Once upon a time, I couldn’t see beauty in anything.

Not in a fucking thing.

It was actually kind of scary.

I understood the concept of beauty, but I could not experience it no matter how hard I tried.

Was I depressed?

Probably.

But that didn’t explain that I couldn’t experience the concept of beauty. I would look at something that was supposed to be beautiful and feel nothing. For my entire life. When people would say, “Oh that sunset is beautiful.” I would say, “Yes that sunset is beautiful”. But inside feel nothing.

I wondered if it was me and that I wasn’t defining beauty properly or I was expecting it to be better than it actually was. I would ask everyone I know do you see beauty in that flower or do you think that sky is beautiful and they would always say yes. I secretly hoped they were faking it like me, but I don’t think they were.

Sometimes I thought things were interesting to look at, but I never experienced them as beautiful. Not a mountain or a body of water or a sky or a cloud.

It felt like being constipated. The more I tried, the harder it was.

So I stopped trying. I thought, oh well, I can live. I don’t need to see beauty in anything ever. I’ve gotten along this far without it. I can keep going.

And then it happened. As soon as I stopped looking for it, there it was.

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Here’s a link to a poem from this collection published in Pinhole Poetry, “My Mother’s House.”

Here are my thoughts on this wonderful collection:

In her debut poetry collection, Baba Yaga and the Girl Who Ate the Rope, Kate Rogers captures personal and collective loss with candour, grace, and beauty.

I was profoundly moved by these stunning and brave poems. I unabashedly wept at Rogers’ tenderness and laughed along with her witty asides.

This is a book for those who know the quiet desperation of caring for a loved one; for those who hold the natural world dear and grieve its destruction; and for those who, despite these harsh realities, can still find hope in love, rage, resistance, and forgiveness.

Baby Yada and the Girl Who Ate the Rope
by Kate Rogers
Frontenac House, 2026

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Publisher’s Description

In these incantatory poems, Kate Rogers reimagines family, folklore, and climate grief. Her muse: the Slavic witch Baba Yaga, both matriarch and mirror. An aging mother stamps her cloven foot in rage, forgets her children’s names, casts spells against wildfire and rescues finches in her deep pockets. Moving between a mother’s decline and sweeping visions of a damaged ecosystem, Baba Yaga and the Girl Who Ate the Rope is a mythic spell-book, both tender and terrifying.

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*Title courtesy of Michael Turner.

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Set in 2015 in Jerusalem, Seven Heavens Away follows fifteen-year old Aziz, a Muslim Palestinian teenager after his friend is murdered by an armed Israeli civilian. The impressionable Aziz is pressured on many sides about what to do in response. His martyred friend’s father, a community leader, whips up the neighbourhood boys to avenge his son’s death while Aziz’s family wants him to focus on his education and forge a new path in Canada away from the violence and hardship of living under constant Israeli threat and settler brutality and theft. In the midst of all these tensions, Aziz and his coworker, Dafna, a Jewish Israeli teen, begin to have feelings for each other, but she has no understanding of the realities of his life and he doesn’t share them with her.

But Seven Heavens Away isn’t simply a star-crossed love story. It’s an intimate coming-of-age portrait of a grieving teenager who must determine for himself who he is and what his values are in the face of one moral dilemma after the other and conflicts beyond his control.

Themes of honour and betrayal reverberate throughout this novel from a multitude of angles and points of view as well as questions about what we owe our friends, family, mentors, teachers, neighbours, and ultimately ourselves. Questions which are all the more heightened and urgent for these characters living under Israeli occupation.

Ashraf Zaghal is also a poet, so it’s not surprising that this intense and gripping debut novel is so beautifully written.

Have you read Seven Heavens Away? What are your thoughts?

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Seven Heavens Away
by Ashraf Zagha
House of Anansi Press, 2026

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“The more I see the dead seagull, the more I need to know what happened to it, but as the body withers, the explanation recedes with it”. —Amber Nuyens, These Dead Things Are Not My Fault

I had the great pleasure of writing a blurb for Amber Nuyens new chapbook These Dead Things Are Not My Fault (Broke Press, 2025)

Amber Nuyens explores climate guilt, anxiety, and denial—both personal and collective in these vividly beautiful but stark and sobering works.

Whether describing the soon-to-be extinct hoiho or a dying pet fish, Nuyens recounts these losses with the precision of a reporter—grim truths laid bare.

