Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Circadian
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 4/3/1983
WEBSITE: http://www.chelseyclammer.com/
CITY: Waco
STATE: TX
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2016029274
Descriptive conventions:
rda
LC classification: PS3603.L348
Personal name heading:
Clammer, Chelsey
Found in: Bodyhome, 2015: t.p. (Chelsey Clammer) p. 193 (MA, Women's
Studies, Loyal University, Chicago; currently enrolled
in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA program; managing
editor, nonfiction editor, columnist, workshop
instructor for The T.J. Eckleburg Review; Pushcart and
Best of the Net nominations, etc.)
================================================================================
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS AUTHORITIES
Library of Congress
101 Independence Ave., SE
Washington, DC 20540
Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov
PERSONAL
Born April 3, 1983.
EDUCATION:Southwestern University, B.A. (honors), 2005; Loyola University Chicago, M.A., 2009; the Rainer Writing Workshop, M.F.A., 2016.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, editor, and columnist. International Dairy Queen, Inc., staff writer, 2016–; Wow! Women on Writing, writing instructor, 2016–; Octane Press, copy editor, 2017–; Amplify Snakc Brands, Austin, TX, packaging editor, 2017–. Also worked as an essays editor for the Nervous Breakdown website; a reader for Creative Nonfiction magazine; and a managing editor, nonfiction editor, columnist, and workshop instructor for the Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review.
AWARDS:Pushcart Prize nomination; 2015 Red Hen Press Nonfiction Manuscript Award, for Circadian.
WRITINGS
Contributor to anthologies, including The V-Word, edited by Amber Keyser, Simon & Schuster, 2016; Queering Sexual Violence: Radical Voices from within the Anti-Violence Movement, edited by Jennifer Patterson and Reina Gusset, Riverdale Avenue Books, 2016; and Writing & Selling Short Stories & Personal Essays, edited by Windy Harris, Writer’s Digest, 2017. Contributor of essays, stories, and poetry to periodicals and online publications, including Electric Lit, Free State Review, Normal School, Black Warrior Review, the Nervous Breakdown, the Rumpus, McSweeney’s, Hobart, Essay Daily, the Review Review, Work Literary magazine and the Water~Stone Review.
SIDELIGHTS
Chelsey Clammer is a writer of both fiction and essays, as well as a freelance editor. She received her master’s degree in women’s studies and also a has a master’s degree in writing. Clammer has been writing ever since she started keeping a journal at the age of nine. “As I continued to journal all through college, I eventually started to concentrate on writing about things I thought others would enjoy reading,” Clammer told Ashley Reynolds in an interview for the Coachella Review website, going on to note: “I didn’t take any writing classes in high school or college, so I just blindly started to try [to] explain the events of my own life in writing. I kept at it, then started reading a lot of memoirs, and by the time I graduated from grad school, nonfiction started to feel so natural to me.”
BodyHome
Clammer is the author of two books of essays. Her debut essay collection, BodyHome, features essays about state of mind. In the essays, Clammer refers to her own body to explore a wide range of topics, from addiction and mental illness to assault and sexuality. For example, in the essay titled “Howls,” Clammer reflects on the death of her grandfather and the suicide of her father. In another essay titled “The Family Jewels,” she examines her family’s sexual history.
Clammer also reflects on memories and what they mean in her life. For example, in “Matchbooks, Pennies,” Clammer wonders why certain things remain in our memories, especially when they are burdensome, without understanding the reasons why. “Though Clammer’s subjects are serious, her writing is often playful and rebellious,” wrote Minerva Rising Press website contributor Lindsey Grudnicki, who also remarked: “With her authentic, no-nonsense voice at the heart of each essay, the collection reads as Clammer’s testimony to the fact that coming to terms with your own truth is a process that demands all of you.”
Circadian
Clammer’s next book of essays, Circadian, explores the areas of trauma, loss, and grief. In the process, Clammer presents various forms of the essays. “Clammer wields her unconventional essay forms—including numbered lists, diagrams of cell mitosis, email exchanges, outlines, and the strange alchemy of numerology—with a deft hand,” wrote Hippocampus magazine website contributor Cate Hodorowicz. A JMWW blog contributor remarked: “The form of the essays changes from one to the next, creating a book that confronts the reader as boldly as Clammer confronts her past.”
In an interview with Hobart website contributor Jac Jemc, Clammer commented on the various forms essays can take and her own approach to writing them. She told Jemc: “I love language and white space because it gives the reader room to explore. And that’s what I feel like is most astonishing about lyric essays—the reader doesn’t just read the work, she experiences it.” Clammer went on in the interview to remark: “I concentrate on a theme in each essay, but I let the language drive it because I feel like sound and pace are almost more important than story.”
