Gatherings
No Arms in the Arts Book Club, 2024 Austin Clarke Prize, Han Kang, Justina Elias, Lisa Ko, Farzana Doctor, Pacinthe Mattar, Nate Lippens, and more!
My News
Kirby News
Fall Book Bash in Montreal Sunday Novmeber 10 from 2pm to 4pm.
Join us for a triple book launch and 10th Anniversary Party for Anstruther Press! Jim Johnstone, Klara du Plessis & Katherine Alexandra Harvey with special guests Kirby, Darren Bifford, and Sarah Burgoyne
Gatherings
Events
No Arms in the Arts Toronto Event
Thursday, November 7th 2024, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm ET, Toronto (venue TBD)
For our final edition before the Giller galaāand our first in-person eventā2018 Giller shortlist and CanLit Responds organizer Thea Lim (An Ocean of Minutes) speaks with Farzana Doctor (The Beauty of Us), Spencer Gordon (A Horse at the Window), and several Toronto-based writers about their new releases and their commitment to withdrawing from the Giller Prize in solidarity with Palestine.
From the Draft Reading Series: An Archive of Care
November 22-24, 2024 | Entirely on Zoom.
What traces does care leave behind?Ā Texts, images, scars, tears, belly-laughs, rituals, memories? For its 19th season, the Draft reading series has condensed our programming into a single weekend. Curators Kern Carter, Therese Estacion and Tyler Pennock have invited a stunning collection of authors to commemorate acts of care: giving and receiving, chosen or imposed, private, public or something in between.
A detailed version is availableĀ here.
To register, please use this form:
https://forms.gle/Fc8o9oXJZz2pf1HV7
Having trouble?Ā Please contact us at draftreadings at gmail dot com
Calls for Submissions
Recommended Reading
āSome memories never heal. Rather than fading with the passage of time, those memories become the only things that are left behind when all else is abraded. The world darkens, like electric bulbs going out one by one. I am aware that I am not a safe person. Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves this single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, damaged, slaughteredāis this the essential fate of humankind, one which history has confirmed as inevitable?ā
āHuman Acts by Han Kang
Audiobook of Minor Detail by Adania Shibli
āI see how mercilessly the wind is pulling at the grasses and trees, shaking their branches in every direction, while the leaves tremble and writhe back and forth, nearly ripping off as the wind viciously toys with them.ā
~
āBy the way, I hope I didnāt cause any awkwardness when I mentioned the incident with the soldier, or the checkpoint, or when I reveal that we are living under occupation here.ā
This essay is going to break one of the most pervasive rules in Canadian journalism: Iām going to talk about how we talk about Palestine, and about our collective, consistent journalistic failure to do so accurately, with humanity, context and courage.
Specifically, I want to talk about how, in my experience, our own highly-regarded editorial processes seem to fly out the window when Palestine is in the news. Itās something I experienced first-hand during my decade working at the CBC.
Read This essay breaks a rule of Canadian media. I hope it encourages others to do the same by Pacinthe Mattar in The Toronto Star
Percival Everett, Sally Rooney, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Kaveh Akbar, Michelle Alexander, Naomi Klein, TĆ©a Obreht, Peter Carey, Jericho Brown, Natalie Diaz, Mary Gaitskill, Hari Kunzru, Rachel Kushner, Jhumpa Lahiri, Justin Torres, Raven Leilani, Susan Abulhawa, Valeria Luiselli, Jia Tolentino, Ben Lerner, Jonathan Lethem, Hisham Matar, Maaza Mengiste, China MiĆ©ville, Torrey Peters, Max Porter, Miriam Toews, Leslie Jamison, Layli Long Soldier, and Ocean Vuong are among the hundreds of prominent authors who have signed an open letter pledging not to work with āIsraeli cultural institutions that are complicit or have remained silent observers of the overwhelming oppression of Palestinians.ā
Read Hundreds of Authors Pledge to Boycott Israeli Cultural Institutions by Dan Sheehan in LitHub
Warning: This story contains references to child sexual abuse which some readers may find disturbing.