These Dead Things Are Not My Fault is a necessary and phenomenal collection of prose poems and essayettes from an exciting new voice.

Buy These Dead Things Are Not My Fault

Amber Nuyens grew up on Syilx Okanagan territory (Winfield, BC) and lives on unceded Lək̓ʷəŋən and WSÁNEĆ territory (Victoria, BC) with her elderly lizard. Her work has been shortlisted for awards including for the Bridge Prize and the Okanagan Short Story Contest, and she has won awards including the UBC Okanagan Creative Writing Prize. Her fiction and poetry has appeared in magazines including carte blanche, PRISM international, Moss, and HAD. She is currently working on a Canada Council-funded collection of short fiction.

These Dead Things Are Not My Fault
by Amber Nuyens
Broke Press, 2025

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“For the last two years or so, Pauline had watched the city go through a rapid downward spiral. The creeping shortage of food, housing, everything. These were direct consequences of larger events happening in the world. There was news about wars close and far—civil wars, military coups, global trade contestations. Then there was the weather—tornados flattening fields of corn, rice paddies flooding, cows dying from heat exhaustion—which triggered food crises. Wildfires and floods sparked mass migrations. There didn’t seem to be an end to the bad news.”

—Carrianne Leung from Wonderland Road

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I was thrilled to write a blurb for ’s forthcoming book, Wonderland Road.

This is a book that truly meets our current moment.

In her phenomenal new novel, Wonderland Road, Carrianne Leung shows us how love can manifest at the end of the world. When all seems lost, love remains in all its messiness, unpredictability, intensity, and glory.

Leung’s breathtaking prose leads us on a harrowing journey through past and present towards a shaky future with three narrators who delight, surprise, and sometimes devastate.

As their worlds are shattered by societal collapse, I ached and wept for these extraordinary characters: precocious and determined young Jing; cracked-but-not-broken Pauline; vulnerable and courageous Julian; fierce and devoted Iris (a talking crow); and the small but bold community doing their best to thrive amidst the horror and against all odds.

Wonderland Road is a gift—not only as a brilliant work of speculative fiction, but also as a blueprint for survival, humanity, and hope in our own frightening and uncertain times.

Everyone, and I do mean everyone, needs this book.

Wonderland Road
by Carrianne Leung
HarperCollins Canada, 2026

Buy Wonderland Road

Publisher’s Description

An absorbing and heartfelt new novel about three people looking for a future when the world hangs by a thread, for readers of Moon on the Crusted Snow and The Future

Pauline has not spoken to her sister, Mei, in two decades, not since before the world changed. A rare letter arrives asking Pauline to return to their old neighbourhood to care for Mei’s young daughter while Mei goes to find work.

Twelve-year-old Jing is living in the Children’s House, where all the parentless children stay while their parents work at the Farms. She hasn’t heard from her mother in months and the food deliveries they were promised have dwindled. Her only friends in the neighbourhood are a crow named Iris, an older boy named Julian, and the ghosts of her ancestors in their abandoned apartment.

Julian, once a star athlete and student with a bright future, is one of the only young men left on Wonderland Road. He can’t leave his parents, and he knows there is nowhere left to go. But Julian dreams of a boy he met and a kiss shared in what feels like another lifetime.

These three people will cross paths on Wonderland Road, a community trying to survive in a world of massive disruption and uncertainty. When the future feels poised on a knife’s edge, they must find a way forward.

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3 Send My Love to Anyone contributors make the 2025 Toronto Book Awards Longlist!!!

Congrats to Maggie Helwig, Hollay Ghadery, and Farah Ghafoor on being longlisted along with all the other amazing authors!

You can read excerpts from their books on Send My Love to Anyone:

Encampment by Maggie Helwig

Widow Fantasies by Hollay Ghadery

Shadow Price by Farah Ghafoor

Read more at the Toronto Public Library

The 2025 Toronto Book Awards longlisted titles are:

• Encampment by Maggie Helwig

• Unlike The Rest by Chika Stacy Oriuwa

• Shadow Price by Farah Ghafoor

• The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse by Vinh Nguyen

• Other Worlds by André Alexis

• Nobody Asked For This by Georgia Toews

• Story of Your Mother by Chantal Braganza

• All the Parts We Exile by Roza Nozari

• Widow Fantasies by Hollay Ghadery

• The Knowing by Tanya Talaga

• The Immortal Woman by Su Chang

• Anne of the Library-on-the-Hill by Catherine Little with Sae Kimura

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Description

13 Cedars is pleased to present Everyone’s a blob, a two-person exhibition featuring new text-based works by author Kathryn Mockler and drawings and sculptures by visual artist David Poolman.

