Kathryn Mockler's Blog, page 33
October 6, 2023
Sandra Ridley | Issue 30
“After your foxfire...” from Vixen © 2023 by Sandra Ridley. Used with permission of Book*hug Press.
Sandra Ridley is the author of four books of poetry: Fallout; Post-Apothecary; The Counting House; and Silvija, a finalist for the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize. She has won the bpNichol Chapbook Award, Saskatchewan Book Award for Publishing, the Alfred G. Bailey Prize, and the Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Battle of the Bards. Additionally, she has been a finalist for the Banff Centre Bliss Carman Poetry Award, the Ottawa Book Award, the Archibald Lampman Award, the ReLit Award for Poetry, and the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. She has also been nominated for the Ontario Arts Council’s KM Hunter Artist Award for Mid-Career Writer and for the Ottawa Arts Council’s Mid-Career Artist Award. Ridley has taught poetry at Sage Hill Writing, Carleton University, and has had the honour of being a mentor with Ottawa’s Supportive Housing and Mental Health Services “Footprints to Recovery” program for people living with mental illness. An audio performance of her chapbook “Lift” was presented on CBC’s Sound Exchange. Her work has been anthologized and translated into German and French. Sandra grew up on a farm in Saskatchewan and lives in Ottawa.
Vixen
by Sandra RidleyBook*hug Press, 2023Griffin Poetry Prize finalist Sandra Ridley offers a breathtaking, harrowing immersion in cruelty behind different veils: ecological collapse, the medieval hunt, and intimate partner violence.
Sparked by a haunting chance encounter with a fox, and told in six chapters of varying form, Vixen is as visceral as it is mysterious, sensuous as it is terrifying. Expanding on her body of work, Ridley exposes the wild in the domestic, the hunt in the home, and the unrelenting nature of stalking. She compels us to examine the nature of empathy, what it means to be a compassionate witness, and what happens to us when brutality is so ever-present that we become numb.
Vixen is a beautiful, difficult, and fierce tapestry of defiance and survival.
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Michael V. Smith
“Everyday” from Queers Like Me © 2023 by Michael V. Smith. Used with permission of Book*hug Press.
Michael V. Smith has published six previous books, which include three collections of poetry, a memoir, and two novels. Also an award-winning filmmaker, drag queen, and professor, Smith teaches at UBC Okanagan, in Kelowna, BC, where he lives with his brilliant husband.
Book Tour DatesToronto (October 27)
Montreal (October 30)
Ottawa (November 2)
Queers Like Me
by Michael V. SmithBook*hug Press, 2023Confessional and immersive, Michael V. Smith’s latest collection is a broad tapestry that explores growing up queer and working class, then growing into an urban queer life.
In these poems, we are immersed in the world of a young Smith as he shares the awkward dinners, the funerals, and the uncertainty of navigating fraught dynamics, bringing us into these most intimate moments of family life while outrunning deep grief. Smith moves from first home to first queer experiences: teenage crushes, video cameras, post-club hookups, fears and terrors, closeted lovers, and daydreams of confronting your childhood bully.
Queers Like Me is an enveloping book—a meditation on family complexity and a celebration of personal insight.
Praise for Queers Like Me:
“Michael V. Smith’s Queers Like Me is a beautiful, funny, honest book. There were so many moments when I felt a loving kinship with Smith through queerness, through family, through home. Each page feels alive and so deeply human. This is a book to read and to be read through—a brilliant dive into belonging.” —Jordan Abel, Griffin Poetry Prize–winning author of Injun and NISHGA
“Michael V. Smith is Canada’s answer to Frank O’Hara. In poems at once charming in tone and yet devastating in subtext, rollicking in language and dignified in what is said as well as what remains unspoken, Queers Like Me explores the nature of family, place, and belonging from the perspective of a life lived on the artistic edge.” —George Murray, author of Problematica: New and Selected Poems
“A verse memoir from several perspectives of identity, Queers Like Me is a faceted lexicon of Smith’s experience of grief, desire, alienation, aging, and happiness. A warm, witty-tragic tale told in lineated conversational intimacy, with lines like ‘I’m a bit emotionally barren / with some singing and dancing / thrown in,’ this confessional/anti-confessional text feels like a friend you could talk to about anything.” —Sharon Thesen, author of The Wig-Maker
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Big heartfelt thanks to all of the subscribers and contributors who make this project possible!
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Michael V. Smith | Issue 30
“Everyday” from Queers Like Me © 2023 by Michael V. Smith. Used with permission of Book*hug Press.
Michael V. Smith has published six previous books, which include three collections of poetry, a memoir, and two novels. Also an award-winning filmmaker, drag queen, and professor, Smith teaches at UBC Okanagan, in Kelowna, BC, where he lives with his brilliant husband.
Book Tour DatesToronto (October 27)
Montreal (October 30)
Ottawa (November 2)
Queers Like Me
by Michael V. SmithBook*hug Press, 2023Confessional and immersive, Michael V. Smith’s latest collection is a broad tapestry that explores growing up queer and working class, then growing into an urban queer life.
