusive, and Seven, a poetry collection You Still Look The Same. She is a founding member of WeSpeakOut and the End FGM Canada Network.
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52 Weeks to a Sweeter Life for Caregivers, Activists and Helping Professionals, A Workbook of Emotional Hacks, Self-Care Experiments and Other Good Ideas
by Farzana DoctorDouglas & McIntyre, 2024Support Send My Love to Anyone
A practical guide to self-care and community care, written for helpers—the caregivers, activists, community leaders, mental health and medical professionals who are the first to help others, but the last to seek help themselves.
As an activist, community organizer and social worker, Farzana Doctor has preached self-care to hundreds of people struggling with burnout and exhaustion. But for years she couldn’t manage to take her own advice.
Many other helpers she knew were the same: they knew the signs of burnout, and they understood the science of self-care. Maybe they’d taken workshops on vicarious trauma; maybe they’d even taught them. But still they struggled to escape the cycle of overwork, overwhelm and recovery. 52 Weeks to a Sweeter Life is a workbook that speaks directly to these people—and anyone who struggles to pause, set boundaries and centre their own needs.
The workbook contains fifty-two lessons, one for each week of the year. Each week, readers will find a simple new idea and an experiment for trying it out, with deeper dives into the material provided, but every level of participation celebrated. Throughout, Doctor embraces both community care and self-care at the same time, showing readers the overlap between the two.
Beautifully written, direct and insightful, this workbook is a gentle and practical guide to a more balanced life, written for those who need it most.
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Last Licks
KIRBY reads "Last Licks" from their new collection, SHE, published by knife| fork | book (April, 2024). Distributed by Asterism Books.
Photo by Don PylelyricsShe's up she's up
Another gray full of dread
Nothing pretty on the corner
Released February 2, 2024
Cover photo: Don Pyle
"Last Licks" first appeared as a limited edition chapbook from Anstruther Press (January 2024) with thanks to Jim Johnstone.
Special thanks to Dale Martin Smith.
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February 1, 2024
Vancouver Launch of Anecdotes
‘Anecdotes’ Launch: An Evening with Kathryn Mockler & FriendsFour wonderful B.C. authors will share bits of their latest works at Upstart & Crow.
RegisterRegister for your free spot on this Eventbrite page, as capacity is limited.
Date and timeThu, Feb 29, 2024 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM PST
LocationUpstart & Crow
1387 Railspur Alley Vancouver, BC V6H 3R7
Join us at Upstart & Crow on Thursday, Feb. 29 at 6 p.m. for a lively evening of readings and conversation between four wonderful B.C. writers.
In this free event, hosted by Giller shortlisted writer Kevin Chong, we’ll toast the launch of Kathryn Mockler’s Anecdotes, a darkly funny collection of short stories published by our indie press favourite, Bookhug. And we’ll enjoy readings from amazing fellow writers Shashi Bhat, Christopher Evans, Chong and Mockler, along with great conversation.
About the authors:
Kathryn Mockler is the author of the story collection Anecdotes (Book*hug Press, 2023), five books of poetry, and several short films and experimental videos. She co-edited the print anthology Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House Books, 2020). She is an assistant professor at the University of Victoria where she teaches screenwriting and fiction.
Kevin Chong is the award-winning author of several books of fiction and nonfiction. His work has appeared in The Guardian, The Rumpus, and more. He currently lives in Vancouver and is an associate professor at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan campus. The Double Life of Benson Yu was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Shashi Bhat is the author of the forthcoming story collection Death by a Thousand Cuts, and the novels The Most Precious Substance on Earth, a finalist for the 2022 Governor General’s Award for fiction, and The Family Took Shape, a finalist for the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award. Bhat is the editor-in-chief of EVENT magazine and teaches creative writing at Douglas College.
Christopher Evans is a writer and editor, originally from the lands of the Lkwungen People, on the traditional territories of the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations, in Victoria, B.C. Chris is a former editor for PRISM internationalmagazine and currently teaches creative writing to children. His debut short story collection Nothing Could Be Further from the Truth was published by House of Anansi in 2022.
More about Upstart & Crow:
Located on Granville Island, Upstart & Crow is a literary arts studio for curious readers and creative storytellers alike. We are international in our outlook, and local in our sensibilities. We create opportunities to surface new talent and champion bold ideas through events, workshops, literary launches, unique partnerships — and yes, we also sell books!
Health precautions:
We want this event to be fun and safe. Masks are welcome, though we won’t enforce them. We hope that folks who come will be vaccinated and boosted and will stay home if they feel ill.
Accessibility:
The main studio of our shop is accessible for folks with mobility aids. There is a washroom on the main floor available for attendees.
Questions: hello@upstartandcrow.com
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