🧅 Clinton and I scream just to hear each other.

Onion Man, 2.0 | Episode 1

Kathryn Mockler

Nov 25, 2024

Onion Man

Clinton and I take off our motorcycle helmets and have a smoke before we go in. Heat from the tarmac rises like steam from coffee. My feet burn from blisters, from steel-toed boots. The factory doors are as heavy as the doors of Simpson-Sears. The warm air makes our skin damp, and it’s as hard to breathe in here as it is in a bathroom after a hot shower. We walk past the women on the line who wear white coats, plastic gloves, hairnets. We make sure our hard hats are in place in case the foreman sees us. We walk to the warehouse—end of the line. Only three women work here: Clinton’s mom on the computer, Brenda in the lab, and me. Clinton works the Britestack, and I stand across from him for ten hours watching unlabelled cans of corn. I make sure each one is in place so he can move them a thousand at a time with a magnet, off the conveyor belt, and down to the forklift drivers. It is so loud in here. Clinton and I scream just to hear each other. Half the time, I have no idea what he is saying.

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About Onion Man

Onion Man, was my first published full-length book. It was also my first foray into autofictional storytelling. Although it is based on some of my experiences working in a factory, living in London, Ontario, and coping with growing up in an alcoholic home, names, characters, details, and parts of the story have been fictionalized.

Long Path to Publication

Onion Man had a long path to publication. I started writing it in my mid-twenties, but it didn’t get published until I turned forty. I never gave up on the manuscript and continued to edit it and send it out faithfully throughout the years. It was shortlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize and excerpts of it had been published in Canadian literary journals. It received an OAC grant and was nominated for the K.M Hunter Prize. I had just enough hits on this manuscript that kept me going, kept me revising instead of just shoving it in a drawer.

Onion Man had pretty much been rejected by every small Canadian and many US presses until Tightrope Books picked it up in 2011. Shirarose Wilensky who worked at Tightrope at the time edited the manuscript. She was the perfect editor for this book. She provided me with keen editorial insights and shared with me materials about children of alcoholics giving me for the first time (I had not yet embarked on therapy) major insight into how my childhood impacted me as an adult. I will always be grateful for her time and attention to this book and the care with which she handled the subject matter.

The book did reasonably well for a debut if one keeps their expectations low. It was longlisted for the Relit Award and got some lovely reviews in journals. Over the years sometimes readers would tell me that they enjoyed it, and often those readers were young women, which always delighted me.

A few years ago Tightrope Books closed as is common in the small press world. The rights were returned to me, and I bought up the remaining copies of the book but haven’t been motivated to sell them. I have long accepted that the book graveyard is part of the publishing process.

Breathing New Life into Onion Man

But a couple of weeks ago, I started thinking about what I could do with this book that was new, so I asked friends on Facebook what they were doing in this situation. The responses ranged from nothing to submitting to another press, to E-book publishing to self-publishing to making an audiobook.

I wasn’t interested in trying to find another publisher as it felt like doing the same thing twice. But I would like to see Onion Man live on in a new format, and that’s when I decided that I would serialize it on Substack and include some extras: audio recordings, new stories, a playlist, photos, and behind-the-scenes notes about the book.

Onion Man was first presented as a novel-in-verse, but I will be recreating it here as prose. I’m also giving myself creative license to make any changes, including adding some pieces that were cut and writing new ones, so this will be an Onion Man, 2.0.

Why Now?

There are themes in this book that are still relevant—addiction, mental health, bodily autonomy, climate crisis (yes some of us were worried about the environment in the late 80s), intimate partner violence, class, Alzheimer’s.

I invite anyone interested coming along in this journey with me, but I am primarily doing this for myself—to revisit an earlier project, reflect on it, revise if necessary, and add some new and unpublished pieces to it.

Description of Onion Man

Onion Man follows an eighteen-year-old girl working for the summer at a corn-canning factory in London, Ontario in the 1980s as she navigates her relationships with her factory job, her boyfriend, her alcoholic mother, her terminally ill grandfather, and the man who every night “peels an onion and eats it as if it were an apple.