An example of Clammer’s use of various essay forms includes the essay “Outline for Change,” which features mathematical formulas and a diagrammed sentence in a tale about her father’s alcoholism and the chronic pain he suffered. Another essay, “Trigger Happy,” includes interviews with writer Lucy M. Johnson, who experienced sexual violence in her life. The essay “Then She Flew Away” discusses the death of a teenager Clammer once mentored. Clammer also writes in depth about her own personal issues, from her own attempts at suicide to eating and bipolar disorders. “Each essay builds on the one before, demonstrating the author’s evolution as a writer and survivor,” wrote a reviewer for Publishers Weekly. A Kirkus Reviews contributor called Circadian “an affecting memoir emerges from a dozen circuitous, digressive essays.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 2017, review of Circadian: Essays.
Publishers Weekly, July 10, 2017, review of Circadian, p. 76.
ONLINE
Chelsey Clammer Website, http://www.chelseyclammer.com (May 28, 2018).
Coachella Review, http://thecoachellareview.com/ (May 28, 2018), Ashley Reynolds, “A Conversation with Chelsey Clammer.”
Geosi Reads, https://geosireads.wordpress.com/ (May 28, 2018), Geosi Gyasi, “Interview with Chelsey Clammer, Author of BodyHome.”
Hippocampus, https://www.hippocampusmagazine.com/ (April 2, 2018), Cate Hodorowicz, review of Circadian.
Hobart Online, http://www.hobartpulp.com/ (January 31, 2018), Jac Jemc, “But I Was Talking about Lightning: An Interview with Chelsey Clammer.”
JMWW, https://jmwwblog.wordpress.com/ (March 27, 2018), Amelia White, review of Circadian.
Minerva Rising Press Website, http://minervarising.com/ (April 1, 2015), Lindsey Grudnicki, review of BodyHome.
Nervous Breakdown, http://thenervousbreakdown.com/ (February 25, 2015), Chelsey Clammer, “Chelsey Clammer–the TNB Self-Interview.”
Poets & Writers Online, https://www.pw.org/ (May 28, 2018), “Chelsey Clammer,” author profile.
Psychology Today Online, https://www.psychologytoday.com/ (December 4, 2017), Ariel Gore, “What Does It Take to Transform Trauma Into Art?”
Chelsey Clammer is the author of BodyHome and Circadian, which was the winner of the 2015 Red Hen Press Nonfiction Manuscript Award. Her work has appeared in The Normal School, Black Warrior Review, The Rumpus, McSweeney’s, Hobart, Essay Daily, and The Water~Stone Review, among more than one hundred other publications. She is the Essays Editor for The Nervous Breakdown, a reader for Creative Nonfiction magazine, and an online creative writing instructor and columnist for WOW! Women On Writing. Chelsey received her MFA in Creative Writing from Rainier Writing Workshop. She is currently working on a collection of essays, Human Heartbeat Detected, that looks at the ways in which we are "human" to one another. Clammer is also currently writing a craft book about lyric essays, Sound It Out. She lives in Waco, TX.
(Sort of. She just moved to Wacky Waco from Round Rock—a town that’s been spread-eagling quite perpetually for the past decade, whose shopping centers keep breeding and every apartment complex is named after a type of nature that exists nowhere near it (e.g., Lakeside at La Frontera = Chelsey's apartment building that’s big enough to necessitate two, four-level parking garages and that has an exquisite view of the “lake,” which is really a manmade pond they plopped down a whopping two blocks west of Lowes, Kohl’s, Petco, T-Mobile, Marshalls, Hooters, Hobby Lobby, et al.), it’s a town whose parking lots keep seeping further into the fringes of a city that insists it’s staying weird, regardless of the normative urban sprawl trespassing on its eccentricity. Either way, Chelsey finally feels at home.)
Winner of the Red Hen Press Nonfiction Award
A lyric, cyclical and inventive form of narrative, Circadian explores the intersection of objectivity and the poetics of our bodies.
Books
BodyHome, Hopewell Publications (2015)
Circadian, Red Hen Press (Fall 2017)
Anthologies
"A Message for Writers from an Editor: We Love You," Writing & Selling Short Stories & Personal Essays. Ed. Windy Harris. Writer's Digest, 2017.
“Hands.” Queering Sexual Violence. 2016.
"Ear Muffs for Muff Diving," The V-Word, Edited by Amber Keyser, Simon & Schuster, 2016.