In these poems, we are immersed in the world of a young Smith as he shares the awkward dinners, the funerals, and the uncertainty of navigating fraught dynamics, bringing us into these most intimate moments of family life while outrunning deep grief. Smith moves from first home to first queer experiences: teenage crushes, video cameras, post-club hookups, fears and terrors, closeted lovers, and daydreams of confronting your childhood bully.
Queers Like Me is an enveloping book—a meditation on family complexity and a celebration of personal insight.
Praise for Queers Like Me:
“Michael V. Smith’s Queers Like Me is a beautiful, funny, honest book. There were so many moments when I felt a loving kinship with Smith through queerness, through family, through home. Each page feels alive and so deeply human. This is a book to read and to be read through—a brilliant dive into belonging.” —Jordan Abel, Griffin Poetry Prize–winning author of Injun and NISHGA
“Michael V. Smith is Canada’s answer to Frank O’Hara. In poems at once charming in tone and yet devastating in subtext, rollicking in language and dignified in what is said as well as what remains unspoken, Queers Like Me explores the nature of family, place, and belonging from the perspective of a life lived on the artistic edge.” —George Murray, author of Problematica: New and Selected Poems
“A verse memoir from several perspectives of identity, Queers Like Me is a faceted lexicon of Smith’s experience of grief, desire, alienation, aging, and happiness. A warm, witty-tragic tale told in lineated conversational intimacy, with lines like ‘I’m a bit emotionally barren / with some singing and dancing / thrown in,’ this confessional/anti-confessional text feels like a friend you could talk to about anything.” —Sharon Thesen, author of The Wig-Maker
Support Send My Love to AnyoneThis newsletter is free, but you can support it 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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October 2, 2023
D.M. Bradford | Issue 30
© D.M Bradford, from Bottom Rail on Top (Brick Books, 2023)
Darby Minott Bradford is a poet and translator based in Tio’tia:ke (Montreal). Bradford is the author of Dream of No One but Myself (Brick Books, 2021), which won the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry, was longlisted for the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal, and was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize, Governor General’s Literary Awards, and Gerard Lampert Memorial Award. House Within a House by Nicholas Dawson, Bradford's first translation, was published in 2023 by Brick Books. Bottom Rail on Top is their second book.
Bottom Rail on Top
by D.M. BradfordBrick Books, 2023Somewhere in the cut between Harriet Jacobs and surveillance, Southampton and sneaker game, Lake Providence and the supply chain, Bottom Rail on Top sets off a mediation between the complications of legacy and selfhood. In a kind of archives-powered unmooring of the linear progress story, award-winning poet D.M. Bradford fragments and recomposes American histories of antebellum Black life and emancipation, and stages the action in tandem with the matter of his own life. Amidst echoes and complicities, roots and flights, lineage and mastery, it’s a story of stories told in knots and asides, held together with paper trails, curiosities, and hooks—a study that doesn’t end.
Tour DatesSupport Send My Love to AnyoneThis newsletter is free, but you can support it 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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Gary Barwin | Issue 30
I believe the hands of the clock are too close to midnight and anyway, this kind of post-ironic honesty is a response to how capitalism erodes our values and sense of self.
In this letter, I’m going to pretend you are Kafka. Nocturnal. Secretive. Intense.
Pained yet quietly open to the joy in the world.
And tonight, I saw—or didn’t see—something which reminded me of you. After midnight as I walked the dog I saw a figure on the path. The forest was blue bright because of the full moon; even the shadows were blue. The dog howled and began to run, but I called him back. I couldn’t tell if the figure was coming towards us or away. We kept walking and the figure appeared to stride off into the trees. Maybe it was a trick of the turning path, but when we rounded the bend, it was gone. The dog nosed disconsolately for a minute then gave up. It was unsettling, alone at night in the woods and this figure appearing seemingly out of nowhere. What was it?
As I’m writing this, I feel as if I’m missing out on the other writing I could be doing.
Remember that summer we watched the waves fall onto the shore, the tide coming in, the waves becoming closer and closer, so near to the sandcastles we’d made until you couldn’t stand it and so you ran up to them and smashed them all.
Kafka wrote a famous letter to his father, filled with bitterness and recrimination. He never sent it, but it’s become posthumously famous since Max Brod saved his friend’s writing from his wished-for-fire. But I like best Kafka’s letters to his partners, such as Milena. There’s often an intimate joy and the sense of loving attention, to the world and to Milena.
I’m living quite well here, the mortal body could hardly stand more care, the balcony outside my room is sunk into a garden, overgrown and covered with blooming bushes (the vegetation here is strange; in weather cold enough to make the puddles freeze in Prague, blossoms are slowly unfolding before my balcony), moreover this garden receives full sun (or full cloud, as it has for almost a week)—lizards and birds, unlikely couples, come visit me: I would very much like to share Meran with you, recently you wrote about not being able to breathe, that image and its meaning are very close to one another and here both would find a little relief.1
That’s how I would like this letter to feel. Dispensing with protective or habitual distance, if we could speak earnestly and straightforwardly, even if we don’t agree. If it could be based on listening, really seeing each other, and authentic connection. I think so much pain and confusion could be alleviated if we only had the feeling of being seen.