Everyone’s a blob is a collaborative exhibition that humorlessly explores the artists' vicarious and often fraught relationship to the world.

Please join us for the opening reception on Saturday, July 19, 2025, from 1-4pm.

Kathryn will be reading from her story collection Anecdotes as well as excerpts from new pieces. Viewing hours continue Sunday, July 20 from 1-4pm. 13 Cedars is located at 933 Route 111, Rowley, New Brunswick.

Thanks so much to Jay Isaac for putting this show and reading together!

Details

Opening Date: July 19, 2025
Time: 1-4pm (reading at 2:00pm)
Location: 933 Route 111, Rowley, NB

Kathryn Mockler is the author of the story collection Anecdotes (Book*hug Press, 2023). She co-edited the print anthology Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House Books, 2020) and runs the literary newsletter Send My Love to Anyone.

David Poolman is an artist working in drawing, print, sound, and video. Since 2015 Poolman has worked with artist Jeremy Drummond as Never Met a Stranger, a publisher of vernacular arts and culture that collectively explore landscape and culture throughout central Appalachia and the rural North American south.

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I love self-help books.

Even if I don’t like their advice, don’t listen to it or apply it or even if it makes me angry—I just like reading this genre. I find it fascinating.

My all time fav is How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. What relieved me most about this book is that I didn’t need to be taught many of its messages.

The main message—don’t be an asshole—is actually the advice I give my writing students when talking about networking and literary communities.

But most of the advice in the book is actually pretty basic and comes naturally to me anyway—listen to others, ask people about themselves, etc.

Nonetheless it is still a fascinating read especially since it’s a timeless classic.

What are your fav self-help books?

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Hello friends,

There is something so wonderful about re-reading a book. I don’t do it often, but there are some books that I love to re-read.

Mostly I re-read poetry and short fiction but occasionally novels.

The thing I love about re-reading is how different the book is from how I thought I remembered it to be. This was true of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, which I had read as a teenager and re-read a couple of years ago discovering how terrifyingly relevant it is and how much I didn’t get from it the first time around.

I’m currently re-reading/audiobooking ’s Book of Delights, a collection of essayettes, which Gay started on his 42nd birthday and wrote one a day for a year.

These essayettes focus on daily delights but don’t shy away from difficult parts of life which is what I appreciate most about this collection.

I’m listening to The Book of Delights on Libro.fm, a terrific alternative to Audible which allows you to support your favourite independent bookstore.

Another Story Bookshop in Toronto is the bookstore I support on Libro.

What books are you re-reading?

Share in the comments.

Here’s an excerpt from The Book of Delights:

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"Oh dear, you're pretty sad." —My mom

Buy or gift a copy of Anecdotes

Anecdotes
by Kathryn Mockler
Book*hug Press, 2023

Publisher’s Description

Winner of the 2024 City of Victoria Butler Book Prize
Finalist for the 2024 VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award
Finalist for the 2024 Fred Kerner Book Award
Finalist for the 2024 Trillium Book Award
Finalist for the 2023 Danuta Gleed Literary Award

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

2024 Fred Kerner Book Award judges comments
“Kathryn Mockler challenges our preconceptions about what a short-story is and can be with this collection. Like Lydia Davis before her, she pushes the envelope on this form, opening new vistas for writers who are bound to follow her lead. Particularly engaging are the stories that play with form to bring us new perspectives on story-telling. In any collection this approach would be brave and challenging. When taking on topics like sexual violence, abuse and environmental change it rises above those laudable aims and achieves something more profound: pure art, gracefully achieved.”

“Anecdotes is a highly original and an intentionally jarring hybrid collection in four distinct parts. Mockler’s bold and darkly playful approach to exploring some of the big issues of our time is an authentic and empowering call to action to anyone who’s paying attention.”

