Gatherings | March 2025
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What’s in Gatherings Issue 44My NewsMy video Do You Know What’s Great adapted from a story in my short fiction collection Anecdotes will be screening online at the Reel Poetry International Festival.
Screening: Wednesday, April 2, 2025 at 1:00 - 1:30 p.m. CST and 7:00-7:30 p.m. CST
Kirby NewsKirby will be having the grand good fortune to read in support of Jessica Hiemstra's new book Book Root (Goose Lane Editions) along with fellow poet Shannon Bramer at the palace of poetry, The Printed Word, Dundas, ON, March 20th 7pm.
Kirby, will be live on April 17 at 7:00pm (EST) chatting with from Junction Reads!
Events’ Wild Prose Readings Presents Soundin’ Canaan: Black Canadian Poetry, Music, and Citizenship with Paul db Watkins and Wayde Compton on March 13, 2025
What I’m ReadingRemembering Canadian artist Kelly Mark, the 'working-class conceptualist' by Dave Dyment
It's rare that an artist's work can be summarized in a few words, and rarer still when that artist is prolific in a wide variety of media. Toronto artist Kelly Mark produced sculptures, drawings, photographs, audio, video, performance, text work, tattoos, mail art and multiples, about a myriad of subject matter.
I'm not sure who originated the term "working-class conceptualist" to describe her and her practice, but it was apt enough to follow her throughout her career, and astute enough to withstand scrutiny.
I always understood it to refer to the fact that the work is smart without being smug, funny without being trite, and completely absent of pretence or academic trappings. She brilliantly conflated the repetition of the minimalist and process-based work championed by the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design — where she studied — with the repetitive tasks of so much manual labour.
Deborah Dundas interviews Omar El Akkad in The Toronto Star
Omar El Akkad: Because I think courage is contagious, and I think there are many battlefields in which the state or the institution or ... institutional power hold immense advantage, the arena of violence being one. But there are ones in which human beings in solidarity with one another hold immense advantages, ones that the state or the institution cannot mimic: joy, love, compassion.
spoke with 20 people in Gaza after the ceasefire
Mohammed R MhawishSnapshots: I spoke with 20 people in Gaza after the ceasefire. My heart broke 20 timesIn the weeks following the ceasefire, I spoke with twenty people in Gaza—mothers, fathers, children, and grandparents—to hear about their first moments, days, and weeks after the bombs stopped. Their stories are not just about survival. They are about loss: of homes, of loved ones, of dreams, of the rhythms of everyday life…Read morea month ago · 352 likes · 37 comments · Mohammed R. MhawishA reading list to process the state of the world from
Mother, Loosen My TongueA reading list to process the state of the world“We are never as steeped in history as when we pretend not to be, but if we stop pretending we may gain in understanding what we lose in false innocence. Naiveté is often an excuse for those who exercise power. For those upon whom that power is exercised, naiveté is always a mistake…Read morea month ago · 982 likes · 18 comments · Huda Hassanoffers advice on how to write while deeply distracted.
SubMakkHow to Write While Deeply Distracted I’m not saying I’m concentrating well right now—that would be psychotic. But I’m never focusing well, and over a lifetime of first masking and then, more recently, dealing with ADHD head-on, I’ve developed enough coping strategies that I can actually get stuff done. Including writing…Read more22 days ago · 218 likes · 18 comments · Rebecca Makkai“Deer Crossing ” by Amber Nuyens in Moss
When the couple drowned after running their car into the lake just after graduation, Jamie’s dad told her that if she ever ended up in the water like that, the first thing to do was to roll down her window. This was the second piece of driving advice from her dad she remembered. The first was that if an animal jumped in front of her on the road, she should accelerate so that the animal might fly over the car instead of going through her windshield. This would also probably kill it instantly and she wouldn’t leave it suffering or have to put it down herself. Don’t swerve, he told her. You’ll hit a tree or drive into oncoming traffic and then everyone but the animal is dead.
interviews in
Women WritingFeatured Writer: Sonal Champsee Welcome to Women Writing…Read more3 days ago · 12 likes · 4 comments · Liisa Kovalaon How to Sell a Story
Writing for People Who Hate WritingHow to Sell a StoryThe world is full of journalism schools and writing advice, but there’s surprisingly little formal guidance out there about how to get your non-fiction articles published. That’s a surprise. At many outlets where I’ve worked, about half of the stories were assigned by editors to staff or freelance contributors, while the other half were proposed by writ…Read more19 hours ago · 4 likes · 2 comments · Jessica JohnsonI’m also reading If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino and enjoying it immensely—not just for its innovative structure but really blown away by Calvino’s gift for description. This book is all hook!
“The world is falling apart and trying to lure me into it’s disintegration.”
Just finished I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman. This book seems to be making the rounds again. I kept hearing about it and then finally it came up in my library app.
This is an eerie and relevant book.
“Perhaps you never have time when you are alone? You only acquire it by watching it go by in others, and since all the women have died, it only affects the scrawny plants growing between the stones and producing, occasionally, just enough flowers to make a single seed which will fall a little way off—not far because the wind is never strong—where it may or may not germinate. The alternation of day and night is merely a physical phenomenon, time is a question of being human and, frankly, how could I consider myself a human being, I who have only known thirty-nine people and all of them women? I think that time must have something to do with the duration of pregnancies, the growth of children, all those things that I haven’t experienced. If someone spoke to me, there would be time, the beginning and end of what they said to me, the moment when I answered, their response. The briefest conversation creates time. Perhaps I have tried to create time through writing these pages. I begin, I fill them with words, I pile them up, and I still don’t exist because nobody is reading them. I am writing them for some unknown reader who will probably never come—I am not even sure that humanity has survived that mysterious event that governed my life. But if that person comes, they will read them and I will have a time in their mind. They will have my thoughts in them. The reader and I thus mingled will constitute something living, that will not be me, because I will be dead, and will not be that person as they were before reading, because my story, added to their mind, will then become part of their thinking. I will only be truly dead if nobody ever comes, if the centuries, then the millennia go by for so long that this planet, which I no longer believe is Earth, no longer exists. As long as the sheets of paper covered in my handwriting lie on this table, I can become a reality in someone’s mind. Then everything will be obliterated, the suns will burn out and I will disappear like the universe.”
I blurbed A Song for Wildcats by Caitlyn Galway and will be doing an interview with her soon. This is an outstanding story collection. Highly recommend.
What I’m WatchingThey Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969)This is a deeply strange and disturbing film. Jane Fonda’s acting is incredible. Relevant story for these terrible times. This is a movie for those who like their bleak very bleak.
Jeffrey Sachs: “The US is leading us closer to nuclear war.”
A terrifying interview. Where we are now was planted many many years ago.
2 into 1 by Gillian WearingMy Cuntry Tis of Thee (2018) by Marilyn Minter
HD Digital Video, 09:45 minutesWriting and Making, Writing as Making - Hannah BlackMy Bodies by Hannah BlackSaute ma ville (1968) by Chantal AckermanFrom Criterion
For My Aching BackFrom the Archives
Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1968 • Belgium
Made when the director was just eighteen, Chantal Akerman’s debut film is a blistering first expression of what would become one of her major themes: women’s confinement in and rebellion against the domestic sphere. Akerman plays a young woman who, alone in her kitchen, enacts a savaging of traditional domestic rituals that leads to a literally explosive climax.
