Gatherings | Issue 40
Hollay Ghadery, Brandi Morin, Reframables, Canisia Lubrin, Tin House, Room Magazine, What Sells A Book, Ben Robinson, Art Monsters, and more
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My News
Thanks to Hollay Ghadery for including Anecdotes in her 49th Shelf list of short story collections that “delight” and “unsettle”.
My micro short film “Do You Know What’s Great” adapted from a short story of the same name from my story collection, Anecdotes, will be screening in the Austin Micro Short Film Festival on September 16, 2024.
It’s even a finalist in the documentary category!
So thrilled to be interviewed by Jon DiSavino for Short Story Today
Kirby News
Gatherings
Recommended Reading
Two RCMP officers shot and killed a 15-year-old boy in the small prairie town of Wetaskiwin, AB early Friday morning. I was immediately sick to my stomach when I read the news online. No matter how many times this violence unfolds against our people, despite knowing the disproportionate statistics, it’s always gutting. Because between the headlines, nothing is ever done about it and the stats are getting worse.
Read Canada’s racist system claims another dead Indigenous boy by Brandi Morin in Riochet Magazine
Canisia Lubrin on
!
From the beginning of her tenure at the museum, Nanibush’s public views on Palestinian justice, expressed on her social media and elsewhere, had irritated powerful members of the board of trustees. She’d been reprimanded before. Three years ago, the museum adopted a new social media policy that, while vague, effectively said anything staffers posted was an extension of the AGO. Nanibush felt the policy was directed expressly at her and was furious. No other staffers, she felt, were being policed as she was. But in the fractious, emotionally charged time after October 7, any advocacy for Palestine risked being interpreted as antisemitic. Those same influential trustees—just two or three out of a board of twenty-seven—could now use Nanibush’s posts as an excuse to remove her from the museum.
Read Why Did Canada’s Top Art Gallery Push Out a Visionary Curator? by Jason McBride in The Walrus
Marina Magloire explores the correspondence between June Jordan and Audre Lorde. Some jaw-dropping revelations and betrayal here.
Jordan was a deeply sophisticated internationalist thinker with a materialist understanding of solidarity. Like a searchlight, her poetry and essays swing from South Africa to Nicaragua to Cuba to Hawaii to Iraq, often in support of their movements for liberation and self-determination. Palestine fits naturally into the broad range of her anti-imperialist sympathies.
Read Moving Towards Life: Exploring the correspondence of June Jordan and Audre Lorde, Marina Magloire assembles an archive of a Black feminist falling-out over Zionism by Marina Magloire in the LA Review of Books.
Read Featuring Palestinian Voices Part 5 in Room Magazine
I’m currently listening to Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer about how to think about and deal with art monsters.
On What Sells a Book? in Publishing Confidential
Gary Barwin on The Next Chapter reflecting on “identity, language, culture and home in his latest, Imagining Imagining.”
If you were putting together a heist crew, how many poets would you include? If you’re Roberto Bolaño, it’s all poets; no getaway drivers, no safecrackers, no wisecracking tech experts. Just poets.
Read James Folta’s Roberto Bolaño’s bank heist plan involves five poets in Lit Hub
A growing body of scientific evidence shows that microplastics are accumulating in critical human organs, including the brain, leading researchers to call for more urgent actions to rein in plastic pollution.
Read Microplastics are infiltrating brain tissue, studies show: ‘There’s nowhere left untouched’ by Douglas Main in the Guardian
Alexander Chee on what we make art for
“I’ve been thinking a lot about, how do we decide the terms under which we make art? What do we make art for? And are we making art to help ourselves survive? Does it help others survive? The novel that I am working on now, Other People’s Husbands, the one that I just sold, is something I wrote to make myself laugh, in part, during a very difficult time. And so it’s my hope that it will help other people do that too.”
Listen to ‘What Do We Make Art For?’: Alexander Chee on Storytelling, Motivation, and Money with on Reckon True Stories Episode 5
When Lisa began brainstorming concepts for the cover of her forthcoming non-fiction book, she wanted to give the creative team a lot of space. The thoughts she sent her editor were mostly open ended—social media handles of artists she loved, examples of books where she liked the aesthetic, notes on mood and palette. As a debut author, she didn’t want to overstep. But she also included a few more specific things: She wanted the art to be gender neutral—no pinks or purples. No images of Black people or linked hands, no variegated splotches suggestive of DEI or unity. She’d seen it done to too many other books by Black women—think Maame by Jessica George, or Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half. By giving a clear sense of her limits, Lisa figured she’d avoid the problem. (Lisa is a pseudonym; her book is in production with a major press.)
Read The Hidden Racism of Book Cover Design: The publishing industry’s troubling reliance on visual stereotypes by in The Walrus
For writers in Ontario, this is your reminder that the deadline for Literary Creation Projects (Works for Publication) is just around the corner. This grant gives $12,000 to work on your novel, poetry collection, short stories, essays, comics, and more.
The grant application has changed slightly from previous years, so this column will walk through the changes, as well as what you need to know to prepare an application.
Read Breaking Down the Ontario Arts Council’s Literary Creation Projects Grant by Manahil Bandukwala in Open Book
Check out “On the Move” by
in Rewilding
New literary journal alert! Pitukena Renowned Lenape poet and writer, D.A Lockhart has started a new literary journal, Pitukena “to rebuild a local literary community based upon Indigenous and allies experiences and efforts to build a new inclusive, supportive, and decolonized approach to art and literary craft.”
Very excited about this new journal! Submit your work to Pitukena!
Ben Robinson’s As Is is a study in place, the town of Hamilton Ontario, considering what it means to be connected to or attempt a connection to place as a settler. Many of the poems function as counter-histories, reading the local history and extracting details that get glossed over elsewhere: the first public building being a prison, the public hangings, the botched first treaty. Other poems are situated in the present, the personal, and look at how these founding errors ring through into the present, for both the individual and the community.
As Is searches for alternative frames for defining a local identity: expanding the sense of time to include the prehistoric, the fossil record of mammoth and wapiti in the area, and expanding the sense of place to consider the treaty boundary as a possible framework for understanding the region. Unusually for a book of poetry, it attempts reckoning with actual historical record.
SMLTA contributor Stephen Humphrey on three classic sword dramas from Japan in
What I’m Listening To
Samira Mohyeddin interviews Kagiso Lesego Molope:
Hollay Ghadery on Short Story Today!
Nathan Whitlock interviews SMLTA contributor Deborah Dundas for What Happened Next:
A couple of weeks ago, Whitlock spoke to writer and journalist Deborah Dundas, formerly the books editor for the Toronto Star and now one of its opinion editors. The occasion for the interview was Dundas’s first book, On Class, published by Biblioasis in 2023. But the two began by talking about Andrea Robin Skinner’s memoir that exposed her stepfather’s sexual abuse and Alice Munro’s knowledge of it—a story Dundas edited for the Star.
Read Who Knew What About Alice Munro in The Walrus
What I’m Watching
Living In The Wake: Honoring The Work of Christina Sharpe
To tune out of life, I’ve been watching Hacks, and it’s fun.
What good shows are you watching these days.
From the Archive
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This is such a incredible compendium, Kathryn. So vast/cool, I have to bookmark many for later! Thank you.
Thanks Ronna!!!