Gatherings | Issue 4
Calls, Events, Recommended Reading, and more!
Hello friends,
Please enjoy the April recommendations!
This month I’m sharing my micro-climate story “Let’s Say” which was recently published in Imagining Climates, a project headed up by author Catherine Bush through the University of Guelph’s Institute for Environmental Research; plus an excellent drawing workshop with Lynda Barry on YouTube; a short doc by Kirsten Johnson; an online anti-racism course and a social justice learning lab; a new poem by Samantha Jones in Watch Your Head, and more.
ICYMI: Check out Issue #1, Issue #2, and Issue #3 of Send My Love to Anyone.
Issue #4 will be coming your way mid-month with two very special guests!
As always. I’ll be adding to the recommendations list throughout the month, so check back here for updates.
If you like this newsletter, consider subscribing and sharing!
Hope you enjoy!
Kathryn
Micro-Climate Stories
I’m happy to be included in the Imagining Climates project with these amazing writers and environmental scientists.
Check out my micro-climate story ”Let’s Say”.
Micro-Climate stories are open to the public. Click here to submit your own Micro-Climate story to Imagining Climates.
About this project
Imagining Climates is a multidisciplinary collaborative and creative response to the climate crisis, exploring the role of imagination in understanding our world today and creating the world of tomorrow. Discover tiny stories, poems, and essays from acclaimed writers Catherine Bush, Karen Houle, Liz Howard, Carrianne Leung, Canisia Lubrin, Kathryn Mockler, Tyler Pennock, Erin Robinsong, Sheung-King, and renowned environmental scientists Dr. Madhur Anand, Dr. Ze’ev Gedalof, Dr. Shoshanah Jacobs, Dr. Jana Levison, Dr. Alex Smith and more. This ongoing series of powerful individual responses to our global crisis expands our understanding of the human connection to our natural world and how imaginative attention can transform us. Presented by the University of Guelph.
April 6 - May 4, 2021 - Hard Conversations: Whiteness, Race, and Social Justice by Patti Digh and Victor Lee Lewis
I took this course last year and highly recommend it. Good weekly reading list.
April 7, 2021 at 5:00pm (Pacific) - Storytelling for Social Justice by Asian American Justice + Innovation Lab (AAJIL)
‘A box of light’: AI inspired by British verse attempts to write poetry, by Allison Flood, The Guardian
An example of the poetry currently being produced by the AI:
and soon I am staring out again,
begin to practise my words, expecting my word
will come. it will not. the wind is calling.
my friend is near, I hear his breath. his breath
is not the air. he touches me again with his hands
and tells me I am growing old, he says, far old.
we travel across an empty field in my heart.
there is nothing in the dark, I think, but he.
I close my eyes and try to remember what I was.
he says it was an important and interesting day,
because I put in his hands one night
the box of light that had been a tree.
The Dali Theatre Museum Virtual Tour
April 7, 2021 at 7:00pm (EST) - Indigenous Toronto Book Launch, Coach House Books
Editors Denise Bolduc, Mnawaate Gordon-Corbiere, Rebeka Tabobondung, and Brian Wright-McLeod will be in discussion and will take audience questions.
Beneath many major North American cities rests a deep foundation of Indigenous history that has been colonized, paved over, and, too often, silenced. Few of its current inhabitants know that Toronto has seen twelve thousand years of uninterrupted Indigenous presence and nationhood in this region, along with a vibrant culture and history that thrives to this day.
With contributions by Indigenous Elders, scholars, journalists, artists, and historians, this unique anthology explores the poles of cultural continuity and settler colonialism that have come to define Toronto as a significant cultural hub and intersection that was also known as a Meeting Place long before European settlers arrived.
Contributors include political scientist Hayden King, artist and curator Wanda Nanibush, chef Johl Whiteduck Ringuette, poet and broadcaster Duke Redbird, playwright Drew Hayden Taylor, educator Kerry Potts, writer/journalist Miles Morrisseau, dancer and scholar Karen Pheasant-Neganigwane, and photographer Nadya Kwandibens.
Pre-order Indigenous Toronto here!
Register for the launch here.
Geist Magazine’s 17th Annual Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest
This is a great contest where you send both a 500 word story and postcard that relates to the story. The deadline is April 12, 2021.
Click here for more info.
Drawing Together with Lynda Barry
This is an absolutely delightful way to spend an afternoon. My favourite part is how she belly laughs in delight when she sees everyone’s drawings!
Creative writing not so creative when it comes to women, say McGill researchers by Anne Lagacé Dowson, McGill Reporter
“The research, initiated by Eve Kraicer (BA Arts’17) as an independent study project with Piper, shows that twice as many men as women appear in novels of the last decade and half. Kraicer and Piper analyzed 1,330 digitized novels, with 26,400 characters in seven genres of fiction published between 2001 and 2015.”
The Above by Kirsten Johnson
I watched The Above last weekend. Highly recommend this short doc by Kirsten Johnson.
In Kirsten Johnson’s The Above a U.S. military surveillance balloon floats on a tether high above Kabul, Afghanistan. Its capacities are both highly classified and deeply mysterious.
Read an interview with Kirsten Johnson. Watch more Field of Vision films here.
“Ocean Acidification” by Samantha Jones on Watch Your Head
Science meets art in “Ocean Acidification,” a beautiful and devastating poem from Samantha Jones on Watch Your Head.
Samantha Jones lives and writes in Calgary, Alberta on Treaty 7 territory, and is mixed Black Canadian and white settler. Her poetry appears in Blanket Sea, CV2, Grain, MixedMag, New Forum, Room, and elsewhere. She is currently a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of Calgary where she studies carbon dioxide cycling in rivers and the coastal Arctic Ocean. Find her on Twitter: @jones_yyc.
Buried in Print Recommends Watch Your Head: Artists & Writers Respond to the Climate Crisis
Buried in Print recommends Watch Your Head, the print anthology I edited with 14 editors in 2020 published by Coach House Books.
Wonderful to see it on this list with these excellent books.
All proceeds from this project are donated to RAVEN and Climate Justice Toronto. You can order the book here.
Hey, writers do you ever do this?
Lately I’ve been researching anarchists and knitting and self-help books from the 50s and going down all sorts of rabbit holes.
What is your guilty research pleasure?
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