A Summer Update: Kneeling in Our Name

A chapbook! A story! Other stuff!

Author

Conyer Clayton
August 17, 2024

Hi folks!

Thanks for subscribing! Happy you are here! 🙂 I promise I won’t spam you.

I have a couple of things to share!

  • Kneeling In Our Name, my latest and seventh solo chapbook, is now available to order from the amazing feminist small press, Gap Riot. I am really delighted this work found such a great home. Kneeling in Our Name is an attempt at conversation with my mother through the veil of death and time, about the interconnections in our experiences; a long and somewhat difficult (but I hope, also, beautiful) meditation on grief, illness, inheritance, silence, and love. The amazing cover (made by Dani Spinosa, how many times have cried about it?!?!?!) is collaged from letters, notes, and scraps written to/from me and my mom.

    The cover of Kneeling in Our Name (Gap Riot Press, 2024)



    It is the first in a series of three connected poems. More on that at a later date 😉 I’ll be launching it on August 20th in Ottawa alongside Anna Lee-Popham, Mahaila Smith, Manahil Bandukwala, and Margo LaPierre, who also have books or chapbooks out or forthcoming this year! Details on the poster below, and on the event page!

  • My first published piece of short fiction is out now with The Temz Review. “Your Whole Life, Swinging” is a little flash cosmic horror piece that I hope gets under your skin.

  • I have a poem in The League of Canadian Poet’s summer chapbook series, an anthology of poetry by trans, two-spirit, and nonbinary poets called Of our own making, edited by Tara Borin! My poem is called “Everyone’s a loser” (lol), and I am in great company alongside folks like Terrance Abrahams, Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi, Ellen Chang-Richardson, Helen Robertson, and Jenna Lyn Albert!

  • I have a short story forthcoming in the November issue of The Ex-Puritan. It is called “The Garden,” and I can’t wait to share it with the world.

  • I’ll be performing at Art Bar in Toronto on September 30th. Maybe see some Toronto area pals there!

What am I writing and reading?

I was lucky enough to get some grant funding for my fiction, so that has been my creative focus for the last while. I’ve been reading a lot of short story collections, novels-in-stories, and novels with more fragmentary narrative styles. Here are some recent favourite reads:

-They by Kay Dick

-Seven Empty Houses by Samantha Schweblin

-Good Citizens Need Not Fear by Maria Reva

-The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli

I have Mariana Enriquez’s new short story collection on preorder, and just got my preordered copy of an anthology of speculative fiction by Palestinian writers called Thyme Travellers, edited by Sonia Sulaiman. Excited to read!

One thing I have been thinking about recently as I move from poetry into fiction is the impetus behind that genre switch. Why now, after what feels like 10 jillion poetry manuscripts, am I coming back to writing fiction, the genre I actually started with in high school? Why in my mid-thirties, after two decades of focusing mainly on poetry?

I’ve been mulling this over quite a bit actually. I think poetry gave me an honest outlet to express aspects of myself I often hid or repressed. It helped look at parts of myself I didn’t want to admit were part of me for a very long time. However, over the last few years, I have worked at being more authentic (whatever that means) in my interactions with the world, and I feel like I am finally myself on the outside most of the time. Whether that is coming out as nonbinary, having better boundaries in all of my relationships, getting sober (i.e., having better boundaries with myself), etc. Obviously, this is a continual, forever work in progress.

Perhaps living in a way that is more true to myself has left me more room to explore beyond my internal life in my writing. I feel like I have more space to let other people into my creative worlds now, because a truer me is living in the real one.

I’ll leave you with something pretty; this nice lilac arrangement from sometime in May.

Until the next,

Conyer

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