Gatherings | Issue 11
Recommended readings, interviews, events, podcasts, calls
Hi friends,
Here are my November recommendations for Send My Love to Anyone Issue 11!
Hope you enjoy these readings, interviews, podcasts, events, and more!
If you have recommendations of your own, post them here or leave a comment below, and I may include in the next newsletter.
Kathryn
Lee Maracle
I’m deeply saddened to hear of the passing of Lee Maracle. Condolences to her family and friends.
I had the good fortune to meet Lee several years ago and to publish her work in The Rusty Toque. We published her poem “Archer’s Body” and an excerpt from Conversations with Canadians (Book*hug Press, 2017).
The Scales Project
The Scales Project is an excellent multi-genre climate-focused site founded by Bethany Gibson that publishes conversations in art about ecological collapse and our place in the changing world. Each posted work begins or adds to an already existing conversation on the site.
My short film This Isn’t a Conversation started Conversation #62 and J.R. McConvey responded with his story “The Cormorant”.
Check out the submission guidelines here if you are interested in participating.
Events
Launch of poetry / in / canada
November 14, 2021 at 2:00pm (Pacific) / 5:00pm (EST).
Launch of new project to create a space for writers, educators, visitors, and poetry enthusiasts alike to share, research, perform, and cultivate widespread appreciation for poetry. With readings by Larissa Lai, rob mclennan, Joanne Arnott, and Erin Mouré.
Register here.
Wise Words Climate Writing Workshop
Join me for this free workshop on November 24, 2021 presented by Wise Words, a seniors writing and communication initiative from the Federation of British Columbia Writers
Register here: https://www.bcwriters.ca/event-4499223
Literary Tweets
Looking for Journal Ideas?
Bernadette Mayer has a whole list of them.
One of my favourites is “Write a perfect poem.”
Can you? Is it possible? Can you do it?
Recommended Reading
From Anstruther Press!
Three Send My Love to Anyone contributors have new chapbooks out from Anstruther Press!
Congrats to all the writers!
The Human Body by Gary Barwin
The Nearest Sweetest Thing by Jessica Le
The Devine Bergamot by Khashayar Mohammadi
Flowers in the Dark by Tucker Nichols
This is a moving and beautiful digital book by Tucker Nichols.
Read full book here.
Todd Nichols: “Flowers For Sick People is a multimedia art and health project by me, Tucker Nichols. New elements of the project are added regularly.
Sickness can be a deeply isolating experience for everyone involved. Like many people, I’ve lived with illness for years. But there’s something about flowers—even if they are garish or they make you sneeze or they are hardly noticed—that can occasionally poke a hole in the wall of isolation that separates sick people from their loved ones. Sometimes flowers inadvertently express something else altogether, or are completely ignored. Flowers for Sick People is my own way of looking at illness while trying to understand how humans struggle to connect in difficult times.”
Zac’s Haunted House (a novel) by Dennis Cooper
Description
Dennis Cooper’s tenth novel bears all of the earmarks of his legendary and controversial work — intricate formal and stylistic play, disturbing content, an exploration of the borderline between fantasy and reality, concern for the emotions and dilemmas of youth, etc. — but it is both something unique in his body of writing and possibly something of a world’s first in the novel genre itself.
Instead of gathering materials from language, sentences, and the developmental character and narrative possibilities allowed and restricted by written fiction, Cooper has turned his characteristic inventiveness on the animated gif, employing gifs’ tightly wound, looping visual possibilities, nervous rhythms, tiny storylines, and their status as dismembered, twitching eye candy to compose a short novel of unexpected complexity, strangeness, poetry and comedy.
"Zac’s Haunted House" is as fun and eerie to explore as its namesake attraction, and, the more closely one searches and decodes its carefully detailed sequences and construction, a deep and fraught fiction puzzle.
Read it here.
Sophie Calle’s The Address Book, An Excerpt, The New Yorker (2012)
In the early nineteen-eighties, the French artist Sophie Calle, who is known for projects that involve immersing herself in the lives of strangers or allowing strangers a view of her own life, found an address book on the street in Paris. Before mailing it back to its owner—a filmmaker called Pierre D.—she photocopied the contents and then proceeded to call each person listed in it to ask questions about him. “I will try to discover who he is without ever meeting him, and I will try to produce a portrait of him over an undetermined length of time that will depend on the willingness of his friends to talk about him—and on the turns taken by the events,” she wrote. She turned her encounters into short pieces, which were published almost daily over the course of a month in the newspaper Libération. When Pierre D. discovered what Calle was doing, he threatened to sue her for invasion of privacy, and she agreed not to re-publish the work until after his death. Siglio Press has just brought out the project—consisting of Calle’s writings and accompanying photographs—as a book, giving readers the chance to peer, along with Calle, into the touchingly elusive figure at the center of her investigations.
Read more here.
Calls for Submission
Spring Writers Retreat 2022, Banff Centre with Madhur Anand and Susan Holbrook
Deadline: December 08, 2021
The Spring Writers Retreat is a self-directed program that offers time and space for writers to retreat, reconnect, and re-energize their writing practice. In addition to a single room, a personal studio space to work from is provided and available 24 hours a day, and you will be surrounded by a community of artistic peers.
Apply here.
2022 Jacob Zilber Prize
Heather O’Neil is the 2022 Jacob Zilber Prize for Short Fiction from Prism international.
Deadline December 20, 2021. Enter here.
Podcasts
Claire-Louise Bennett in conversation with Sheila Heti
“I’m writing about what matters to me in that moment.” —Clair-Louise Bennett
Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut, Pond (Fitzcarraldo), has been a firm bookshop favourite since its release, for its unique, irreverent voice and attention to the parts of experience which go overlooked or unspoken. Checkout 19 (Jonathan Cape), the follow-up, is one of our most eagerly-anticipated books of 2021; Bennett was in conversation with Sheila Heti.
Listen here.
Interview
Matt Bell interviews Nnedi Okorafor: Africanfuturism and Worldbuilding in Science Fiction
From the Archive
It’s Queer to Have a Body by Kirby
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