Lyric/Hybrid Essays
"Which Another Way of Saying Decay." The Missing Slate. December 2017.
"Heartbeat Detected." The Rumpus. October 2017.
"The Effects of Silence: Unheard Outcries of Child Abuse." The Nervous Breakdown. October 2017.
"The (In)voice of God." Crab Fat Magazine. July 2017.
"It's a Long Story." The Normal School. Spring 2017.
"Then She Flew Away." (Reprint) One Person's Trash. May 2017.
"Collection," Hobart, November 2016.
"Circadian," Another Chicago Magazine, Summer 2016.
"An Editor's Reference List for Positive Feedback," McSweeney's, June 2016.
"Two Words," Word Riot, June 2016.
"A Striking Resemblance," The Fem, March 2016.
"Outline for Change." Green Mountains Review, Fall 2015, Vol. 28 No. 2.
"Skin and Kin." Tikkun Magazine. January 2016.
"Horizon-ed." Room Magazine. Winter 2015.
"Twenty-six Junctures of How I am a Part of You." Best New Writing. Fall 2015. ***Winner of the Eric Hoffer Prose Award***
"Lying In the Lyric." Essay Daily, August 2015.
"Mother Tongue." Black Warrior Review, April 2015. ***2nd Place for the 2014 Nonfiction Contest***
"Body of Work, On Structure Courting Content." Essay Daily, March 2015.
"Dear You." Atticus Review. February 2015.
"A Striking Resemblance." Water~Stone Review, November 2014. ***Honorable Mention for the 2014 Judith Kitchen Nonfiction Contest***
"I could title this wavering." Labletter. February 2015
"An Index for Bi the Book: How to Become Bisexual in Less than a Month." The Drunken Odyssey, November 2014.
"10 Warning Letters that Could Have Helped My College GPA." The Drunken Odyssey, October 2014.
"Our Father." Stoneslide Corrective. October 2014.
"Lil' Lesbo-Festo: A Misogynist Rapper Helps to Write a Womanifesto." Crab Fat Literary Magazine, October 2014.
"Trigger Warnings." Essay Daily. July 2014
"On Three." New Delta Review. May 2014
"The Howls of Our Homes." Owen Wister. May 2014
"One Time at the Village Inn." Star 82 Review. March 2014
"Eat Me, I'm Organic." The Nervous Breakdown. February 2014
"The Learning Curve." Gravel. August 2013
"Echo." Two Hawks Quarterly. June 2013
"Restricted." Pithead Chapel. May 2013
“Seven.” The Dying Goose. March 2013
"Diving In." Eunoia Review. April 2013
“Sensed.” The Doctor T.J. Eckleberg Review. Fall 2012
“I Have Been Thinking About.” Cobalt. Fall 2012. Winner for the 2012 Nonfiction Contest
“Objects of Desire.” Red Fez Magazine. August 2012
“Forty-Two Blue Fires Burning.” The Writing Disorder. Fall 2012
“Triptych of a White Girl with Dreadlocks.” Kansas City Voices. Summer 2012
“On Grief.” Flagler Review. Spring 2012
“Bodyhome.” Revolution House. Spring 2012. Winner for the Editor's Pick, Nonfiction, 2012
“Story of BodyHome.” Stone Highway Review. May/June 2012
“Grasp.” Spittoon. Spring 2012
“Objects of Desire.” THIS Literary Magazine. January 2012
Essays
"Well that was Awkward as Fuck." The Flexible Persona. September 2017.
"Your Words. Not His." Breathe Free Press. May 2017.
"The V-Word Blog: Plot Twist," Riveted, March 2016.
"I Live In a Town." The Doctor TJ Eckleburg Review. Fall 2015.
"Not Kidding." Slink Chunk Press. August, 2015.
"What It's Like to Love Someone." Dirty Chai. May 2015.
"Swerve." Crack the Spine, March 2015.
"The Guide to Kissing Like a Butterfly." Eunoia Review, March 2015.
"Herted Skies." Hamilton Stone Review, March 2015.
"Coupons." Free State Review, Spring 2014
"Same/Different." Work Literary Magazine, July 2014
"Matchbooks, Pennies." The Meadow, Summer 2014
"Overalls." Progenitor. Forthcoming, May 2014
"That's Dirty." Whistle Fire. May 2014
"Curtains." Seltzer. April 2014
"What You Finally Attend To." Cobalt Review. March 2014
"Joe." Twenty-Four Hours Online. March 2014
"Write Essay Done." Crack the Spine. September 2013
“Dinner Time.” Sugar Mule. August, 2013
"The Family Jewels." Cliterature. June 2013
"Autopsy Report." Temenos. June 2013.