After returning from the walk, I lay down and dreamt that all of the ink from all the world’s writing was distilled into a vast tank, like liquid night. Then someone was dropped in and their body stained blue as they struggled to breathe. They pressed against the glass as if a desperate sea creature. Later, there was a war and the tank was tipped over and ink floods into the fields and streets. All those words—serifs, ascenders, bowls—released into the world.
*
Yesterday, Zoe Whittall posted on Twitter that a friend had reminded her “gay bars used to end the night with three slow songs so we'd go off into the night after swaying around holding each other and I think we should bring back that tradition.”
And I responded, ‘I think all gatherings, meetings, grocery shopping trips should end this way.”
I used to be invested in irony and was quite cynical, though I might have said something about engaging in the absurdity and contingency of everything. I’d shy away from direct expression (where is the complicating nuance?) and anything that could smack even slightly of sentimentality. But now I feel like saying “Fuck that shit.” My friend and collaborator Lillian Nećakov and I were discussing why we and many of our peers both are writing about death, and have an interest in “deeper thinking.” Is it the times or our age—sixty or more?
I believe the hands of the clock are too close to midnight and anyway, this kind of post-ironic honesty is a response to how capitalism erodes our values and sense of self. I’m trying to think without the carapace, to speak from the squishy, undeflecting, unguarded self, hoping that I’m able to withstand whatever the consequences are. I both feel that I’ve been around long enough to be strong enough for it and that I’ve learned from many brave souls, speaking from many places of alterity—queer, disabled, BIPOC—telling what is true for them.
*
A wolf in front of me. I wait. A forest grows. A wolf and me and the trees. I wait more. The wolf is bones. I will not be late to the chess game.
*
Do I believe that words are enough? Words spoken to you or words written, would they change things, be helpful? Change is more of a process, I believe. The formation of a new pattern. How many days does it take to form a habit. Answer (backed by science!): sixty-six days.2 (I’m beginning to feel like I’m channeling the second-personing of the letterwriting Rilke.)
Perhaps a thought finds in way into your thinking and, like a computer virus, begins to replicate, working in the background, making changes that may at first be invisible. The thin edge of a wedge doesn’t break the rock but after some time and some worming, more of the wedge wedges between the rockflesh and splits it (so it “bursts like a star,” to quote Rilke.) A single statement may have echoes. And perhaps the attention, the care, the seeing is the first thing that makes a difference, allows the exchange to take root. A letter is read, maybe only partially, then it is put down. But then picked up again, either literally, or in the mind.
*
In his “Archaic Torso of Orpheus,” Rilke exhorts, “You must change your life.” Err, ok. I’d never thought of that. I’ll change it, right away. Thanks, Rainer. Of course, we wonder “change how?” And rather than just following instructions, the phrase become more active because we consider what it means. If it even is—like I’m doing here—possible to be told to change, as if thinking something can make a more fundamental change possible. But at least for this letter, what comes before this iconic and often motivationally-memed line is important. Translations vary but the point is:
for there is no angle from which
it cannot see you.
You must change your life.
or
for here there is no place
that does not see you.
You must change your life. 3
The torso of Orpheus sees you wherever and however you are. Is it a shaming gaze that means you cannot continue to get away with your bullshit? I imagine a judgemental God with an eye like a cue ball, having no pupil, it looks (and judges) in every direction.
I think it means that “you are seen”—that your being and your experience are witnessed. I love that the torso of this famed Greek figure has no head and so it “sees” in every direction without eyes. It radiates corporeal human life, from one living thing to another. Never mind the cerebral cogitation of rationality, this “being seen” is elemental. It is from this place that the exhortation to “change your life,” comes. From a deep, indeed a fundamental, understanding, of the human condition (and this six-pack Greek demi-God is definitely conditioned!) I’d say from a place of love. An atheist Antinomian grace. You are always already everything.
It is from this place that I’d like to write this letter to you. The real you, not the Franz Kafka we both needed it to be addressed to. I wish it could beam out in every direction, not in words but with a sense that you are seen. You do not need to change your life, you just need to see it. To see below the white-capped water of its surface and know your innate value. To call yourself beloved, to feel yourself beloved on the earth.4
Gary Barwin is a writer, composer and multidisciplinary artist and the author of twenty-six books including Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy, which won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award. His national bestselling novel Yiddish for Pirates won the Leacock Medal for Humour and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and was long-listed for Canada Reads.
Barwin has been writer-in-residence at University of Toronto (Scarborough), Laurier, Western University, McMaster University and the Hamilton Public Library, Hillfield Strathallan College, Sheridan College and Young Voices E-Writer-in-Residence at the Toronto Public Library. He has taught creative writing at a number of colleges and universities, to at-risk youth in Hamilton through the ArtForms program and currently mentors through the Vancouver Manuscript Intensive. His writing has been published in hundreds of magazines and journals internationally and his writing, music, media works and visuals have been presented and broadcast internationally. Though born in Northern Ireland to South African parents of Ashenazi descent, Barwin lives in Hamilton, Ontario, and at garybarwin.com.
