My ghosts are people, obsessions, images, questions, subjects that keep returning, things that mystify me.
I've been meaning to ask Kyo Maclear
I’ve been meaning to ask you is an interview series where Kathryn Mockler invites people to answer questions about being human.
What is your first memory of existing?
Sitting in a highchair in a bright kitchen on New King’s Road in London. Perfect soft-boiled egg nested in a blue ceramic cup that looked like a miniature goblet. An even row of ‘toast soldiers’ for dipping. A blurry mum in the background.
What is your first memory of being creative (writing, art making, etc.)?
When we immigrated to Canada, I was five. I chatterboxed my way up and down the airplane aisle and then we landed and I instantly became a different, shyer person. My first teacher in Toronto let me stay inside every lunch hour until I adjusted. We would draw murals on craft paper with oil pastels. The classroom door was always covered with wild new scenes. Miss Lev put her whole body into drawing. I remember her showing me how to blend colours with my fingers and that felt very cool. When I finally found the courage to play outside, she would sit in the sun and bake her face with an old-school, DIY tanning reflector she made from a double-record album covered with aluminum foil.
What is the best or worst dream you ever had?
The best (recurring) dream is when my (deceased) parents visit me. Sometimes we share a big meal in my kitchen. I wake up feeling visited and happily full of them.
What is your favourite or significant coincidence story to tell?
It’s not really a story but just after my dad died, I heard ABBA playing everywhere—at the grocery store, from passing cars, while waiting on ‘hold’ during phone calls. This happened at least a half dozen times. My dad really loved ABBA so it felt like he was telling me, with a little Swedish harmonic fervor, that everything was going to be okay.
Do you have a preferred emotion to experience? What is it and why? Or is there an emotion that you detest having and why?
I like the feeling of zanshin (a cat-like state of ‘relaxed alertness’.) I don’t like surprises or the feeling of being surprised. Why? I guess I’ve had a few existential jump scares over the past few years, along with several ill beloveds needing frequent ambulances, alongside the experience of living in a seriously dysregulated and shocking world…so I’ve become a person who gravitates toward a certain flatness and predictability, when it’s within my control. My nervous system easily jangles. (I guess I’ve just defined ‘anxiety’?)
What do you cherish most about this world?
The birds and plants and waterways and the people who—without apparent hesitation, fear, indecision—are going against the extractive, hypernationalist, omnicidal mindset that is killing the planet and the most vulnerable beings on it.
Do you believe in ghosts? Why or why not?
Yes. My ghosts are people, obsessions, images, questions, subjects that keep returning, things that mystify me. I’ve been thinking about the sheet—the one we throw over ghosts, like the Halloween costume with two holes for eyes—and that maybe writing is just a sheet we throw over our otherwise vaporous questions, curiosities and concerns. The sheet may be a fixed form (like a novel or a memoir) but I think it’s mostly a container for holding our hauntings.
Tell me about something you’d like to promote or support.
Online Auction for Crips for e-Sims for Gaza
Would love to promote the online auction fundraiser for Crips for eSims for Gaza.
What is this auction for?
Since December 2023, the volunteer-run group Crips for eSims has been
crowdfunding to buy and send eSims to Palestinians. People in Gaza are cut
off from the internet by Israel’s bombing and blocking. In order to
communicate with their families, send and receive warnings about attacks,
and document atrocities, many Palestinians in Gaza rely on eSims —
digitally activated cellular voice/data cards. Since they don’t require
physical hardware, eSims can be purchased and topped-up online by anyone,
anywhere.
In a time when moving basic resources like food and cash into
Gaza has become virtually impossible, eSims have remained a direct and
accessible site of support.
Unfortunately, funds for this initiative are now $30k+ in the red, and fundraising has considerably slowed down in the past few months. We’re putting together this auction so writers, artists and readers can directly support Palestinians in staying connected with each other and the rest of the world.
Details of the auction will be forthcoming when available.
Kyo Maclear is an essayist, novelist, children’s author, teacher and cat fan. She lives in Tkaronto/Toronto, on the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the New Credit, the Haudenosaunee, Métis, and the Huron-Wendat.
For readers of Crying in H Mart and Wintering, an unforgettable memoir about a family secret revealed by a DNA test, the lessons learned in its aftermath, and the indelible power of love.
Three months after Kyo Maclear’s father dies in December 2018, she gets the results of a DNA test showing that she and the father who raised her are not biologically related. Suddenly Maclear becomes a detective in her own life, unravelling a family mystery piece by piece, and assembling the story of her biological father. Along the way, larger questions arise: what exactly is kinship? And what does it mean to be a family?
Thoughtful in its reflections on race and lineage, unflinching in its insights on grief and loyalty, Unearthing is a captivating and propulsive story of inheritance that goes beyond heredity.
What gets planted, and what gets buried? What role does storytelling play in unearthing the past and making sense of a life? Can the humble act of tending a garden provide common ground for an inquisitive daughter and her complicated mother? As it seeks to answer these questions, Unearthing bursts with the very love it seeks to understand.
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