"Reading Into the Madness." (Podcast) The Drunken Odyssey with John King. May 2013
"Shirley?" bioStories. May 2013
"Linda." Embodied Effigies. Featured Writing, March 2013
"Roll." Red Fez. February 2013
"Eyes of the Beholder." MsFit Mag. April 2013
"In the Ward." Trans Lit Mag. January 2013
"Running FAQ." Ms. Fit Magazine. January 2013
"Your Lesbian Haircut." The Bookends Review. January 2013
"Sarah." The Coachella Review. January 2013
"Shoal Creek Carrie." Northwind Magazine. January 2013
“Betty Ann.” Meat for Tea. December 2012
“Waking Up to It.” Subliminal Interiors. Winter 2012
"Jen." Newtown Literary Journal. Winter 2012
“Writing Blind.” Vine Leaves. Fall 2012
“Infestation.” Museum of Americana. Fall 2012
“Cut.” The Rumpus. Fall 2012
“Her Hands.” The Rusty Nail. Fall 2012
“Man in the Basement.” This Great Society. Fall 2012
“Inkling.” The Atticus Review. August 2012
“Unnoticed.” Epiphany. August 2012
“Pounce.” Off the Rocks. Summer 2012
“Peach.” The Citron Review. June 2012
“Starving to Write.” ninePatch, Fall 2012
“Sabrina.” The Coachella Review. Summer 2012
“Hands.” SN Review. Spring 2012
“Scaffolding.” The Prompt. Spring 2012
“On Ecstasy.” Sleet. Spring 2012
“Stature of Her Story.” Emerge Literary Journal. Winter 2012
Craft Essays & Submission Column
"Submissions Flowchart." Wow! Women on Writing. November 2017.
"Fight Like a Writer." Wow! Women on Writing. September 2017.
"Craftology." Tishman Review. Summer 2017.
"Writing Contests: You Have Nothing to Lose." Wow! Women on Writing. July 2017.
"Breathe and Proceed: Poet Tammy Robacker on How to Submit the Hard Stuff." WOW! Women on Writing. June 2017.
"How to Hold Your Horses." WOW! Women on Writing. May 2017.
"Caring About Cover Letters." Wow! Women on Writing. April 2017.
"Find or Fling?" WOW! Women on Writing. March 2017.
"Rejection Acceptance." WOW! Women on Writing. February 2017.
"Hard-Working Writer Seeks Widely Read Journal." WOW! Women on Writing. January 2017.
"Flowchart for Fixing an Awkward Sentence." Passages North, January 2017.
"What My Submissions Spreadsheet Teaches Me." WOW! Women on Writing. December 2016.
"Submit 'Til You Make It." WOW! Women on Writing. November 2016.
"The Business of Publishing." Microcosm blog, January 2016.
"Respect the Comma-Maker." The Review Review, August, 2015.
"A Message for Writers from Editors: We Love You." The Review Review. May 2015.
"On Revision: Cut It Out." www.behindtheprose.com. April 2015.
"Top 5 Questions to Bring Out an Editor's Sassy Side." The Review Review. January 2015
"A Call to Get Organized!" The Review Review. January 2015
"Sound It Out." The Review Review. February 2015.
Fiction
"Vaginatarian." Quaint Magazine. August 2014
"ILL." Lamp Lit Underground. August 2014
"Liked." Lamp Lit Underground. August 2014
"Shape Up." Sterling Magazine. Summer 2014
"Nudge." (And an interview at the end!). Crossed Out Magazine. February 2014
"Lucky." The Coe Review. July 2013
"Clings." Crossed-Out Magazine. June 2013
"The Acceptance Speech." Foliate Oak Literary Magazine. January 2013
Poetry
"Attempt." One Throne Magazine. December 2014.
"Kitchen." Milk Sugar Literary Magazine. August 2013
Reviews
Review of Samanta Schweblin's Fever Dream, The Rumpus. March 2017
Review of Jade Sharma's Problems, The Rumpus, June 2016.
Review of Alison Hawnthorne Deming's Zoologies, Newfound, March 2016.