Imagining Imagining: Essays on Language, Identity and Infinity
by Gary BarwinWolsak & Wynn, 2023Award-winning author Gary Barwin has written poems, novels and books for children. He’s composed music, created multimedia art and performed around the world. Now he has turned his talented pen to essays. In Imagining Imagining: Essays on Language, Identity and Infinity Barwin thinks deeply about big ideas: story and identity; art and death; how we communicate and why we dream. From his childhood home in Ireland to his long-time home in Hamilton, Barwin shares the thoughts that keep him up at night (literally) and the ideas that keep him creating. Filled with witty asides, wise stories and a generosity of spirit that is unmistakable, these are essays that readers will turn to again and again.
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Get more from Kathryn Mockler in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the app1Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena <https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/89235/letters-to-milena-by-franz-kafka/9780805212679/excerpt>
23Rilke, ‘The Antique Torso of Orpheus,” <https://writing.upenn.edu/bernstein/syllabi/readings/Rilke-Archaic.html#:~:text=You%20must%20change%20your%20life.,-tr.&text=of%20his%20loins%2C%20glide%20to%20the%20centre%20of%20procreation.&text=it%20cannot%20see%20you.,have%20to%20change%20your%20life> a blend of translations by Stephen Mitchell and Sarah Stutt
4Raymond Carver, “Late Fragment.” https://allpoetry.com/late-fragment
September 24, 2023
Send My Love to Anyone | Issue 29
Hello friends,
Here’s a little update.
To be honest, I had a pretty rough summer. Between a family member getting scammed and some health issues, it was a bust.
So I’m glad the summer is over, and things are somewhat better.
In happier news my husband David Poolman collaborated with several musicians over the past couple of years, and in August released an instrumental album Any-Angled Light, which I absolutely love and listen to every day!
“Recorded by visual artists and musicians in Montreal, Toronto, and rural Ontario, these songs were constructed in a call-and-response fashion with audio sketches, drawings, photographs, text, and video sent back and forth between the players - a conversational process that began during the winter of 2020 and continued off and on over the next 2 years.”
You can get it on all streaming platforms and there’s vinyl too!
As for me, I’ve been gearing up for the release of my debut story collection, Anecdotes, which was published on September 19th by Book*hug Press. They call it a book birthday, and I like that!
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.
This month for Send My Love to Anyone, I wrote about my mindset change when it comes to self-promotion. I was inspired by Chen Chen’s IG post last January about self-promotion, privilege, and finding your readers, which really stuck with me. For Anecdotes, I decided to lean into self-promotion instead of dreading it, and I’m trying to have fun. So far it’s working.
One thing I did that I find personally difficult was walk into a bookstore and ask to sign my books! I know writers do this all the time, but I never have and it was hard! It was Munro’s Books, and they were so nice about it! Check out the article to find out more about my self-promotion journey. I hope it helps writers who find self-promotion as difficult as I do.
I’m getting into BookTok and engaging with a great literary community there. Later this fall, I’ll be posting about my experience on BookTok. I’m mostly ignored, have low views, and many of my videos are silly, but there’s so much freedom in being ignored. More importantly you can build a community there—just block the trolls like the dude who thought he would become a New York Times bestselling author by reading a book by a woman author every day. There’s quite a bit of drama on #BookTok which I also love! And I’ve made friends on BookTok! It reminds me of the old days of Twitter when I made online literary friends all the time.
Anecdotes got some early love before its release. It was listed on the Toronto Star, Frieze (yes, that Frieze art magazine from the UK!!), 49th Shelf, CBC Books, The Hamilton Review of Books, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn. This fall I’m touring the book and co-launching with these wonderful Book*hug authors—Sandra Ridley (Vixen) and Michael V. Smith (Queers Like Me). I may even add an east coast tour. Details to come.
And now for Issue 29 of Send My Love to Anyone!SMLTA columnist Kirby has a stunning piece about the courageous act of continuing and Meghan Greeley shares an excerpt from her debut novel Jawbone (Radiant Press) which also has a gorgeous cover!
For Gatherings this month, I recommend Lindsay Wong, The Silent Partner, an article about Literary Friendships, Casey Plett’s book On Community, The Victoria Authors Festival, and more!
In unrelated news, I think I have figured out the perfect length for a timed writing prompt, and it’s seven minutes!
I’m teaching a short fiction class where we do writing prompts, and I’ve discovered that seven minutes is the sweet spot—a long enough time to get something written but also short enough to keep you on track. Here’s a new writing prompt from my other newsletter Where Do I Start?
Lastly, you can now follow me on Bluesky!
Kathryn
Send My Love to Anyone | Issue 29Support Send My Love to AnyoneThis newsletter is free, but you can support it 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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Get more from Kathryn Mockler in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the app
September 19, 2023
Meghan Greeley | Issue 29
1.
The vocal cords do not atrophy. The larynx is a multi-purpose room. Of course, I swallow still. I clear my throat: a habit now, an empty signal.
The vocal cords look like a vagina. I have seen a video of this. They are fleshy pink bands slapping together. I once read about a man in the Ozarks who woke from a nineteen-year coma. He couldn’t remember anything after 1984, the year of his accident, but seven thousand days of dormancy can’t stop the cords from thrumming to life. He said mama. Then he said Pepsi and then he said milk. The brain goes soft, but the voice is always ready, waiting.
2.
If you think this video is for you, it’s not. No—it’s for you, but not to you. I’d explain it properly if you were here, but you’re not here, and anyway, my mouth is wired shut. Well—the wires are gone now, but I’m still shut. I can’t talk yet, but it isn’t a head thing.
