Wild Prose Readings, Mary Turfah, Deborah Dundas interviews Omar El Akkad, Remembering Canadian artist Kelly Mark, fiction by Amber Nuyens, Hannah Black, David Lynch & more!
Gatherings | Issue 44
Send My Love to Anyone is a newsletter on all things writing where Kathryn Mockler writes about the writing process and other troubles and invites guests to share their work.
Send My Love to Anyone supports small and independent presses and writing that intersects human rights, collective liberation, anti-oppression, and the climate crisis.
Learn more about Send My Love to Anyone
What’s in Gatherings Issue 44
My News
My 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 News
Kirby 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 Reading
Recognition and alienation in the work of Isabella Hammad by Mary Turfah in Bookforum
AS NEWS BROKE that a ceasefire agreement—tenuous, immediately delayed by Israel—had been signed, celebrations filled Gaza’s streets. People allowed themselves to take in this victory: the naked force of the entire West had failed, for over a year, to break their will. When news of the ceasefire reached me, via phone notification, I started crying. But where I’d anticipated feeling some sense of closure, I felt instead like I was finally allowing myself to look through a door that I’d left open. During the acute phase of the genocide, there were questions many of us hadn’t allowed ourselves to ask. Among the heaviest: What will happen to these children? A small boy with dark circles under his eyes was asked recently what he would do on the first day of the ceasefire. “I want to go to [see] my mom,” he answered. “My mom died—I want to visit her grave and read al-fatiha [a prayer] for her.”
Remembering 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.
A reading list to process the state of the world from
I just discovered
an food and culture magazine and incorporates culture and politics.At Vittles, we think about food as economy, class, inheritance, and political agency, rather than just a dish on a table. We publish essays about all aspects of food culture, from deep dives to polemics, from personal essays to reported journalism, as well as restaurant recommendations, recipes, and reviews.
Beware the man whose handwriting sways like a reed in the wind Anne Carson in the London Review of Books
This is an essay about hands and handwriting. I think of handwriting as a way to organise thought into shapes. I like shapes. I like organising them. But because of recent neurological changes in my brain I find shapes fall apart on me. My responsibility to forms can’t be gracefully fulfilled. Nonetheless, I offer the following in the hope it does not strike you as dishevelled or depressing.
Come as You Are: Remembering Joe Brainard in letters to friends, lovers, and fans by Andrew Chan in Bookforum
EVEN A CURSORY GLANCE at the life of Joe Brainard reveals him to have been something of a genius of friendship. Since the artist and writer died of AIDS-induced pneumonia in 1994 at the age of fifty-three, his legacy has been steadfastly tended to by a band of his contemporaries, who jump at the chance to rhapsodize at length not just about the man’s achievements but also his gentleness and unpretentiousness. Foremost among these evangelists is the poet Ron Padgett, whose close bond with Brainard began when the two were high school classmates in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the 1950s. In the past two decades, Padgett has published the unabashedly affectionate memoir Joe, edited an authoritative anthology of Brainard’s writing, and served as the narrator of a short film about his friend, directed by the documentarian Matt Wolf. It’s easy to understand the urge to advocate for Brainard’s place in history. A staunchly idiosyncratic devotee of small-scale work, he was well-reviewed during his lifetime without ever becoming a brand name in the art world, partly due to his lack of skill and interest in the business side of his profession. One imagines that, by posthumously shepherding him into the spotlight, his friends are trying to reconcile a long-held desire to see him succeed with their respect for his humility.
“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.
I’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.
A Song for Wildcats by Caitlyn Galway
“The horses watched as the cab passed, their black-smoke manes blowing over the bright swells of their eyes, their legs like brittle stems of clay. It was late October 1933, and the drought had swept its indiscriminate scythe across the once sun-honeyed fields.” —from “Wisps” in A Song for Wildcats
What I’m Watching
They 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 Wearing
My Cuntry Tis of Thee (2018) by Marilyn Minter
Writing and Making, Writing as Making - Hannah Black
My Bodies by Hannah Black
Saute ma ville (1968) by Chantal Ackerman
From Criterion
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.
Thanks Kathryn for this great update and for sharing all this info. And congrats on your video "Do You Know What’s Great" being screened online as part of the Reel Poetry International Festival — wonderful showcase!