Review of Story Club. The Review Review, June 2015
Review of Sheilds & Shards & Stitches & Songs, Word Riot, June 2015
Review of The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far, Electric Literature, June 2015
Review of Able Muse, The Review Review, April 2015
Review of The Collagist, The Review Review, January 2015
Review of House of Coates, Electric Lit, December 2014
Review of Flag + Void, The Review Review, November 2014
Review of Storm Cellar. The Review Review, October 2014
Review of The Other Side. Electric Lit, October 2014
Review of Ninth Letter, 11.1. The Review Review. July 2014
Review of Salt Hill Journal #32. The Review Review. May 2014
Critique of Dinah Lenney's The Object Parade. The Nervous Breakdown. May 2014
Critique of Michelle Orange's This is Running for Your Life. Cigale Lit Magazine. April 2014
Review of Experimental Fiction Journal. The Review Review. April 2014
Critique of Thalia Field's Bird Lovers, Backyard. Gazing Grain Press. April 2014
Photography
"Wish I Was Somewhere" and "Flower," Gravel. March 2015.
"Rugged." OVS Magazine. Winter 2013
About Chelsey Clammer
Work
Amplify Snack Brands
Packaging editor · April 28, 2017 to present · Austin, Texas
Octane Press
Copy Editor · March 2017 to present
WOW! Women On Writing
Writing Instructor · June 2016 to present
International Dairy Queen Inc.
Staff writer · April 18, 2016 to present
Education
Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University
Class of 2016 · MFA · Nonfiction Writing · Lyric Essays · Badassery · Tacoma, Washington
Writers write.
Loyola University Chicago
Class of 2009 · MA · Women's studies · Chicago, Illinois
Southwestern University
Class of 2005 · BA (Hons) · Feminist Studies · English language · Georgetown, Texas
Round Rock High School
Class of 2001 · Round Rock, Texas
Current City and Hometown
Waco, Texas
Current city
Laramie, Wyoming
Hometown
Other Places Lived
Denver, Colorado
Moved on May 1, 2012
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Moved in 2011
Austin, Texas
Moved in 1996
Tracy, California
Moved in 1994
Elizabeth, Colorado
Moved in 1988
Laramie, Wyoming
Moved in 1983
About Chelsey
Chelsey Clammer is the author of BodyHome and winner of the 2015 Red Hen Press Nonfiction Manuscript Award for her essay collection, Circadian. She has been published in The Rumpus, Hobart, McSweeney’s, and Black Warrior Review among others. She is the Essays Editor for The Nervous Breakdown and a volunteer reader for Creative Nonfiction. She teaches creative writing online with WOW! Women on Writing, and received her MFA from Rainier Writing Workshop. www.chelseyclammer.com.
Be her patron:
www.patreon.com/chelseyclammer
Favorite Quotes
We will not live to settle for less, we have dreamed of this all of our lives. ~Adrienne Rich
Favorites
Music
[Lilith Fair]
Lilith Fair
Books
[AM/PM]
AM/PM
Movies
[Mr. Fish: Cartooning From The Deep End]
Mr. Fish: Cartooning From The Deep End
Television
[Veronica Mars]
Veronica Mars
A Conversation with Chelsey Clammer
By Ashley Reynolds
Chelsey Clammer is a fun and edgy writer who has the ability to add brash and humor to serious life subjects. Her story "Sarah" is the second story that we've published in The Coachella Review. She impressed us with writing so much that I had to sit down and chat with her about her life as a nonfiction writer. She received her MA in Women's Studies from Loyola University Chicago. In addition to The Coachella Review, she has been published in THIS, The Rumpus, Atticus Review, Sleet, and many others. She also manages her own freelance company at www.chelseyclammer.com. In the interview, we talk about how she writes her unusual life story to inspire women to accept themselves for who they truly are.
How did you get into writing nonfiction?
I was have been writing in a journal ever since I was nine. The entries were not fantastic or anything, but I jotted down what I did that day and what I was going to do the next day. Excerpt from diary when I was nine, May 3, 1992: "I went to school today. Mom made me eggs for dinner. I think Brandon likes me. I really, really like him. Oh! And I could smell my armpits today. I'm going to be a woman soon!" In high school, I wrote highly emotional poetry, as most hormonal teens do. I will not torture you with an excerpt of it, but poetry didn't feel like it came naturally to me, so I stuck with my journal. As I continued to journal all through college, I eventually started to concentrate on writing about things I thought others would enjoy reading. My junior year of college I attempted writing a novel about a drunk lesbian in college, and I was a drunk lesbian in college when I wrote it. I got through the first draft, and realized I was just trying to write about my life. I didn't take any writing classes in high school or college, so I just blindly started to try and explain the events of my own life in writing. I kept at it, then started reading a lot of memoirs, and by the time I graduated from grad school, nonfiction started to feel so natural to me. It was the type of writing in which I could best describe myself, and so I really started to focus on it.