It is a head thing, you would probably say, or is your mouth on your ass?
I should say: it isn’t a brain thing. I was wired shut, and then a man put his latex fingers in my mouth and cut out the wires with gardening shears, and now the ghosts of the wires wire me shut. Like when a fence is knocked down but you’re in the habit of walking around it. You just walk right around it.
3.
This room is the world now. Here are the given circumstances: the world beyond these walls no longer exists, and so this one-room cabin has become my lone little planet. When a gale batters the tin roof, it is not a north wind but the solar winds or some such science thing, rattling me in my solitary orbit. I should clarify: the sun is still the sun in this scenario, but I have censored it like the proper nouns of a wartime letter. Heavy blackout curtains hang like never-evers, like the enemy must not discover light. Do these curtains hide a magic hour or a witching hour? I don’t know, and the enemy wouldn’t either. I bought them at a convenience store on the highway, the kind that sells cigarettes and canned soup but also party supplies and plastic barrels, and the plastic barrels were cash only. (Nothing else was cash only.) When I opened the package, a little nest of dead baby spiders tumbled onto the floor. They were mummified and milky, yet almost transparent in places. You know opals? Like that.
4.
Sometimes, when I sit in the dark, I try to listen to the Foley of the world. This whimper of metal is a swivel chair. That sigh of mass displacing air is me with my toes tucked under the seat, letting velocity twist me slowly, slowly clockwise, the pathway of time and unusual planets. I hear things you can’t hear beneath a midday sun. I hear things you can hear beneath a midday sun too, but I hear them more so. Breathing. The acidic murmurs of my stomach. The beep of my watch: four in the morning. Astronauts still wear watches, like me.
I can hear the ocean. I try not to hear the ocean; I should acclimatize myself to the sounds of an ocean-less world. I should only perceive, as an exercise, the contents of this room, the creak of the iron cot, the wind in the cold woodstove. The groan of the floor, its boards settling with the night. Groaning under the weight of my suitcase, which vomits its contents onto the shiplap, because in my secret life I am messy, and besides, the camera can’t see it.
I do not hear the camera, sitting silent and sentinel on its tripod, but I see it. I see its little light. I see it like a distant star whose radiation has found me here. It’s the only thing that interrupts the darkness. A pinprick of red: recording.
The camera has been recording for thirteen minutes. The rules say that I am only allowed to speak for one minute. This was not the winning take. This was the seventy-eighth not-winning take. I knew it was another failed experiment the moment I pressed record and started listening to the light bulb. My head was beside a lamp, and I could hear electricity coursing through the filament. The bulb hummed in a key I didn’t like, so I turned out the lamp and let the camera document the dark and the nothing and me in the dark with nothing to say.
5.
I found this cabin on Airbnb. I messaged the owner and said, I’m looking for the loneliest place in the world. I said, I’m in the market for an indefinite sojourn. I said, I’m looking for the kind of place that will make me feel like I’m the sole occupant of a distant planet without water or oxygen or microbial life. The owner messaged me back and said, I’ve never rented it for more than three nights but okay.
6.
I shower daily. I have been here for twenty-nine days and so I have taken twenty-nine showers and I have learned that this is the lifespan of a bar of Irish Spring soap if you are rigorous, which I am. I like the stench of it, of using this daily ritual as a marker of time. It takes three and a half hours for my dripping hair to dry completely. Once it is bone dry, the morning is over.
After the shower, my body is vermillion. The only way I feel clean is to scald my skin until it is red and raw.
This morning I walk barefoot and naked from the steaming bathroom to the blender. I make a smoothie from a banana and Greek yogurt and pomegranate juice and a stale cherry muffin. The smoothie is red, like me. Red as the light on the camera: still recording. I did not turn it off before falling asleep, I realize, and the memory card is robust.
I look at the camera and imagine I am on a YouTube cooking show. Just throw the whole muffin right on in there! That’s what I’d say. That’s the extent of my skill level. A few weeks ago, I’d continue, I put a slice of pizza in the blender with a dipping sauce. I had to add water because the pizza and the sauce would not liquefy.
Subscribers, I’d say with great solemnity, I don’t recommend it.
I imagine that the YouTube video is removed because I am naked and it violates the terms of service. My nipples and the dark patch of hair between my legs have violated someone else’s terms.
Maybe, I think, I will not say a minute’s worth of words. Maybe I will show a minute of myself, exposed and unafraid, to prove that I have graduated beyond social conventions like shame of a naked body. Where I’m going, the rules won’t apply.
I drink my muffin smoothie through a straw, sucking the thick, starchy liquid through my teeth. It’s amazing how much living you can do without opening your mouth at all.
Excerpt of Jawbone published with permission of Radiant Press.
Order Jawbone from Radiant Press.
