Gatherings | Issue 37
Kirby and I will be reading and chatting at Another Story Bookstore in Toronto. It’s our first ever reading together and we’re celebrating the publication of Kirby’s book She and Anecdotes being a finalist in the Trillium Book Award!
Come and join us while we chat and read from our books!
Anecdotes is a Trillium Finalist!I’m honoured to be in the company of so many wonderful writers! I’m rooting for everyone!
Anecdotes GiveawayThis month I'm hosting a book giveaway for two Go Fund Me campaigns. The first will help Azza, Mohammad, and their children in Gaza and the second will help Yasmeen Ouda bring her family to Canada.
If you donate at least 6 dollars to either of these fundraisers by May 31, 2024 and email me your donation receipt, you’ll be entered in a draw for a signed first edition copy of my book, Anecdotes, which was just shortlisted for the Duanta Gleed Prize and the Trillium Book Award.
This giveaway is available to Canada and US residents.
I found out about these campaigns from Gaza Funds and Operation Olive Branch.
Tanis MacDonald includes my first poetry book, Onion Man, in her round up of Reading Working-Class on the Wolsak and Wynn blog.
Mockler’s first book takes place in and around a corn-canning factory in 1980s southwestern Ontario, what the publisher calls “a time in Canada when the recession lay like a lead weight on the shoulders of young people, leaving the future bleak.” I remember working in a terrible job in my no-money 1980s and when I read Onion Man, I could feel the stickiness of an unairconditioned summer workplace, the smells, the listlessness of the workers, especially the young people, the no reason-to-do-anything dead-end of it all. Technically, Onion Man is a story told in poetry, but it reads like a novel – you know, stuff happens, and people speak like they speak.
PS if you are a paying subscriber, you can get a free e-book of Onion Man.
Kirby’s NewsKirby: Nestle In Words Like An Animal: The Poetic G/Rasp of Tongue, Throat, and Mouth in G. Review of G by Klara du Plessis & Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi, The Fiddlehead
Check out Kirby’s tour schedule for their new poetry book, She!
SMLTA Recommends“What we’re seeing is very troubling,” said author Thea Lim who was shortlisted for the Giller Prize in 2018. Literary spaces that are meant to be bastions of free speech and discourse are going against the mandate that they were created for, she said. They’re creating a situation for artists where “you either have to be quiet about slaughter, atrocity, genocide. Or you risk your career.”
Read Kagiso Molope’s challenge at Ottawa gala spotlights artists fighting institutional silence on Gaza in the Toronto Star by Shree Paradkar
And that’s the horror of all this: in a room full of some of the most influential people in the country, at a time when we’re witnessing a genocide, many in attendance were worried about how we’re speaking about the atrocities in Gaza and not about how we’re going to end it.
I am terrified of what this means for the people in the middle of this war — which is also to say that I’m terrified of what it means for all of us.
Read Palestine and the Pen by Kagiso Lesego Molope in The Grind
The Miramichi Review is doing a Fundraiser for Palestine and is inviting submissions from Palestinian authors as well as reviews of Palestinian books.
Crooked, Iffy: Tom Prime’s Male Pregnancy In Reverse by Benjamin C. Dugdale in Ex-Puritan
I first read Sadi Muktadir’s work when I was the Canada Editor of Joyland (2013-2020) and selected his story “Quadruple Bypass” which was published in 2019.
His debut novel is out this week and the launch is in Toronto on May 23, 2024! Details below!
Room Magazine is hiring a publisher.
D.A. Lockhart is a past SMLTA contributor, and his poetry book North of Middle Island has been shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award. I’m delighted and honoured to have my book on the same shortlist as D.A. Lockhart and the other finalists!
Here’s a visual poem from his collection!
Very sad to learn of the passing of Alice Munro.
Read 20 Short Stories From Nobel Prize-Winning Writer Alice Munro (RIP) Free Online, Open Culture
The Influence of Alice Munro with Heather O’Neil, CBC
The Art of Flash Fiction Alice Munro 1931-2024“I want my stories to be something about life that causes people to say, not, oh, isn't that the truth, but to feel some kind of reward from the writing, and that doesn't mean that it has to be a hap…Read more8 days ago · 27 likes · 13 comments · Kathy FishA Life in Quotes, The Guardian
Canadian authors remember Alice Munro and her literary legacy - Heather O'Neill, Kevin Chong, Dionne Irving, Andrew Pyper among the authors who admired the CanLit legend, CBC
Five of the best Alice Munro short stories, The Guardian
Clare Sestanovich joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss “The Moons of Jupiter,” by Alice Munro, which was published in The New Yorker in 1978.
Sneak Peek from Issue 37Recommended Substacks
Sally’s Salon Des RefusesTranslating Misuzu Misuzu Kaneko was a Japanese children’s poet who lived from 1903-1930. If you do the math, you’ll see that she died young, and if you do a bit of internet research, you’ll discover her death was by suicide at the tender age of 26. I’ve read and written about Misuzu’s…Read more8 days ago · 2 likes · Sally Ito
Memoir LandHow's the Writing Going, R.O. Kwon?R. O. KWON’s nationally best-selling first novel, The Incendiaries, is published by Riverhead, and it is being translated into seven languages. Named a best book of the year by over forty publications, The Incendiaries was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award. Kwon has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, and MacDowell. Kwon and Garth Greenwell coedited the best-selling anthology…Read morea year ago · 2 likes · Memoir Land
Sitting in Silence #13 - On EstrangementSitting in Silence is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber… Listen now3 days ago · 3 likes · 2 comments · Sitting in Silence
Pickle Me This Episode 11: Deepa RajagopalanDeepa Rajagopalan is the author of the short story collection PEACOCKS OF INSTAGRAM, a book that’s so great it’s got me accosting strangers in the street, and she came to our conversation with a very cool twist on the Bookspo format. Her Bookspo pick is Alice Munro’s short story “Corrie” (which was included in her 2012 DEAR LIFE), which she used as insp… Listen now10 days ago · 1 like · Kerry Clare
CRAFT TALKHow to Prep for #1000wordsofsummerHi friends. We are only twelve days away from this year’s #1000wordsofsummer! A few reminders: Here is the FAQ. There is a slack. There is also a companion book you can either buy or take out of the library or borrow from your bestie. This is a fundraiser, if you can…Read more2 days ago · 142 likes · 9 comments · Jami Attenberg
Hmm That's Interestinghas everyone gone a bit insane?Ok, sorry. I am moving at the end of the month. So I've been packing boxes and rummaging around my apartment, the one I've lived in for over five years, running into mementos and hidden notebooks and ugly clothes and lost postcards and mysterious furniture stains and wondering what exactly I've been doing for the last half decade of my life…Read more3 days ago · 170 likes · 25 comments · Clara
Sam WiebeFadeoutOn a night of rain and darkness, Fox Olson’s white Thunderbird might have hit the top of that slope too fast. It had certainly hit the bottom too fast. More than plot, character, setting or theme, the PI novel is about voice. Style. From Raymond Chandler to Samantha Jayne Allen, what draws me in more than anything is a writer’s language, tone, dialogue, …Read more16 hours ago · 3 likes · Sam Wiebe and Naben Ruthnum / Nathan RipleyFrom the ArchivesSupport 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!
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