My favorite author is Marya Hornbacher (author of Madness and Wasted), and I had a chance to do an independent study with her one winter. And although I wasn't even enrolled in college when I saw online that she was about to start teaching in Chicago, I contacted her to see if I could sit in on the class. The class was full, so she offered to do an independent study with me. By the time I started working with Marya, I had enough writing practice due to all of my journalling, that I was at the point where I was ready to learn the craft of writing, to turn the memories from my journals into essays and eventually a memoir. Marya helped to teach me craft techniques, to help me more eloquently express what it was I was trying to get at, and she encouraged me to always stick with it, to continue to tell my stories. Telling my own stories feels natural to me, and so I go with it.
Can you explain what the phrase "finding the concept of home in my body" means?
When I was a kid my family moved around every three years or so following the business career of my father. I never had a physical place that I could really claim as my home. For instance, when I visited my parents during breaks from college, it was at a different home than the ones I grew up in, and so it never really felt like I was "coming home." After I graduated from grad school in Chicago, I had a friend who was living in Minneapolis, and I would visit her every three weeks or so. I slept on her couch the whole time I was there, and I started to realize that I had a lot of moments in my life in which I slept on other people's couches. I always felt comfortable in these spaces that were not mine, and I couldn't explain why.
But the more I visited Minneapolis, the more I started to think that if my idea of home—a cozy, welcoming place you can always return to—was in my body, was in fact my body itself, then I would always be at home in the world, that I would always be carrying my home with me. Through writing many essays I have tried to explore this concept. I have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, an eating disorder, and PTSD. I started to ask myself, "how can I feel at home in a body that has felt so traumatized, a body in which my mind has felt unstable, and a body I have tried to do away with by not eating?" I found that through my recovery from these various disorders, my body had always been there for me, waiting for me to come back to it no matter how much I tried to push it away. So the body is a type of home, a place that will always be there for us, a place we can always return to, and a place that will always welcome us back, because it is a space that feels safe and cozy inside of it.
I have a tattoo of the word "home" on my arm to remind me that my home is always with me.
You have an MA in women's studies. How does that specific point of view affect your writing?
For my thesis I wrote about how the body can help to express our mental states, how our different emotions speak through the body. I also started to look at how bodywork—such as yoga, or Alexander Technique—can help us to better express what is going on in our minds. I have always been interested in the body, and through Women's Studies I started to read disability theory. It was these two fields of study that have helped me to express what my body means to me—both theoretically and emotionally—which is what most of my writing is about.
Also, women's studies gave me the opportunity to incorporate my own stories with the academic writing I was doing. I was allowed to ask how my own life had been affected by race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. Unlike other fields of study, women's studies encouraged me to bring this personal point of view into my writing. I continue to do that as I write about my body, as I write about what my body and my relationships mean in relation to some of the larger topics of life.
Through women's studies, I also found that there is power in a woman—or any minority in this society—telling her story. To speak out about what has pissed her off or tried to cut her down is a very radical thing. I take this idea with me into all of my writing, to give my stories a voice, to finally express to the world what I have experienced—whether that be oppression or amazing connections I have made with different women.
As a nonfiction writer, do you ever find it difficult to open yourself up to vulnerability? If so, how are you able to get past it?
One of the best writing practices I have ever done is to make a list of the most embarrassing things that have ever happened to me, the things that I would NEVER write about. Then I wrote about them. Doing this challenged me to get past what I thought I could not write about because I was so vulnerable to those stories. The practice encouraged me to just say it—to finally get those words and events that I had been hiding from the world out of me. I have had numerous friends tell me that they know more about me from reading my essays than from actual interactions we have shared.
At first I would try to put humor into all of my work, or to skim the surface of the topics that felt too hard, too exposing, but writing that skims the surface is never as enjoyable to read because it doesn't really bring you into the story. I have a writing friend who tells all of her students that when they write they need to just, "Roll up your sleeves and dive in." This is how I approach all of my writing. Just dive into it, get everything out of me. And yes, I feel embarrassed or shy after I put a very vulnerable piece of writing out there (such as the "Sarah" piece about bulimia, or a piece I wrote about my adventures in masturbation called "Objects of Desire"), but what keeps me going is knowing that I am putting words to experiences that other people are having, that I'm speaking up about cutting or bulimia or mental illness or even that I am a runner and a smoker, and people are reading it, knowing that they, too, can tell their own stories.
A lot of people ask me what I hope for readers to get out of my writing, or why I would write about such vulnerable things. I always say that I write about such personal things in order to hopefully inspire someone else to share their own story.
You are very involved with reviews and blogs. In what ways do social media help or hinder you as a writer?