Meghan Greeley is a writer, editor, performer, and director originally from Corner Brook, NL. Her poetry, prose, and scripts have been published in The Stockholm Review of Literature, Ephemera, Metatron's ÖMËGÄ project, Riddle Fence, Humber Mouths 2, The Breakwater Book of Contemporary Newfoundland Drama (Vol. 1), and the Playwrights Canada Press anthology Long Story Short. She was a 2016 nominee for the RBC Tarragon Emerging Playwrights Prize and is currently the Writer in Residence at Memorial University. Her play Hunger was shortlisted for the 2023 Winterset Award. Her stage plays have been produced in Toronto, Halifax, and across the island of Newfoundland. She currently lives in St. John’s, NL.
Jawbone
by Meghan GreeleyRadiant Press, 2023A young woman has one minute to speak on a submission video to win a one-way trip to Mars, a location she views as the ultimate escape. As she barricades herself in a cottage by the sea and prepares to record, she examines her fixation on the colour red, shame, guilt, a dramatic breakup with her boyfriend, and the breakdown of her relationship with her best friend. There is another problem however, her jaw has been wired shut for a long time, and shes having trouble speaking. A passionate story about queer love and loneliness and a dazzling debut from author Meghan Greeley.
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September 17, 2023
On Self-Promotion | Issue 29
My debut story collection Anecdotes comes out with Book*hug Press on Tuesday September 19th. That’s the official book birthday, but it’s already in stores and my dear dear friend and Book*hug Press sibling Michael V. Smith (Queers Like Me) and I will be co-launching our books at Camas Books and Info Shop in Victoria on September 18th.
The last time I had a solo authored book out was in 2015, my poetry collection, The Purpose Pitch. A lot has changed with book publishing, marketing, and publicity in eight years. And even though I have had poetry books published before, I feel like a brand new author because nothing is as it was. In 2015 there was social media of course, but video and TikTok have taken things in a whole other direction.
Many writers cringe at the thought of self-promotion myself included. But no matter if you are with a big press, small press, or self-publishing, self-promotion is just going to be part of the gig. This time around, I decided to try to embrace it instead of dreading it.
One thing that changed my attitude about self-promotion was Chen Chen’s January 22, 2023 IG post. I urge you to read it in it’s entirety.
chenchenwrites
A post shared by @chenchenwritesYes, wouldn’t we all just love to sit back and have readers flock to our work, but that is just not going to happen for most writers especially without an agent or if you are with a smaller press or self-publishing.
Self-promotion doesn’t have to be screaming “buy my book” all the time. There are many ways to promote yourself and many ways to do it by uplifting other writers, which is something I am particularly interested in because I like being part of a community.
Another reason I decided to go all in on the self-promotion was that this is probably my most personal book to date. It deals with subject matter that I care deeply about—sexual violence, harassment, addiction, disfigurement, mental health, environmental collapse, and the absurdity of the hellscape we find ourselves in (there is humour here too—it’s not all depressing). But I want to reach others who care about these things or may have had some of these experiences.
I’m also passionate about independent presses and independent bookstores. Promoting this book allows me to shine a light on my favourite bookstores. And it gives me an opportunity to support my publisher who has invested in this project. Anecdotes is experimental, unusual, has upsetting subject matter, a weird sense of humour, and will not be to everyone’s taste. It doesn’t fit in an easy marketing box. And, fuck, I’m glad and fortunate that a press would take a chance on a book like this. And I was so lucky to have a such a wonderful editor—Malcolm Sutton who also created the cover illustration and designed book. I don’t take any of their work for granted, and so I hustle.
But just because I’ve reframed self-promotion doesn’t mean that I find it easy or I don’t cringe at myself. I hate having my picture taken and try do it as infrequently as possible. Weirdly though I’ve found myself on TikTok over the last year, which I have discovered has a really lovely literary community. I don’t have may followers (there’s freedom in being ignored) and I’m just sort of playing around, but I’m having fun with it and meeting new writers and readers. I even got invited to be on Tim Blackett’s new literary podcast (details to come) because of TikTok.
One self-promotion activity I found very difficult to do was go into a bookstore and ask to sign books. I don’t know why it made me feel uncomfortable. It’s good for the bookstore, it’s good for the publisher, it’s good for me and my book! But old me dreaded it and was embarrassed, but I pushed through and got myself down to the bookstore and asked to sign my books. Everyone at Munro’s couldn’t have been nicer. Todd took my picture, and Munro’s shared it on their socials, and I shared it on mine.
And then there’s the tour. I was not planning on doing a book tour but having Michael launching during the same season with the same press it seemed ridiculous not to set up a small tour (Michael and Book*hug did the heavy lifting here). We got Sandra Ridley on the ticket—how cool is that—whose poetry book Vixen is also launching with Book*hug this fall, and the three of us will be heading to Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa. I also added some other readings along the way—a virtual event with Junction Reads, Concordia in Montreal, and Words Fest in London. Although I’m excited about this tour, it causes me a great deal of anxiety. I worry that no one will come or that I’ll forget people’s names or that I won’t read well—all the fears! But because I’m committed to the subject matter of my book and my publisher, I’m going to push through despite this.
I wanted to write this piece about self-promotion for those like me who find it extremely difficult. And to also explain why I do it and why I think it’s important.
Also check out Book*hug’s entire fall season! It’s amazing!
Please share your experiences with self-promotion and any tips or tricks for getting through it!
If you have a book coming out or that’s out, please share it in comments with your title, publisher, release date, and a link!