Alberta, Canada - The mid-morning autumn light spills through the kitchen window as Martha Cardinal threads her hands through the wisps of sage smoke. The 76-year-oldās movements are deliberate and graceful. She reaches up to beckon the smoke over her head and moves the sage in sweeping arcs around her small frame. Then she closes her eyes as if in silent prayer. This is her daily smudging ritual and each breath she takes is a quiet act of reclamation.
When she has finished, she opens her eyes, settles into her wooden kitchen chair, and declares, āI feel good.ā
Read Nobody Hugged Me by Brandi Morin in Al Jazeera
It is with great sadness that we note the passing of Roy Miki, professor emeritus in Simon Fraser University's Department of English. Professor Clint Burnham offers an overview of Roy Mikiās life and career: Ā
In Memoriam: Roy Miki, professor emeritus, SFU
Fire!! was a pathbreaking showcase for Black artists and writers āready to emotionally serve a new day and a new generation.ā
Read A Radical Black Magazine From the Harlem Renaissance Was Ahead of Its Time by Jon Key in Hammer & Hope
Bhakti Shringarpure Recommends Writing by Hammour Ziada, Leila Aboulela, Amir Tag Elsir, and More
Today, Sudan and its glittering capital, Khartoum, are under siege as conflicts simmering for decades have manifested into full-blown war. Hundreds of thousands of people have already been displaced, the death toll is increasing, the countryās rich resources are being plundered, and the damage to architecture and infrastructure has become unimaginable.
Read To Understand a Country: 8 Immersive Novels About Sudan in LitHub
This story began as a fairy tale.
I was nineteen, an aspiring writer myself, when I first read the fiction of Alice Munro. Fresh out of an MFA program in my mid-twenties, I moved to Victoria and stumbled upon a job at a bookstore co-founded by my literary idol. For the next nine years, as head of social media at Munroās Books, I proudly advertised this connection (āYes, that Alice,ā the shopās website boasted), happy to fill in the blanks of our iconās elusive public persona with a fantasy of motherly sacrificeāfor her bookselling days had coincided with the parenting of her young daughters, a time that predates the current Government Street location. Munro herself never worked in that building, a neoclassical marvel with lofty ceilings and a loftier origin story.
Read Undoing the Fairy Tale of Alice Munro by Justina Elias in The Walrus
Last year, I went to the doctor to get a referral for two long overdue hip replacements. The week leading up to my doctorās visit, I tried not to eat up all the sugar in the house. I prayed a lot. I assumed the worst. And the worst, at that point, was that this doctor, all the way up in New York, would tell me I had an incurable disease and I was going to die.
Read Letter from Home by Kiese Layman in The Bitter Southerner [Thanks to Carrianne Leung for sharing this essay with me.]
New research reveals that people who are experiencing climate-related distress are more likely to engage in collective action. History, by contrast, shows that manufactured optimism can lead to complacency and the shirking of responsibilities.
In the 1990s, hope ā coupled with doubt ā was the fossil fuel industryās antidote to the precautionary principle, the sensible idea that some problems had such dire implications that humanity should err on the side of caution even if the science was not completely settled. When George Bush was president, he was initially so concerned by the impact of fossil fuels on the climate that he looked into regulating the oil industry. But he backed away from this on the grounds that future generations would probably develop new technologies to solve the problem. Call that dumb, call that wishful thinking, or call that hope, the result was the same: no action.
Read Would abandoning false hope help us to tackle the climate crisis? by Jonathan Watts in the Guardian
On notetaking!
Read ās āCodaā
Many of us who have spoken out against Israelās war on Gaza have not only opposed the war, but also drawn connections between the violence there and other interlocking crises: mass death and displacement in Sudan, the Congo and Haiti; the disparity between U.S. military funding for war and funding for escalating climate catastrophes; the expansion of carceral systems, including surveillance and militarization of policing; and the increased criminalization of dissent following the racial justice protests in 2020, quelling connections between the global and the domestic. Suppression of dissent also suppresses connections between people and communities in a time of organized abandonment, a time when we need each other even more.
Read Literary Institutions Are Pressuring Authors to Remain Silent About Gaza by Lisa Ko in truthout
Read Write Because You Want To by Jessica Johnson
From A Queen Without a Country: Nate Lippens, Interview in Full Stop
Recommended Viewing
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
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