Kathryn Mockler's Blog

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Gatherings | Issue 36

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Kirby and I are cooking up something cool. Details TBA!

I’m thrilled to see Anecdotes on the Danuta Gleed Literary Award shortlist with these amazing writers!

What a lovely and generous reading of Anecdotes by Mia Johnson in White Wall Review

"She [Mockler] thoughtfully exposes how content we are with embracing ourselves until someone tells us it’s wrong to do so. And she’s as brutal as she is unforgiving because holding onto that shame is exhausting. Mockler’s prose allows us to grieve our youth; to visit those parts of ourselves that felt powerless and give them somewhere to lay their head. “I don’t want to be a woman!” she puts indignantly. It’s that outrage born from shame as our sense of self shifts. When giving voice to negative emotions around experiences that reveal a great deal of pain – they’re often overridden by a paralyzing fear. Mockler teaches us to trust the transformative process, which reveals a commonality in our repression of these difficult emotions."

Kirby NewsRecommended Reading

Room Magazin e: Featuring Palestinian Voices, part 4: Palestinian poetry for National Poetry Month

Mustafa Aljazzar is raising funds for psychosocial and recreational support activities for children and women in shelter centers in Gaza.

omarsakrpoet

A post shared by @omarsakrpoet

Universities must be places where students have access to specialized knowledge that shapes contemporary debates; where faculty members are encouraged to be public intellectuals, even when, or perhaps especially when, they are expressing dissenting opinions speaking “truth to power.” Classrooms must allow for contextual learning, where rapidly mutating current events are put into a longer historical timeline.y

Read Is This the End of Academic Freedom? by Paula Chakravartty and Vasuki Nesiah in NYT

I was silent and nothing came of it.
I spoke and nothing came of it.
I cursed, I apologized, and nothing came of it.
I was busy, I pretended to be busy…and nothing.
I sat, I walked, I ran.
I shivered and I warmed up. Nothing.

Read Palestinian by Ibrahim Nasrallah (trans. Huda Fakhreddine) in Protean

RIP Paul Auster, The Guardian

As police, administrators, politicians, and outsiders attack college protesters in a wave of reactionary repression, I am reminded of the role the recently-passed novelist Paul Auster played in the anti-Vietnam War protests at Columbia University.

Read “Crazy with the poison of Vietnam in my lungs.” Paul Auster on the ’68 Columbia protests on Lit Hub

Jade Wallace offers great reviewing advice for poetry (but really can be applied to any genre)!

Send My Love to Anyone contributor Carrianne Leung brought this wonderful video to my attention: Inciting Joy with author Ross Gay

Two poems by Annick MacAskill in Ex-Puritan

has a terrific new podcast: Bookspo

Pickle Me This Episode Six: Emily AustinWhat a delight to bring you this conversation with Emily Austin about her beautiful and hilarious new novel INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT SPACE, how some interesting feedback on her first novel inspired her to deepen her own understanding of love, and how ideas from bell hooks’ ALL ABOUT LOVE found their way into her fiction… Listen now24 days ago · 2 likes · Kerry Clare

In the ’80s, the spy agency investigated the "Gateway Experience" technique to alter consciousness and ultimately escape spacetime. Here is everything you need to know.

Read How to Escape the Confines of Time and Space According to the CIA in Vice

Link to this trippy Gateway Intermediate Workbook, CIA

I went down a Truman Capote rabbit hole after watching the series Feud: Capote vs. The Swans

Truman Capote's "La Côte Basque," originally published in the November 1975 issue of Esquire, was meant to serve as the first taste from his upcoming masterpiece about the inner circles of high society women. That novel, eventually called Answered Prayers, wouldn't publish until after the writer's death, but the passage became famous for the scandals it brought. In 2024, it was adapted for the television screen, for FX's Feud: Capote vs. the Swans. Available in full, below, it contains insensitive descriptions of beauty and body standards.

Read "La Côte Basque” by Truman Capote in Esquire

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It is fashionable to complain about the lack of books coverage today, but then this has always been the case. There has, according to a certain contingent, always been too little literary criticism, too few reviews, or the wrong kind of reviews, or reviews of the wrong books. But that doesn’t negate the fact that there is a vibrant community of people in Canada writing reviews, reading and thinking about literature, and striving to better the discourse in this country. They deserve recognition.

Read The crisis in book reviewing may not be what you think it is by Steven Beattie, That Shakespearean Rag

And while you are at it, check out a recent review by Steven Beattie of Mathew Walsh’s new poetry collection:

If Walsh’s collection is a snapshot of the way we live now – a fragile negotiation with the confusion and worry of how to be fully human in a world that seems intent on denying some people that freedom – it is also a paean to the importance of art as a means of support for the vagaries of human existence.

Steven Beattie on Mathew Walsh’s Terrarium in That Shakespearean Rag

The season is called evening.

Out of belief comes men

and then the sea and then the air

and then the upper part ignites

and a child comes screaming rosy fluids

and then the mother sleeps and what is change

Read “After Trees” by Lisa Robertson in Brick

The Audacity.Standards of CareEarly in my relationship with my wife Debbie, I noticed that while we walked around in New York, she always holds her path. She is not rude about it but she struts down the street with an elegant confidence, an inherent belief that she has as much right as anyone to take up space. She is this immovable force and it is an incredible thing to witness. When I am out and about, I’m always inclined to move out of the way, to try and take up as little space as possible, to try and make myself disappear while knowing full well that I cannot. And, more importantly, I should not…Read more25 days ago · 225 likes · 33 comments · Roxane Gay Omar Sakr PresentsOn Complicity & Cowardice in the ArtsRecently, Art Guide magazine commissioned an article from writer Sophia Cai on the subject of whether art can be "apolitical" and when she turned it in, they asked to remove two paragraphs in which she named the Australian cultural institutions that have publicly taken "apolitical" stances. Their reasoning for this was that her specificity prevented the…Read morea month ago · 15 likes · Omar Sakr

CRAFT TALKA Burst of ColorThe BIG news: this year’s #1000wordsofsummer big summer session starts June 1 and runs through June 14. I will be doing two free in-person events in New York City on June 1, and one free in-person event in New Orleans on June 8. Details coming soon…Read morea month ago · 166 likes · 19 comments · Jami Attenberg

Calling all writers and wordsmiths—we are now accepting submissions for The 19th Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest!

How it works: Send us a story and a postcard—the relationship can be as strong or as tangential as you like, so long as there is a clear connection between the story and the image.

Deadline: May 20, 2024 at 11:59PM PDT.

Winning entries get cash prizes and publication in Geist, so dig through your drawers and find a postcard that inspires the micro-lit writer in you.