Writing a weekly humor column for The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg review has really helped me to learn how to write short, humor pieces. Though at first I had doubts that I could do it. During the time when the editor approached me about writing the weekly humor column, I was in the throws of trying to write very lyrical and emotional writing—quiet essays that felt more like reading poetry than nonfiction. I have always thought that when I try to write humor, it sounds like I'm pushing it too hard, that I'm not allowing the reader to make her own connections with the events.
Doing the weekly humor column has really made me start to trust myself and my readers. That I can put a really embarrassing event on the page, or a weird experience I have had, and that I can play with it, can use a quirky voice and outlandish language in order to write it, and that I can just trust that the readers will get the humor of it. It is also great that I have to push myself to write a new short essay every week. From that, I have learned to trust my brain, to just keep writing because something will come of it eventually.
On the other hand, once I get into the flow of the kind of witty writing I do for Eckleburg, I have sometimes found it hard to get back into the rhythm of the lyrical and poetic voice I yearn to use for my essays. It's a hard transition, and sometimes I just have to tell myself to take a break from trying to come up with Eckleburg columns, and work more on the lyrical writing. With that practice, I have come to learn that whether what I'm writing about is interesting or not is not the point. The point is to keep pushing myself to write for a couple of hours every day, to use that lyrical voice in order to get into the habit of it, to make it feel more natural again.
Writing for a lot of blogs and journals is also wonderful, because I get to meet so many interesting writers and editors. And while I have never met any of them face-to-face, I at least know there are other writers and editors out there who are working towards similar goals as I am. It helps me to not feel as lonely in my writing.
Aside from the reviews and blogs that you do, have you ever dabbled in other writing genres? If so, how was it different from writing nonfiction?
I've written exactly one short story. And I wrote one fiction book that I will never do anything with, because I wrote it so long ago and the writing is terrible. Sometimes I wished that I did write more fiction, because more than a dozen times a day I stare at my notebook and say to myself, "I have nothing to write about. I've written about everything in my life already." I get stuck trying to find new things to write about. Thus, I want to try and write fiction in order to expand the topics I think I can write about. I'm still trying to get the hang of fiction, though. For some reason it's hard for me to come up with things that did not happen to me. The one short fiction piece I wrote is this really absurd and quirky story about a woman who is eating a pair of her underwear in public. When I write fiction, I feel like I have to make the events so extreme from my own life in order to not mix fiction with nonfiction.
I have also written a few poems. Really, though, they're pieces I originally wrote as short lyrical essays, then ending up changing the lining and spacing of them to make them into poems.
I have no idea how to write plays. Dialogue can be really challenging for me, so I've never even wanted to attempt that genre. It scares me.
Since you obviously have a very full plate, how are you able to manage your time with all of your projects?
I make writing my full-time career, or at least I view it in this way. Very rarely do I get paid for my writing, so I always refer to it as "the career that doesn't pay." But by approaching it as a career, I make sure that I write for at least forty hours a week, which sounds like a lot, but if you prioritize it, then it is easy to do. Not everything I write has to be interesting or "good," because writing is all about practice. It always astonishes me how I will write and write and write about random little things for weeks, then suddenly one day I will tap into an idea for an essay. So it is imperative that I give myself the time to meander around my thoughts for hours, days, weeks even. And while usually nothing comes out of me for days at a time, suddenly I'll hit a memory and an essay will come flooding out of me in one day. The essays can only come out of me if I write, if I make time for myself to practice writing daily.
All of this is to say that I make writing the most important thing in my life. I write first thing when I wake up. I write whenever I can during the day. And I write for a few hours before I go to sleep. Yes, my brain eventually starts to knot up and I have a hard time getting words out of me, but I keep pushing myself, keep going after it. A writer friend once told me that writing is like riding a bike, "You'll never forget how to write, but if you don't do it often you'll get rusty and your writing muscles will be limp." I agree with this. Writing is a sport. You have to practice it in order to be conditioned for it.
Thus, if you make writing the most important thing in your life, then you will find that you have tons of time to write.
Also, I got sober. Instead of sitting in bars for at least four hours every night, I now have all of this free time to write.
You have a couple of projects at the publishers now. Can you explain a little bit of what the projects are?
I have a collection of essays called BodyHome. It started out as a collection consisting of 260 pages, but I dwindled it down to 150. These essays all approach the idea of finding the concept of home in the body. The title essay (which won Revolution House's Editor's Pick Award for 2012) concentrates on understanding how I have tried to push my body away from me because of the trauma it had experienced, but how I started to accept my body as a safe space, as a home. There's a wide range of topics in the collection that all wrestle with this concept, such as: an essay about my sexuality and my dreadlocks, one about using the five senses in order to pinpoint memories that made me feel like I was growing into a woman, one about experiencing grief in the body, another one about sexuality and friendship ("Sabrina" which was published in The Coachella Review in the fall of 2012), and one about bisexuality ("I Have Been Thinking About" which won the Editor's Pick Award 2012 from Cobalt).