Kathryn Mockler is the author of five books of poetry and several short films and videos. She co-edited the print anthology Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (2020) and is the publisher of the Watch Your Head website. She runs Send My Love to Anyone, a literary newsletter, and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Victoria where she teaches screenwriting and fiction.
You can order Anecdotes at your local independent bookstore or at Book*hug Press.
With dreamlike stories and dark humour, Anecdotes is a hybrid collection in four parts examining the pressing realities of sexual violence, abuse, and environmental collapse.
Absurdist flash fictions in “The Boy is Dead” depict characters such as a park that hates hippies, squirrels, and unhappy parents; a woman lamenting a stolen laptop the day the world ends; and birds slamming into glass buildings.
“We’re Not Here to Talk About Aliens” gathers autofictions that follow a young protagonist from childhood to early 20s, through the murky undercurrent of potential violence amidst sexual awakening, from first periods to flashers, sticker books to maxi pad art, acid trips to blackouts, and creepy professors to close calls.
“This Isn’t a Conversation” shares one-liners from overheard conversations, found texts, diary entries, and random thoughts: many are responses to the absurdity and pain of the current political and environmental climate.
In “My Dream House,” the past and the future are personified as various incarnations in relationships to one another (lovers, a parent and child, siblings, friends), all engaged in ongoing conflict.
These varied, immersive works bristle with truth in the face of unprecedented change. They are playful forms for serious times.
Praise for Anecdotes
“Part coming of age and part end times, Anecdotes is a bold and brilliant mixture of dark humour, understated literary experiments, and a poet’s eye for the truth. Mockler’s writing isn’t afraid to look at the world and see it for what it is. Her stories are so deeply immersive you’ll never want to leave. An absolute must-read if you live on this planet and even if you don’t.” —Carleigh Baker, author of Bad Endings
“‘What happened to you?’ Terrible things do happen. Daily. From the opening story of a dead boy nobody loved, to anxiety-ridden days of overcrowded public buses and murderous job interviews, to birds dropping from the sky, to no one needing money anymore [or a stolen laptop] because the world is ending today and everyone still thinks it’s happening to someone else while it’s happening to them. Is it too late? Of course it is! ‘What do they need?’ Don’t ask Pastor Rick. Like you, dear reader. ‘They need to hold on real tight.’ Mockler’s Anecdotes is an instant ‘post hope’ classic!” —Kirby, author of Poetry is Queer
“Utterly original, bracingly acidic, and always vulnerable, Kathryn Mockler channels Donald Barthelme having a psychotic break in this magnificent collection of coming-of-age stories for late stage capitalism.” —Emily Schultz, author of The Blondes and Sleeping With Friends
Press Coverage
What We’re Reading: Staff Writers’ Picks, Spring 2023 —Hamilton Review of the Books
24 Books by Past CBC Poetry Prize Winners and Finalists Being Published in 2023 —CBC Books
What to Read this Summer —Frieze
Most Anticipated: Our 2023 Fall Fiction Preview —49th Shelf
Our books editor on the 30 (plus!) new reads we can’t wait to cozy up with this fall —Toronto Star
Books of the Month: September 2023 Edition —Vol. 1 Brooklyn
Support Send My Love to AnyoneThis newsletter is free, but you can support it 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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September 16, 2023
The First Time "Prissy" | Kirby
The First Time “Prissy” by Kirby | Send My Love to Anyone
KIRBY “Prissy”Shall I rewrite or revise / My October symphony? / Or as an indication / Change the dedication / From revolution to revelation? — Pet Shop Boys
Is she off a cliff?
She’s utterly lost.
She misses future thinking
her pre-internet brain [Coupland]
things that work
being carefree
going to New York
travel without dread
the city she grew up in
cinemas with grand marquees
having to enter a place
old flames
wanting to go outside [or do anything]
going to the market my bread boy
walking without effort
dancing
going for drives
get up and go
seeing things
having a life
Saturday morning cartoons
“Your grief is real,” my friend Bobby says.
So is long COVID.
Why is she trying to make things matter anyways? Fuck that habit.
Especially these last days of summer, her absolute favourite, that hint of crispness in the air, crunchy apples, constant breeze, a lush growth spurt of herbs and blossoms find their epiphanies in a final chorus on the balcony. When Toronto skies are blue-blue, trees so green against the blues, the promise of field tomatoes and real tomato sandwiches and didn’t Hellman’s know just when to go on sale? And peaches. And apricots.
I still experience these as seasonal. Don’t you?
She doesn’t like to matter, so she tries to make things matter, but that’s not entirely true. Nothing binary ever is.
Of course she wants to matter, she does matter ffs. I simply want to have a say in how and what matters.
For instance, I don’t want it to matter, how much I’ve aged or how slow I’ve become of late. And, I’m self-conscious about it, because it’s a new thing for me to consider.
“I am single, yes, but I’m too exhausted for anything else and being gay is a young man’s game,” actor Rupert Everett would say, “I could set myself on fire at Heaven (a London nightclub) and gays would simply light their fags off me.” How fabulous!
This isn’t entirely true either, (well, maybe in Heaven). My god, was anyone more crush-worthy than once “leading man” Rupert in Dance with a Stranger, The Comfort of Strangers, Another Country? His recent brilliant turn in My Policeman.