2024 VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award judge’s comments:

“More than mere Anecdotes, Kathryn Mockler delivers a kaleidoscope of compressed, heartbreaking, and hilariously vivid scenes from our age of anxiety. Visions and traumas, both personal and political, unfold as fabulations, autofictions, found texts and allegory (wherein “the past” laughs themselves silly at “the future’s” efforts to build their “dream home”). The end of the world is our daily companion—seen on a highway outside Las Vegas, or casually announced in a public library—but Mockler never lets us forget the very ordinary ways we experience endings: of friendships, love, self-confidence, or childhood illusions. How does one not despair? Mockler reminds us, in seemingly endless permutations of prose genre, form, and method, that “everything becomes beautiful when you realize nothing is going to last.” —Steven Collis

Buy Anecdotes

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

• 7 Tragicomic Book That I Love: Kathryn Mockler —49th Shelf

• Power Q&A with Kathryn Mockler —River Street Writing

• An Interview with Kathryn Mockler —All Lit Up

• “Kathryn Mockler’s debut collection of short fiction is a deliciously dark and clever experiment that succeeds beautifully. Across four parts, the book riffs through flash fiction, connected stories, and micro conversations, ending with a past/future blend of hopelessness that will appeal to any cynic—or perhaps even realist.” —Candace Fertile, The British Columbia Review

• “I was pleased to have Anecdotes in my hands and immerse myself in Mockler’s work…Against this darkness, the light shines ever brighter. Mockler bravely looks into the void and reports what she sees. Again, Beckett comes to mind” —Michael Bryson

• Reframing Rage with Kathryn Mockler —Reframeables Podcast

• “In powerful, distilled prose, Mockler seamlessly blends dark humour with pain. Add in absurdist flash fiction, climate anxiety, micro-conversations—this is a book with existential bite.” —Catherine Graham, The Ampersand Review

• “Mockler blends traditional form with conversation deconstructions, one liners, and flash fiction. ‘Past and future’ is a reoccurring motif, and provides an organic pathway to explore the trajectory of the climate crisis in our lifetime, and the media’s all too common ‘how did we get here?’ refrain. Mockler’s look at social nostalgia is particularly satisfying, with wildly relatable stories that offer the possibility for rosy recollection, and then yank it away with a grin.” —Carleigh Baker, 49th Shelf

• “How do we act justly on behalf of our earth amid political outrage? Mockler creates a space for us to have this reaction and encourages us to not disembody ourselves from the narrative entirely. We’re all deeply interconnected with each other, especially with those we disagree with. It’s more important than ever to expand our capacity and to keep engaging critically.” —Mia Johnson, The Whitewall Review

• “One-of-a-kind assemblage of short fictions, a book with one of the most original covers I’ve ever seen.” —Heidi Greco, subTerrain Magazine

• “These rapid-fire vignettes create entire worlds and drama with speed, ease, and a trippy dexterity. Lots of fun and unlike anything else you’ll read.” —Shawn Micallef, 2024 Summer Recommended Reading List for the Writers’ Trust of Canada

• Episode 6: Kathryn Mockler —Tim Blackett and Friends podcast

• Episode 107 – Kathryn Mockler: Four Stories from ANECDOTES —Short Story Today podcast

• “Anecdotes is a fascinating collection of stories, moments, conversations, and thoughts that are delightful and disturbing—often at the same time. I adore what author Kathryn Mockler has done: creating a book that, when I was done reading it, felt like a complete story—felt whole—but was made up of these shiny and sharp shards of life.” —Hollay Ghadery, 49th Shelf

• “From kids bullied in a schoolyard to environmental collapse, Mockler sucker-punches her readers with the courage to shine light and comment on serious issues. Her writing is uncommonly direct and she does not try to sugar coat the hopelessness that many of us experience when contemplating the issues she puts forth. Yet, she does give us the only thing that could possibly manage such harsh reality— outrageously good humour.” —Deborah Vail, PRISM International

• Getting to know Kathryn Mockler: An Interview by Deborah Vail —PRISM International

• Books Can Be Powerful: A recommended reading list by the author of I Remember Lights —49th Shelf

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Geese

What can be done about all the loudmouths?

What can be done about the Canadian geese—

so they don’t smell my fear when I walk by?

Don’t stare a goose in the eye. And when you 

pass don’t turn around to see if he is following

you because if he‘s not, he will start. He will

make a point of it because Canadian geese

know that above all else—fear is valuable. 

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“Do You Know What's Great?" is a commentary on our tendency to detach from the problems of the world and find solace in passive observation and indifference.

