Kathryn Mockler's Blog

Gatherings | Issue 42

My NewsGatherings Events

Thursday, November 7th 2024, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm ET, Toronto (venue TBD)

For our final edition before the Giller gala—and our first in-person event—2018 Giller shortlist and CanLit Responds organizer Thea Lim (An Ocean of Minutes) speaks with Farzana Doctor (The Beauty of Us), Spencer Gordon (A Horse at the Window), and several Toronto-based writers about their new releases and their commitment to withdrawing from the Giller Prize in solidarity with Palestine.

May be an image of text that says 'No Arms in the Arts Book Club #4 As part of our continued Giller Prize counter-programming we are hosting another edition of our book club. The No Arms in the Arts book club is a free, hybrid event series featuring the writers who have withdrawn from the Scotiabank-funded Giller Prize as an act of solidarity with Palestine. Taking place within a growing movement of writers who refuse to let their work be used to artwash genocide, this conversation will ground readers in the aesthetic considerations, ethical commitments, and and material consequences of a literature that is rooted in liberation.'

From the Draft Reading Series: An Archive of Care
November 22-24, 2024 | Entirely on Zoom.

What traces does care leave behind? Texts, images, scars, tears, belly-laughs, rituals, memories? For its 19th season, the Draft reading series has condensed our programming into a single weekend. Curators Kern Carter, Therese Estacion and Tyler Pennock have invited a stunning collection of authors to commemorate acts of care: giving and receiving, chosen or imposed, private, public or something in between.

Over the course of a weekend (November 22 to 24, 2024) we will host six readings, including 30+ participants, with more news still to come.

The final reading of the weekend (Sunday, November 24th) will be an open mic with contributions from audience members and participants. A condensed version of the schedule is below. A detailed version is available here.

To register, please use this form:
https://forms.gle/Fc8o9oXJZz2pf1HV7

Having trouble? Please contact us at draftreadings at gmail dot com

We welcome your donations
by e-transfer at draftseriescollective at gmail dot com

Suggested amount: $10-$30.
If times are tight for you, please attend as our honoured guest.

We are grateful for the support of the Toronto Arts Council and our generous audiences.

Calls for Submissionsex_puritan

A post shared by @ex_puritanRecommended Reading

“Some memories never heal. Rather than fading with the passage of time, those memories become the only things that are left behind when all else is abraded. The world darkens, like electric bulbs going out one by one. I am aware that I am not a safe person. Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves this single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, damaged, slaughtered–is this the essential fate of humankind, one which history has confirmed as inevitable?”

—Human Acts by Han Kang

Habiba’s SubstackThe silence of death is louder than all other sounds Between death and life, between fear and safety, between darkness and light. In our city, you can taste the taste of death in the alleys of the streets that have turned to ash. You know whenever you pass through the darkness of its alleys, you can smell the scent of death. We walk in the dark roads and empty streets and fear grips our hearts, whether we…Read more19 days ago · 15 likes · 5 comments · Quds Mon Amour

It is with great sadness that we note the passing of Roy Miki, professor emeritus in Simon Fraser University's Department of English. Professor Clint Burnham offers an overview of Roy Miki’s life and career:

In Memoriam: Roy Miki, professor emeritus, SFU

Bhakti Shringarpure Recommends Writing by Hammour Ziada, Leila Aboulela, Amir Tag Elsir, and More

Today, Sudan and its glittering capital, Khartoum, are under siege as conflicts simmering for decades have manifested into full-blown war. Hundreds of thousands of people have already been displaced, the death toll is increasing, the country’s rich resources are being plundered, and the damage to architecture and infrastructure has become unimaginable.

Read To Understand a Country: 8 Immersive Novels About Sudan in LitHub

This story began as a fairy tale.

I was nineteen, an aspiring writer myself, when I first read the fiction of Alice Munro. Fresh out of an MFA program in my mid-twenties, I moved to Victoria and stumbled upon a job at a bookstore co-founded by my literary idol. For the next nine years, as head of social media at Munro’s Books, I proudly advertised this connection (“Yes, that Alice,” the shop’s website boasted), happy to fill in the blanks of our icon’s elusive public persona with a fantasy of motherly sacrifice—for her bookselling days had coincided with the parenting of her young daughters, a time that predates the current Government Street location. Munro herself never worked in that building, a neoclassical marvel with lofty ceilings and a loftier origin story.

Read Undoing the Fairy Tale of Alice Munro by Justina Elias in The Walrus

Last year, I went to the doctor to get a referral for two long overdue hip replacements. The week leading up to my doctor’s visit, I tried not to eat up all the sugar in the house. I prayed a lot. I assumed the worst. And the worst, at that point, was that this doctor, all the way up in New York, would tell me I had an incurable disease and I was going to die.

Read Letter from Home by Kiese Layman in The Bitter Southerner [Thanks to Carriane Leung for sharing this essay.]

Every day, I watch Palestinians mourn in the language I speak with my own mother. If the world understood the beauty of their words, perhaps they might care about them

Read In Gaza, Language Is All We Have Left by Pacinthe Mattar in The Walrus

New research reveals that people who are experiencing climate-related distress are more likely to engage in collective action. History, by contrast, shows that manufactured optimism can lead to complacency and the shirking of responsibilities.

In the 1990s, hope – coupled with doubt – was the fossil fuel industry’s antidote to the precautionary principle, the sensible idea that some problems had such dire implications that humanity should err on the side of caution even if the science was not completely settled. When George Bush was president, he was initially so concerned by the impact of fossil fuels on the climate that he looked into regulating the oil industry. But he backed away from this on the grounds that future generations would probably develop new technologies to solve the problem. Call that dumb, call that wishful thinking, or call that hope, the result was the same: no action.

Read Would abandoning false hope help us to tackle the climate crisis? by Jonathan Watts in the Guardian

On notetaking!

sweater weatherhow i'm taking notes (for now)Hello friends…Read more7 days ago · 108 likes · 22 comments · Brandon Feud(al)Codawe scum the fluid-slick world pebble, are 70% water, are an empire of aqueducts; we—extinguishing ourselves soon enough —know the fluttering formations of jacaranda seeds can find quiet only in the hollow we are becoming © Tolu Oloruntoba…Read more17 days ago · 3 likes · 2 comments · Tolu Oloruntoba

Many of us who have spoken out against Israel’s war on Gaza have not only opposed the war, but also drawn connections between the violence there and other interlocking crises: mass death and displacement in Sudan, the Congo and Haiti; the disparity between U.S. military funding for war and funding for escalating climate catastrophes; the expansion of carceral systems, including surveillance and militarization of policing; and the increased criminalization of dissent following the racial justice protests in 2020, quelling connections between the global and the domestic. Suppression of dissent also suppresses connections between people and communities in a time of organized abandonment, a time when we need each other even more.

Read Literary Institutions Are Pressuring Authors to Remain Silent About Gaza by Lisa Ko in truthout