An interview with Conyer Clayton

Conyer Clayton is an Ottawa based artist who aims to live with compassion, gratitude, and awe. Her most recent chapbooks are: Trust Only the Beasts in the Water (forthcoming with above/ground, 2019), Undergrowth (bird, buried press), Mitosis (In/Words Magazine and Press), and For the Birds. For the Humans. (battleaxe press). She released a collaborative album with Nathanael Larochette, If the river stood still, in August 2018. Her work appears in ARC, Prairie Fire, The Fiddlehead, The Maynard, Puddles of Sky Press, TRAIN, post ghost press, and others. She won Arc's 2017 Diana Brebner Prize, 3rd place in Prairie Fire's 2017 Poetry Contest, honourable mention in The Fiddlehead's 2018 poetry prize, and was long-listed for Vallum's 2018 Poem of the Year. She is a member of the sound poetry ensemble Quatuor Gualuor, and writes reviews for Canthius. Her debut full length collection of poetry is forthcoming in Spring 2020. Check out conyerclayton.com for updates on her endeavours.

How did you begin writing, and what keeps you going?

I kept pretty systematic diaries from ages 8-12. Lots of apologizing for my feelings, lists of curse words, and drawings of what I thought sex was. These started getting more accurate later on. Around grade 9 I started writing poetry, short stories, and flash fiction. I continued on from there without much pause through my undergrad and graduate English and writing degrees, into my late twenties, until here I am, at 30, still writing with pretty much the same process as ever.

What keeps me going is discovery of all my temporal selves, all of my real and unreal and hopeful and hopeless selves. I think this is the most crucial work of life; growth, and specifically growth through internal work that will (ideally) manifest outwards as love towards other beings, to the earth, and to ourselves, in all our wide and expansive versions. Writing helps me remember that none of these versions are more or less me, just situated differently along my timeline. Writing is how I discover just about everything.

Finding a wonderful literary community here in Ottawa has really helped propel and nurture my vision of myself as writer. I am inspired by my friends all of the time. For the first time of my adult life, when someone asks me what I do, I often answer "writer" before "gymnastics coach."

With a couple of chapbooks to date, to you feel your process of putting together a manuscript has evolved? How do you decide on the shape and size of a manuscript?

I don't know that having released 4 chapbooks in the past year and half or so has necessarily changed the way I put a manuscript together. I just try to listen to what I think a work is trying to tell me, and honour what it says. That being said, I have 3 ways that manuscripts generally come together:

1) I'll have an idea for a thematically or stylistically unified manuscript, and my drafting then follows that mold. "Undergrowth" (bird, buried press, 2018) was made in this way. I had the loose idea of writing based on seed packets, and once I drafted a few poems, it became clear that the subject matter demanding my attention were events in my Halifax garden during the summer of 2016, the last summer of my failing marriage. The rest of the book followed from that realization extremely quickly.

2) I write. I write. I write some more. I look back over the things I've been writing, and realize there is cohesion. I put them together roughly and play around until it feels done. It usually isn't done. I sit on it for a few years. Write some more. Come back. Hate it. Love it. Change it. Keep it. Trash it. Over think it. But time is necessary. I have slowly been learning that I need to be more patient about certain poems and manuscripts timelines even if it takes forever and I am tired of it and just want it to be out in the world and off my mind. It takes forever. I love this entire process. I love listening to it whine.

3) This third way is rare and elusive, but has happened: it is quick and easy. I simply write, do some mild edits, and it just works. It comes out and is pretty much done.

Usually my projects just feel their way into being, taking the shape they need. This is how my collaborative album with Nathanael Larochette, If the river stood still, came about. We played with putting "Mitosis" to music, and the rest stepped out gradually and naturally. Peeking around the corners, like it had always existed and we just had to find it.

I think every manuscript has a different life, but there are certainly lessons to be learned from each. I don't want to be an artist who gets stuck in my ways. I want to be open to what my work wants and needs. How to let it be alive and breathe and die. Then I want to do it again, but differently, every time.

What poets have influenced the ways in which you write?

My high school years were spent obsessively reading the canonical Modernists. I was/am particularly fond of Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway remains in my top 5 favourite books), H.D., Faulkner, Beckett, and Hemingway (I know I know). I tried to emulate stream of consciousness styles of writing when I was in high school, and that has a big impact on my writing process to this day. I think this practice is how I am able to sit and write without the burden of self criticism hindering my initial drafting. There is a lot of power in the free associations and links our minds create within the mundane. I was/am also very into magical realism and fabulism; Borges, Calvino, Marquez, Morrison, Rushdie, etc.

As far as contemporary poets go, I'd say my biggest influences, or those poets I keep coming back to, are Kaveh Akbar, Eleni Sikelianos, and Natalie Shapiro.

I read lots of short stories nowadays, and am blown away by the recent collections of Carmen Maria Machado and Anjali Sachdeva.     `

How important has mentorship been to your work? Is there anyone who specifically assisted your development as a writer?

My very first university writing course in 2007 was with Martha Greenwald. She reads and edits my poetry to this day. One day in class, a poem of mine titled "For Ernest" was ripped apart by my peers in the workshop (it was a poem re-imagining a Hemingway short story from the perspective of a minor cameo character). I was pretty upset. She pulled me aside after class and told me not to stop writing, that it was a good poem, that the class simply didn't get it, but she did, she saw me. I think about that every once in a while to this day, and I don't know if I ever told her what it did for me, so this is me, telling her now. Hi Martha. Thank you so much. Thank you for the time you've spent these past few years reading and giving me feedback on two full length manuscripts. Thank you thank you thank you!

Another shout out to Kiki Petrosino, who was my thesis advisor during my Master's. She was also the professor during my summer course in the UK. I drew a lot of inspiration from that course, and the time we spent working on my creative thesis. We've stayed in contact over the years, with my having published a poem in Transom Issue 11, the beautiful online journal of which she is co-editor with Dan Rosenberg. (http://www.transomjournal.com/) You should check her most recent collection, Witch Wife (Sarabande Books). It is haunting and gorgeously crafted.

What are you currently working on?

I am in the final stages of editing my debut full length manuscript. Details are still a secret for now, but more on that soon!

I have a lot of other manuscripts in the works or completed and in the editing stages:

- A full length manuscript that is proving a hard one to edit, as it is about some super raw and emotional events in my life.
- Poems about the body / impermanence / illness / stress / addiction (i.e. holes and what fills them)
- A manuscript of surrealist prose poems inspired by my dreams (some of which are in the newest/next issue of TRAIN)
- A manuscript of somewhat continuous narrative prose poems about reincarnation (sort of). This may actually be a short story collection or a novel written in prose poems but I am not entirely sure yet.
- A chapbook length work called "The Clearing" which I have been writing immediately following meditation. The Clearing is place of safety in my mind; a pine forest, an island, a sun and a moon, all of these things at once, and it evolves every time I visit it. My hope is that the clearing can be a meditative and calming place for others to slip into as well.

Can you name a poet you think should be receiving more attention?

I'd like to promote a small press rather than a poet here (although Mia Morgan is also a great poet!):

Coven Editions is a fairly new small press here in Ottawa making incredibly beautiful and handcrafted broadsides, chapbooks, and unique poem objects, and they definitely deserve more attention! They've published works by fantastic poets like Manahil Bandukwala, Frances Boyle, Ian Martin, rob mclennan, Dorian Bell, among others. Mia Morgan and Stephanie Meloche are doing gorgeous work. https://www.coveneditions.com/