“Do You Know What's Great” is an experimental video composed of found footage and the text adapted from my flash fiction story of the same name from my debut story collection, Anecdotes (Book*hug Press, 2023), which won the 2024 Victoria Butler Book Prize and was a finalist for the 2024 Trillium Book Award, 2023 Danuta Gleed Literary Award, 2024 Fred Kerner Award, and 2024 VMI Besty Warland Between Genres Award.

"Do You Know What's Great?" has screened at REELpoetry Houston, TX (Houston, USA), Oxford Shorts (UK), Austin Micro Film Festival (Finalist, USA), So Limitless and Free International Film Festival (Finalist, Montreal), and received an honorable mention from the Croma Art Film Festival (USA).

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Kathryn Mockler is the author of the story collection Anecdotes (Book*hug Press, 2023), which won the 2024 Victoria Butler Book Prize and was a finalist for the 2024 Trillium Book Award, 2023 Danuta Gleed Literary Award, 2024 Fred Kerner Award, and 2024 VMI Besty Warland Between Genres Award. She co-edited the print anthology Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House Books, 2020). Her films have screened at TIFF, EMFA, the Palm Springs Film Festival and most recently at the Arizona Underground Film Festival and REELPoetry/HoustonTX. She runs the literary newsletter Send My Love to Anyone and teaches screenwriting and fiction in the Writing Department at the University of Victoria.

Check out Anecdotes at Book*hug Press.

Buy Anecdotes

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One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
Omar El Akkad
Penguin Random House, 2025

If you’ve been witness to Israel’s US-backed genocide of Palestinians that our government (Canadian) supports, this book will offer some sanity.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“There is an impulse in moments like this to appeal to self-interest. To say: These horrors you are allowing to happen, they will come to your doorstep one day; to repeat the famous phrase about who they came for first and who they’ll come for next. But this appeal cannot, in matter of fact, work. If the people well served by a system that condones such butchery ever truly believed the same butchery could one day be inflicted on them, they’d tear the system down tomorrow.

And anyway, by the time such a thing happens, the rest of us will already be dead. No, there is no terrible thing coming for you in some distant future, but know that a terrible thing is happening to you now. You are being asked to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice. You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience. Who cares if diplomatic expediency prefers you shrug away the sight of dismembered children? Who cares if great distance from the bloodstained middle allows obliviousness. Forget pity, forget even the dead if you must, but at least fight against the theft of your soul.”

•

“Toward the end of December 2023, the South African government brings charges of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice…

… Among those who have been calling for an end to the relentless killing, the development inspires a set of conflicting emotions.

First, there is the basic relief of watching some official entity—any entity-do something. Time and again, in conversation with friends, some of whom have lost family members in this killing spree, there is a sense that one must be going mad: to see so plainly the destruction, the murdered children filmed and presented for the world to look upon and then to hear the leaders of virtually every Western nation contend that this is not happening, that whatever is happening is good and righteous and should continue and that in fact the well-being of the Palestinian people demands this continue—it's enough to feel like you're losing your mind. As such, even were it a completely performative, hopeless act, the case brought before the International Court of Justice represents a brief respite from the bare-skinned duplicity, the Orwellian-ness of it all.”

—Omar El Akkad

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I bought this day timer thinking I would use it to organize my life, and instead it’s become a diary where I write one page about what I did in my day.

Without planning it, I start each entry with “Today I …”

I write very neutrally about the events of my day and only include the details and not much information about how I feel about things unless I’m having a particularly bad day.

I might write something like, “Today I saw a woman with thick black glasses standing on the sidewalk taking pictures of cherry blossoms while smoking a cigarette. Or I will repeat a headline: “A child in Gaza watched his mother burn alive. Then he died too.”

If I write a feeling, I might say, “Today I am depressed” or “Today I am scared.”

I’ve never been good at keeping a diary, but I guess this is what I’m doing.

I do it at the end of the day before bed.

My grandfather who wasn’t a particularly nice man kept a diary of the weather.

I used to think that was boring, but now I think it’s interesting, and I would like to see it, but I have no idea where his diaries ended up.

We could all write a diary of the weather, and it would sound different.

I wonder how he described each day of winter when it felt like winter would never end. I wonder how he described the rain and sunny days. Did he ever make notes about clouds or critters? Were there any mentions of trees?

My grandfather was the type of man who would beat his son with a rake for drinking underage or would pretend he didn’t know you if you embarrassed him in public.

