Send My Love to Anyone | Issue 3
with Gary Barwin and Catherine Graham
Hello friends,
Welcome to the third issue of Send My Love to Anyone.
This month features a micro interview with poet and novelist Catherine Graham, a reflection on writers’ self love and hate by author, musician, and artist Gary Barwin, and I share a nonfiction piece about working in housekeeping at a hotel that I recently adapted for a screenplay.
Check out the March Recommendations which includes recommended books, films, events, and calls for submission.
I’d love to hear from you!
Send your writing process questions to admin@kathrynmockler.com or anonymously here, and they may appear in a future issue.
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Kathryn
Micro Interview
On Choosing Subject Matter
CATHERINE GRAHAM
Kathryn Mockler: How do you choose subject matter or does it choose you?
Catherine Graham: I had no plans to be a writer, a poet. The concept was foreign to me. Poets were old men we studied in English class, dead men with white beards.
The deaths of my parents changed my relationship to writing. They died during my undergraduate years: mother, my first year; father, my last. Alone in the world, grief consumed me.
A worried family friend suggested I see a therapist. The therapist suggested I keep a journal. Write out your feelings. Give grief a voice.
It helped but it wasn’t a cure.
One day I began playing with words. Images, the music of words, the silence. I was thinking about the water-filled quarry I grew up beside and the cedar-walled bungalow where I lived with my parents. That house had to be sold after they died.
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Guest Post
Gary Barwin reflects on writers’ self love and hate for Send My Love to Anyone.
Feeling Like Schrodinger's Cat: On Writers' Self Love and Hate
GARY BARWIN
For most of this I talk about something that isn’t my favourite subject: me. I hope, though, that it's clear that what I'm talking about applies to most writers, perhaps in different ways, and we all have to manage feelings around both "success" and "failure" as writers and as people. And I hope also, as Whitman said, “All I mark as my own you shall offset it with your own,/ Else it were time lost listening to me.” To be honest, it’s not that what I’m saying here is new, but it's something that I think isn’t spoken about enough, especially among writers. And ok, maybe I am my favourite subject and just don’t realize it. I mean, let’s take a moment to think about my hair. Wow. Good. Now here goes:
I’m a goddamn genius! Love me! I just got the cover design and blurby words for my new novel. It’s a really beautiful cover and the words are really fantastic. They make the book sound amazing. And they said some tremendously complementary things about me and my work.
This should be good, right? Of course it is. I mean, it’s good for the book and for attracting unsuspecting readers. And I’m flattered and all. However, it makes me think about that oh so difficult of issues. What to do about positive feedback? It can make you uncomfortable. (Negative feedback is another thing — thanks, Dad! — but maybe what I say here about its opposite also applies.)
There is of course imposter syndrome. That couldn’t really be me! What if everyone finds out that I’m a fake? I can’t live up to those words. And for me, the book is done, so it’s going to have to go out into the world without me. Nothing I can do will change the novel at this point. Unless, you know, I try to arm-wrestle Putin, accidentally discover a new planet or become a Kardashian. The novel is typeset and ready to go. And it’s too late to fix that factual error someone found. But now that I’m working on a new novel, I feel haunted by the last ones. Can I make them as good? (They’re disappointments to me, of course — I wanted them to be so much better — but also, can I make this novel as good as the last ones? It should be just like the last ones, except of course, totally different.) This is the quantum state, the Schrödinger's Cat of Self Regard that writers often live with. We're great while at the same time we're awful. Naturally, sometimes we're Mx In-between.
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Nonfiction
This month I’m sharing a nonfiction piece I wrote for Geist Magazine in 2018 that I recently adapted into a short screenplay.
It’s based on my experience working as a hotel chambermaid.
I Won’t Clean the Tub
KATHRYN MOCKLER
He said he just wanted towels. There was no reason to be afraid.
I worked as a chambermaid in a small hotel in Montreal the summer I graduated from Concordia University. It was a four-storey grey building near Mount Royal. Maids were instructed to knock on all doors before we entered and not to clean a room if a guest was still in it. Doors were always to be left open. I remember being told these rules when I first started, but I was more concerned about learning how to correctly make a bed. My boss was a harsh woman with straight hair tied back in a bun. She was tall and thin and had excellent posture and looked more like a ballet teacher than a hotel operator. She wore green dresses and a strong-smelling perfume that lingered in the hotel rooms and hallways long after she had checked on my work. She was very strict, very unfriendly and very concerned about my hospital corners, which I always failed to get right. “Why can’t you learn to do this properly?” she would say as she demonstrated for me for the tenth time how to make a bed.
Working at this hotel is where I discovered the custom of leaving tips for chambermaids. Once I got a twenty-dollar bill. I was afraid it was too much money, so I took it to my boss.
“What should I do with it? Should I keep it?” I asked.
“Why shouldn’t you keep it?” she said. “They left it for you. Of course you should keep it.”
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Issue #3 of Send My Love to Anyone
Micro Interview with Catherine Graham
Feeling Like Schrodinger's Cat: On Writers' Self Love and Hate by Gary Barwin
I Won’t Clean the Tub by Kathryn Mockler
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