I get it. We’re the same age. Madonna, Morrissey & me. The age of disappearance. Or, as the Morrissey song goes, “Now I am a was.”
I shared this fear of being “left out,” with a younger friend Finner, who replied, “I don’t think that’s just an older person fear.” and while I know that to be true, perhaps My October Symphony casts a different shadow. Another false assumption. Depends on the day.
Funny, “Blame it on My Youth,” is playing on the radio.
Quite unexpectedly, I ran into an old friend (a rarity to be sure), not just anyone, but one of the dancers from the dance I raved with featured in the final pages of Poetry is Queer, the Arthur of Arthur and Ermano, now single and their name is Aaron, and how strange because they share similarly chiseled features as Rupert, that strong jawline and hair for days. It took but a minute for smiles of recognition to kick in. We’ve met up several times since. How lovely to pick up this friendship again.
He’s in one of the newer residences in Corktown, an area I’m quite familiar with since we know another dear friend on nearby Trinity Street (many a gay night there, what’s a gay night you ask? When gays are free to be gay), and it was such a pleasure to be in my friend’s new home he’s worked so hard most of his life to procure. To see him well. Enjoy G’nT’s, a puff, and a sunset. I texted these thanks:
And the next day, I sent the mock-up for the cover of my new collection, She
It’s a courageous act to continue, darlin’s. Daily.
Reminder: Let loved ones care for you Kirby, they do. And the young ones adore you. Such good fortune.
I now ask for what I need. Recently tested out some canes. Not quite there yet. Soon come.
Kirby is the author of Poetry Is Queer.
Support Send My Love to AnyoneThis newsletter is free, but you can support it 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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“Prissy” | The First Time | Kirby
Kirby | The First Time “Prissy” Send My Love to Anyone
KIRBY “Prissy”Shall I rewrite or revise / My October symphony? / Or as an indication / Change the dedication / From revolution to revelation? — Pet Shop Boys
Is she off a cliff?
She’s utterly lost.
She misses future thinking
her pre-internet brain [Coupland]
things that work
being carefree
going to New York
travel without dread
the city she grew up in
cinemas with grand marquees
having to enter a place
old flames
wanting to go outside [or do anything]
going to the market my bread boy
walking without effort
dancing
going for drives
get up and go
seeing things
having a life
Saturday morning cartoons
“Your grief is real,” my friend Bobby says.
So is long COVID.
Why is she trying to make things matter anyways? Fuck that habit.
Especially these last days of summer, her absolute favourite, that hint of crispness in the air, crunchy apples, constant breeze, a lush growth spurt of herbs and blossoms find their epiphanies in a final chorus on the balcony. When Toronto skies are blue-blue, trees so green against the blues, the promise of field tomatoes and real tomato sandwiches and didn’t Hellman’s know just when to go on sale? And peaches. And apricots.
I still experience these as seasonal. Don’t you?
She doesn’t like to matter, so she tries to make things matter, but that’s not entirely true. Nothing binary ever is.
Of course she wants to matter, she does matter ffs. I simply want to have a say in how and what matters.
For instance, I don’t want it to matter, how much I’ve aged or how slow I’ve become of late. And, I’m self-conscious about it, because it’s a new thing for me to consider.
“I am single, yes, but I’m too exhausted for anything else and being gay is a young man’s game,” actor Rupert Everett would say, “I could set myself on fire at Heaven (a London nightclub) and gays would simply light their fags off me.” How fabulous!
This isn’t entirely true either, (well, maybe in Heaven). My god, was anyone more crush-worthy than once “leading man” Rupert in Dance with a Stranger, The Comfort of Strangers, Another Country? His recent brilliant turn in My Policeman.
I get it. We’re the same age. Madonna, Morrissey & me. The age of disappearance. Or, as the Morrissey song goes, “Now I am a was.”
I shared this fear of being “left out,” with a younger friend Finner, who replied, “I don’t think that’s just an older person fear.” and while I know that to be true, perhaps My October Symphony casts a different shadow. Another false assumption. Depends on the day.
Funny, “Blame it on My Youth,” is playing on the radio.
Quite unexpectedly, I ran into an old friend (a rarity to be sure), not just anyone, but one of the dancers of the dance I raved with featured in the final pages of Poetry is Queer, the Arthur of Arthur and Ermano, now single and their name is Aaron, and how strange because they share similarly chiseled features as Rupert, that strong jawline and hair for days. It took but a minute for smiles of recognition to kick in. We’ve met up several times since. How lovely to pick up this friendship again.
He’s in one of the newer residences in Corktown, an area I’m quite familiar with since we know another dear friend on nearby Trinity Street (many a gay night there, what’s a gay night you ask? When gays are free to be gay), and it was such a pleasure to be in my friend’s new home he’s worked so hard most of his life to procure. To see him well. Enjoy G’nT’s, a puff, and a sunset. I texted these thanks:
And the next day, I sent the mock-up for the cover of my new collection, She
It’s a courageous act to continue, darlin’s. Daily.
Reminder: Let loved ones care for you Kirby, they do. And the young ones adore you. Such good fortune.
I now ask for what I need. Recently tested out some canes. Not quite there yet. Soon come.