Sometimes I skip a day writing in this diary, but I don’t let myself feel guilty about it.

Do you have a diary?

Share in the comments.

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I remember when I got the phone call from Andrea Strudensky that Broke wanted to publish four of my poems in their first issue, I was over-the-moon excited.

Broke started in 1994 in “Darius Snieckus’ living room on St. Urbain street” (according to Facebook) by Andrea Strudensky.

I also lived on St. Urbain and was taking the call on a landline phone, twisting the green cord tightly around my fingers because I could not contain my excitement.

My poems were going to be in a magazine! A magazine that would be on newsstands…in Montreal anyway.

I couldn’t believe it. The magazine paid in copies, and I still have mine.

I had just finished my English and creative writing degree at Concordia and was eager to get some work published.

The year before I had a false start when I foolishly submitted to a $10 000 poetry contest in the back of a Harper’s magazine.

When I got the acceptance from the contest saying that my poem would be published, I jumped around my apartment and immediately called my sister to read her the letter—including the fine print, which stated that contributors had to purchase the $100 volume if they wanted their work published in the anthology.

As I considered how I could afford this (I could not afford it), my sister gently said, “Kathryn, I think it’s scam. I don’t think you’re supposed to pay for your writing to be published.”

Rereading the letter with tears in my eyes, I knew she was right.

Of course it was a scam.

I even recalled our poetry teacher telling us to be wary of poetry contests.

Once the fantasy of being published had dissipated, I took a good look at the photo of the leather-bound volume on the order form, and I could now see that the book was terribly cheesy with its gold lettering, decorative flower illustrations, and large-print format.

That disappointment made Broke’s acceptance all the sweeter.

Broke was the real thing because I knew who the editor was and where the magazine was published.

I’m not sure when the magazine stopped publishing, but in 2010 Broke created a Facebook group and shared some of the photos from past issues.

Although I hadn’t looked at the publication in years, I was delighted to see that I was in the same issues as filmmaker Matthew Bissonnette (Who Loves the Son, Passenger’s Side).

Small world.

Here’s one of my four poems that was published in Issue 1.

This poem came from a childhood memory of my dad taking me out to shoot at tin cans on a friend’s land.

In fact, it’s one of my best memories of spending time with my dad although the poem seems somewhat depressing reading it now.

After my parents divorced, my father lost interest in my sister and I, so I guess the poem reflects how I felt about him at the time.

Things are somewhat better between us, but it hasn’t been an easy relationship. Unsurprisingly, it was one of the first things I wrote about as new writer.

What was your first literary publication experience?

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Speech Dries Here on the Tongue: Poetry on Environmental Collapse and Mental Health
Edited by Hollay Ghadery, Rasiqura Revulva, and Amanda Shankland
The Porcupine's Quill, 2025

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Speech Dries Here on the Tongue is an anthology of poetry by Canadian authors exploring the relationship between environmental collapse and mental health. This threat of environmental collapse has brought with it a sense of impending annihilation and has contributed to the current mental health crisis, made crueller by a global pandemic that highlighted our fragile nature. These are poems by writers who have used their words to both articulate and navigate this crisis, unpacking the complex interplay between mental and environmental health in order to alert, inform, and inspire readers.

Edited by Hollay Ghadery, Rasiqra Revulva, and Amanda Shankland, the collection includes work by Brandon Wint, Jennifer Wenn, Canal Smiley, Amanda Shankland, Concetta Principe, Dominik Parisien, Khashayar Mohammadi, , Tara McGowan-Ross, , Grace Lau, Fiona Tinwei Lam, , gregor Y kennedy, Maryam Gowralli, , , Karen Houle, Nina Jane Drystek, AJ Dolman, Conyer Clayton, .

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Once I went for an early morning walk along a Victoria beach where many like to winter swim.

A swimmer who looked to be in her 80s was walking towards the water wearing a robe.

Nearby a middle-aged woman noticed the swimmer and called out in a cheerful but condescending sing-song voice, “Are you going into the water?”

The swimmer turned back and said, “Yeah.”

She was clearly in no mood for this conversation.

“Have you done this before?” the middle-aged woman inquired like she was talking to a toddler.

The swimmer turned back again and nodded.

“Are you with a group or do you go in on your own?”

Without looking back the swimmer said to the woman, “Ignore me.”

