Hi all! This substack has been dormant for a few (okay, many) months, and I’m fully planning on starting it up again, with hopefully a bit more frequency. To that end, I thought I’d start off with a short post with some book and writing updates, and share two poems to kickstart the whole thing off.
First: Lake Burntshore, my novel set at a Jewish sleepover camp in 2013 about settler colonialism, anti-Zionism, Palestine, sex, drugs, rock and roll, has been out for a little over two months! The novel is available in all formats (my first audiobook!). The novel has appeared on a number of reading lists, has gotten a great review, and I have been on a bunch of podcasts and interviews. For more on the book, check out my website.
I have two short stories coming out later this summer: “Shimon’s Trial” at The Ex-Puritan, and “How Many More” at Niv Magazine; both of them exist in the Lake Burntshore universe (though neither of these two particular stories have characters from the novel), and are part of a suite of camp stories I’ve been working on since I finished the novel. In the fall, my story “Tasmanian Shores,” about an ill-fated attempt to find Jewish refuge in Tasmania in the 1940s, was chosen by Zsuzsi Gardner to be included in Best Canadian Stories 2026! The story originally appeared in Prairie Fire.
Finally, I wrote an essay about the surprising, and horrifying, fact that around 1,500 Israeli soldiers, many fresh from the killing fields of Gaza, are currently acting as staff at 158 Jewish summer camps all across Turtle Island for Mondoweiss.
As I guess is pretty obvious from this little roundup, everything in my writing life has been orbiting Lake Burntshore these past months and years. It’s a wild sensation having your first novel out in the world, with high highs and low lows. Maybe a subject for a future essay.
To end off this substack, here’s the two promised poems, that are somewhat representative of the two directions my poetry is going in right now (and the two collections I am writing towards: A Logging Road to the Cosmos and The Pattern and the Valley). The first, “Cataloguing the Known Universe,” was originally published at Periodicity Journal, along with some of my thoughts on my beloved prose poem form. The second, “Swimming in Kahshe Lake,” is much older, and remains unpublished, until today, I suppose.
That’s it for now!
More anon.
Aaron
