Fall 2023 Fiction Preview: Anecdotes by Kathryn Mockler
Today’s Fall 2023 Fiction Preview features Kathryn Mockler’s Anecdotes!
With dreamlike stories and dark humour, Anecdotes is a hybrid collection in four parts examining the pressing realities of sexual violence, abuse, and environmental collapse.
Absurdist flash fictions in “The Boy is Dead” depict characters such as a park that hates hippies, squirrels, and unhappy parents; a woman lamenting a stolen laptop the day the world ends; and birds slamming into glass buildings.
“We’re Not Here to Talk About Aliens” gathers autofictions that follow a young protagonist from childhood to early 20s, through the murky undercurrent of potential violence amidst sexual awakening, from first periods to flashers, sticker books to maxi pad art, acid trips to blackouts, and creepy professors to close calls.
“This Isn’t a Conversation” shares one-liners from overheard conversations, found texts, diary entries, and random thoughts: many are responses to the absurdity and pain of the current political and environmental climate.
In “My Dream House,” the past and the future are personified as various incarnations in relationships to one another (lovers, a parent and child, siblings, friends), all engaged in ongoing conflict.
These varied, immersive works bristle with truth in the face of unprecedented change. They are playful forms for serious times.
“Part coming of age and part end times, Anecdotes is a bold and brilliant mixture of dark humour, understated literary experiments, and a poet’s eye for the truth. Mockler’s writing isn’t afraid to look at the world and see it for what it is. Her stories are so deeply immersive you’ll never want to leave. An absolute must-read if you live on this planet and even if you don’t,” writes Carleigh Baker, author of Bad Endings.
We’re happy to share an introduction from Kathryn Mockler!
In addition, we’ve selected an excerpt from one of the stories in the collection to share with you today. Anecdotes will be released on September 19, 2023, and is available for pre-order from our online shop or from your local independent bookstore.
The boy is dead, and we will spend the rest of the story trying to find out why and what happened and how it affected the people in the boy’s life.
The boy came from a middle-class white family (his mother Protestant, his father Catholic) who were indifferent to him because he had a facial disfigurement from birth. As soon as he came into the world, he was not what they had anticipated. So they treated him more like a pet to keep fed and watered, which they did adequately.
While he is somewhat missed, his parents were able to get on with their lives fairly quickly after his death because they simply had not paid all that much attention to him when he was alive.
His parents had the boy because they thought it would strengthen their relationship, even though neither of them really had an interest in children. The boy had no siblings. His Catholic grandparents lived on the other side of the country and never got to know their grandchild. The boy’s mother told him his grandparents took no interest in him because she refused to baptize him Catholic. His mother claimed she wanted the boy to make up his own idea about religion when he got older, but the boy knew the truth—she was ashamed to bring her disfigured child into the church.
Nonetheless, his Catholic grandparents sent him Christmas cards and modest birthday gifts. Once the boy’s father took him to see his grandparents, but his father was really interested in visiting an ex-girlfriend, during a time that came to be known in the family as his mid-life crisis. The boy watched TV for the entire trip, and his grandmother cooked him frozen supermarket lasagna every night. Even her store-bought cookies tasted bad.
Kathryn Mockler is the author of five books of poetry. She co-edited the print anthology Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (2020) and is the publisher of the Watch Your Head website. She runs Send My Love to Anyone, a literary newsletter, and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Victoria where she teaches screenwriting and fiction.