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What’s so exciting about this book is Schreiber’s voice. I love the way she blends genre—myth and autofiction. These prose vignettes are poetic, vivid, and raw, but also they have a narrative urgency that draws you in and keeps you want to know more about the narrator’s past relationship with her counsellor and her subsequent mental health crisis.

The depiction of mental illness and recovery is so fresh and true to the experience. IYKYK.

I really have not read a book quite like this.

For you I know these memories might have died. For me, they keep. For you have they simply been discarded? And if they have, to where? What I want to know is, where are the things that have vanished? —from Iris and the Dead by Miranda Schreiber

Iris and the Dead
by Miranda Schreiber
Book*hug Press, 2025

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Publisher’s Description

This haunting exploration of love and desire, disability and madness, and trauma and recovery, is a diaristic marvel for fans of Annie Erneaux.

Weaving personal memory with magic realism and folklore, Iris and the Dead asks: What if you could look back and tell someone exactly how they changed the course of your life?

For our narrator, that someone is Iris, the counsellor with whom she developed an unusual, almost violent bond. There are things she needs to tell Iris: some that she hid during the brief time they knew each other, and some that she has learned since. She was missing her mind the autumn they spent together and has since regained it.

Iris and the Dead unfurls the hidden power dynamics of abuse, offering a beguiling inquiry into intergenerational trauma, moral ambiguity, and queer identity.

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Originally published in Catapult Magazine in 2022, this is an evergreen piece for those who have never wanted children and feel like there are few places to discuss this experience.

Why are the childfree by choice such a threat?

When you tell people that you don’t want children, they often look for a reason for it to make sense to them. You must hate children or you must have something very wrong with you. Sometimes they’ll take your declaration as a criticism of their own life choices or circumstances and become defensive.

If you are still in your childbearing years, things get even more personal: Many people will tell you that you’ll change your mind or you’ll feel differently about your own. Others love to share their story about how they once felt like you but their lives changed for the better when they had children. Consequently, for most of my life, I’ve not talked about it.

My earliest and most vivid memory of knowing that I did not want children occurred during a Ouija-board session when I was ten. The Ouija board predicted I would be married with two kids, while my best friend would be a magazine editor in New York.

“I don’t want that life!” I was furious at the Ouija board and secretly hoped my friend was moving the planchette to give herself what I considered a better future.

“You don’t have to have that life. It’s not written in stone,” she said.

I won’t, I remember thinking.

There are myriad ways to be in the world. Parenthood is just one of them, and, while it happens to be the choice for the majority of the population, that number is going down as more people are electing to not have children. The birth rate has been steadily declining in the US since 2014 and in Canada since 2009. According to a 2021 Pew research poll, “Some 44% of [US] nonparents ages 18 to 49 say it is not too or not at all likely that they will have children someday.” Fifty-six percent of these nonparents younger than fifty cite “not wanting to” as the main reason for their choice.

Recently, I googled the question “What is another word for childless?” A site called WordHippo came up with a long list that included infertile, barren, unfruitful, empty, dreary, hollow, uninteresting, worthless, and so on.

Normally I wouldn’t take a site like this seriously, but the combination of the negative implications of the existing words and the absence of a word that adequately described my relationship with nonparenthood struck me deeply. These words are exactly how society treats people with uteruses who don’t have offspring. The connotations of this language make me never want to talk or write about this subject again, and yet I’m compelled to because, when I was weighing this choice, I longed to hear stories like mine.

*

I am old enough to remember when access to abortion was restricted in Canada. Before 1988, when the law was struck down, therapeutic abortion could only be performed in a hospital and had to be approved by a committee who believed the mother’s health was in danger. Interpretations of “in danger” varied wildly, and access to abortion was neither consistent nor equitable across the country. It often still isn’t, as access is largely dependent on proximity to an urban center.

Having few abortion options made getting pregnant in the mid-1980s one of the worst things that could happen as a teenager—so much so that when I was fourteen and started dating my first boyfriend, my mother said, “Whenever you want to, I’ll take you to the doctor to get the pill.”

I was mortified. “But I’m not even having sex!”

Two years and another boyfriend later, I got on the pill myself. One day my mother saw the birth control package in my room and said, “Oh. Good.”

Years later, as a young adult, I still thought getting pregnant was one of the worst things that could happen to me, and this feeling didn’t dissipate once I got married at the age of twenty-five. My partner Dave and I got married in Las Vegas as a way to celebrate our relationship, not as a precursor to having children. Although we assumed that we might have kids someday, we didn’t talk about it or plan for it.

