Gatherings | Issue 36
Ibrahim Nasrallah, Annick MacAskill, Omar Sakr, Ross Gay, Bookspo, Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, Steven Beattie, Lisa Robertson, Roxane Gay, Jade Wallace, Kirby & more.
My News
Kirby and I are cooking up something cool. Details TBA!
I’m thrilled to see Anecdotes on the Danuta Gleed Literary Award shortlist with these amazing writers!
What a lovely and generous reading of Anecdotes by Mia Johnson in White Wall Review
"She [Mockler] thoughtfully exposes how content we are with embracing ourselves until someone tells us it’s wrong to do so. And she’s as brutal as she is unforgiving because holding onto that shame is exhausting. Mockler’s prose allows us to grieve our youth; to visit those parts of ourselves that felt powerless and give them somewhere to lay their head. “I don’t want to be a woman!” she puts indignantly. It’s that outrage born from shame as our sense of self shifts. When giving voice to negative emotions around experiences that reveal a great deal of pain – they’re often overridden by a paralyzing fear. Mockler teaches us to trust the transformative process, which reveals a commonality in our repression of these difficult emotions."
Kirby News
Recommended Reading
Room Magazine: Featuring Palestinian Voices, part 4: Palestinian poetry for National Poetry Month
Mustafa Aljazzar is raising funds for psychosocial and recreational support activities for children and women in shelter centers in Gaza.
Universities must be places where students have access to specialized knowledge that shapes contemporary debates; where faculty members are encouraged to be public intellectuals, even when, or perhaps especially when, they are expressing dissenting opinions speaking “truth to power.” Classrooms must allow for contextual learning, where rapidly mutating current events are put into a longer historical timeline.y
Read Is This the End of Academic Freedom? by Paula Chakravartty and Vasuki Nesiah in NYT
I was silent and nothing came of it.
I spoke and nothing came of it.
I cursed, I apologized, and nothing came of it.
I was busy, I pretended to be busy…and nothing.
I sat, I walked, I ran.
I shivered and I warmed up. Nothing.
Read Palestinian by Ibrahim Nasrallah (trans. Huda Fakhreddine) in Protean
RIP Paul Auster, The Guardian
As police, administrators, politicians, and outsiders attack college protesters in a wave of reactionary repression, I am reminded of the role the recently-passed novelist Paul Auster played in the anti-Vietnam War protests at Columbia University.
Read “Crazy with the poison of Vietnam in my lungs.” Paul Auster on the ’68 Columbia protests on Lit Hub
Jade Wallace offers great reviewing advice for poetry (but really can be applied to any genre)!
Send My Love to Anyone contributor Carrianne Leung brought this wonderful video to my attention: Inciting Joy with author Ross Gay
Two poems by Annick MacAskill in Ex-Puritan
In the ’80s, the spy agency investigated the "Gateway Experience" technique to alter consciousness and ultimately escape spacetime. Here is everything you need to know.
Read How to Escape the Confines of Time and Space According to the CIA in Vice
Link to this trippy Gateway Intermediate Workbook, CIA
I went down a Truman Capote rabbit hole after watching the series Feud: Capote vs. The Swans
Truman Capote's "La Côte Basque," originally published in the November 1975 issue of Esquire, was meant to serve as the first taste from his upcoming masterpiece about the inner circles of high society women. That novel, eventually called Answered Prayers, wouldn't publish until after the writer's death, but the passage became famous for the scandals it brought. In 2024, it was adapted for the television screen, for FX's Feud: Capote vs. the Swans. Available in full, below, it contains insensitive descriptions of beauty and body standards.
Read "La Côte Basque” by Truman Capote in Esquire
It is fashionable to complain about the lack of books coverage today, but then this has always been the case. There has, according to a certain contingent, always been too little literary criticism, too few reviews, or the wrong kind of reviews, or reviews of the wrong books. But that doesn’t negate the fact that there is a vibrant community of people in Canada writing reviews, reading and thinking about literature, and striving to better the discourse in this country. They deserve recognition.
Read The crisis in book reviewing may not be what you think it is by Steven Beattie, That Shakespearean Rag
And while you are at it, check out a recent review by Steven Beattie of Mathew Walsh’s new poetry collection:
If Walsh’s collection is a snapshot of the way we live now – a fragile negotiation with the confusion and worry of how to be fully human in a world that seems intent on denying some people that freedom – it is also a paean to the importance of art as a means of support for the vagaries of human existence.
Steven Beattie on Mathew Walsh’s Terrarium in That Shakespearean Rag
The season is called evening.
Out of belief comes men
and then the sea and then the air
and then the upper part ignites
and a child comes screaming rosy fluids
and then the mother sleeps and what is change
Read “After Trees” by Lisa Robertson in Brick
Calling all writers and wordsmiths—we are now accepting submissions for The 19th Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest!
How it works: Send us a story and a postcard—the relationship can be as strong or as tangential as you like, so long as there is a clear connection between the story and the image.
Deadline: May 20, 2024 at 11:59PM PDT.
Winning entries get cash prizes and publication in Geist, so dig through your drawers and find a postcard that inspires the micro-lit writer in you.
There is nothing I enjoy more than office supply talk.
doesn’t disappoint by sharing a cool Muji pen hack!
I’ve started up my writing prompts again. Here are some dialogue writing exercises:
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