Since Dave and I only had ourselves to consider, we were able to support each other fully in our creative lives, he as an artist and me as a writer. We moved across the country and back multiple times for school or to take advantage of creative or teaching opportunities—even if it meant more debt, temporary separation, or unemployment. No matter where we lived, we always had an active social life. The majority of people we hung around were writers, filmmakers, and artists of varying ages. Some had kids, others didn’t. While I was happy for my friends and family who had children, I still did not pine for my own.

For the rest of my twenties and into my thirties, I had no biological yearnings and experienced zero family pressure.

At one point when we were in our early thirties, Dave wondered if we should think about having kids, and I said, “I’m not ready,” ending the discussion before it could start.

In my midthirties––the time when many people are having or preparing to have children––I quit my sessional teaching job so I could attend the Canadian Film Centre’s screenwriting program and immerse myself in the film world. Because I never thought about having children, I never worried about whether it would impact my writing.

But at the age of thirty-six, I was jarred when a gynaecologist said, unprompted and unrelated to the reason for my visit: “If you’re planning on having children, don’t wait. This isn’t going to last forever.”

For the first time in my adult life, I said out loud, “I don’t want children.”

“You better be sure about that,” she said, which sounded less like advice and more like a threat.

Her statement, although it irritated me, prompted me to ask Dave, when I got home, if we were going to have kids. He wasn’t sure he wanted them, and I still wasn’t ready.

But in case I changed my mind, I thought I should take prenatal vitamins. The vitamins were horse-pill­-sized capsules from the health food store that I tried to gag down unsuccessfully. How would I ever be a parent if I couldn’t even swallow this pill? After a while, I stopped trying. The prenatal vitamins stayed on the kitchen counter, then migrated to the cupboard under the bathroom sink, where they expired and were eventually thrown out.

*

Because we were ambivalent, Dave and I didn’t talk about parenting again until the fall of 2013, when we went to see Linda Griffiths’s play Heaven Above, Heaven Below in Toronto. The play is about an ex-couple who meet up at the wedding of a mutual friend and revisit their past relationship and her abortion twenty years earlier. While he is now a parent, she is not.

Dave and I were unusually quiet on the walk home. Although the play didn’t depict our experience exactly, it had deeply affected us. I felt simultaneously glad I didn’t have children and wondered if I would regret it. Suddenly, making this decision became pressing. By that point I was in my early forties and probably only had a couple years left to even try. If I couldn’t get pregnant, there was no money for fertility treatments. We were still paying off student-loan debt. The only way we could have afforded a child would be to move in with my mother, and I was not prepared to make that sacrifice.

Did I really want to become pregnant? I did not. As someone who lives with a chronic illness, I would not fare well during a geriatric pregnancy, the term for anyone over thirty-five who becomes pregnant. The times in my life when I had pregnancy scares, I always knew I would abort.

But despite my reservations about pregnancy, now that the choice was soon to be taken out of my control, all of society’s motherhood projections began to haunt me: Who will help me in my old age? Am I being selfish? Why have I never had an urge to become a mother? Does my life have purpose? Is there something terribly wrong with me? In her essay “Beyond Beyond Motherhood,” Jeanne Safer describes exactly how I felt: “I don’t really want to have a baby. I want to want to have a baby. I long to feel like everybody else.”

Choosing not to be a parent can be extremely isolating. Between the limited vocabulary for describing the experience and few established communities and support networks for people who make that choice, it was clear to me that society did not want to make room for this way of being.

I was desperate to find other women to talk to who did not want children but who had some mixed feelings as they were approaching the end of their reproductive years. Eventually I found a forum for “childfree women,” which was the first time I had heard that term. The site used the categories “childfree by choice” and “childfree by circumstance,” implying the group members were accepting of both situations. I went to one of the local meetups at a coffee shop, hoping to have nuanced discussions about the tension between gendered societal pressure and not feeling any desire to have children.

All of the women present had what are usually considered “legitimate” reasons for not having kids—infertility, no partner, other family responsibilities. They bonded over their search for partners, fertility treatments, and their exclusion from family and society. When I introduced myself as someone who never wanted or tried to have children with my husband and had no family pressure to do so, they turned on me. One gasped. Another said, “What a waste,” and the rest became unfriendly. I left feeling confused and even more alone.

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