I have another collection of essays called There is Nothing Else to See Here, which consists of about 15 essays that move beyond the surface of a situation, and zooms in on specific moments. In other words, just when I thought there was nothing else to say about some topic, I dive into it even further, look at the small details that profoundly affect the larger situation, such as what my mother's hands did after she found my father dead in their bedroom. By zooming in on the smooth motions of her hands as she discovered my father's body I was better able to understand her quiet, calm response to the huge life-changing event of my father's death.
Currently, I am tinkering around with a bunch of essays about the women in my life. My hopes are to one day have a book about how women have influenced my life.
Finally, I just wrote a memoir this summer about mental illness and sexuality. I have always dated women, though whenever I started to get manic, I would desire penetrative sex with men. This memoir, titled Again, looks at how I always felt that my sexuality was being dragged around by my mental states. Then, a year after I finally got steady in my mind with medication and therapy, I started dating a man and wondered if I was going manic again because of this shift in my sexuality. The book weaves the themes of addiction, self-mutilation, eating disorders, and bipolar disorder with different facets of my sexuality.
All of these books are under consideration at publishers.
Fingers crossed.
January 31, 2018 Interview
But I Was Talking About Lightning: An Interview with Chelsey Clammer
Jac Jemc
But I Was Talking About Lightning: An Interview with Chelsey Clammer photo
Chelsey Clammer is the author of BodyHome and winner of the 2015 Red Hen Press Nonfiction Manuscript Award for her essay collection, Circadian (October 2017). She has been published in The Rumpus, Hobart, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Normal School and Black Warrior Review among others. She is the Essays Editor for The Nervous Breakdown and teaches creative writing online with WOW! Women on Writing. Chelsey received her MFA from Rainier Writing Workshop.
But I know Chelsey from bookselling. We worked together in the late aughts at Women & Children First in Chicago, and I can honestly say it's my favorite job I've ever had. The store wasn't perfect, but it was a lovely little microcosm of people striving to do better: employees, volunteers, customers, and visiting authors. Chelsey was always challenging and generous as a coworker, and it feels totally logical yet thrilling to get to read her books now, and see all of that brilliance I encountered on a daily basis, spun into the challenging and generous essays in her newest collection, Circadian.
Jac Jemc: One of my favorite things about essays are the opportunity they provide to be discursive. Essays seem to encourage digression and tangents, and you do such a great job of managing that - letting these essays wander, but, by the end, justifying that wandering and all of the places you arrived in the process. What does that look like in the actual drafting and revision process?
Chelsey Clammer: This collection was a blast to write, because I felt like I was just following the writing as I wrote it. I’d start with a very vague idea and just go from there. For instance, I had the line “But I was talking about lightning” in my head for the first line of an essay, but I had no idea what that essay was about. So I started to write about lightning and do some Wikipedia-ing, and eventually the idea of looking at trauma and human relationships through the metaphor of lightning started to emerge. From there, I just followed my brain around as the essay started to form.
Usually, my writing process is that I’ll find a word, thought, or concept interesting, and I’ll write about it for 10 minutes (by hand—I have to write everything by hand first or else I don’t feel connected to it). Then, if I find what I wrote to maybe be interesting, I’ll type it up and save it. From there, a ton of little bits of writing start to come together to form an essay. Which also means that there are tons of bits of writing that could be cool tangents, but didn’t totally fit in the essay by the time I have a solid first draft. So, a lot gets cut out of the essays. I’ll take what didn’t get cut and write and explore and then revise the hell out of everything dozens of times. Lately, I’ve started to record myself reading what I think is the final draft. When I listen to it, I’ll make notes about sound and if any line of thought feels too random and awkward to really fit in with the rest of the essay. Then, it’s back to revising the hell out of it before I send it off into the world!
JJ: When you were working on these essays, did you have the idea for this collection in mind? They work so well together as a whole, I imagine there had to be some that didn't make the cut because they felt too far afield from the rest? I want to hear about those.
CC: I didn’t have any theme in mind as I started writing, but I did start to notice that I was loving the practice of doing some cursory research on something to use as a way to write about a personal story of my life. I think the research helped to give me a way to think about my experiences differently. As I started writing these “informed-by-other-stuff” essays, I also saw that they were in some way circling back on themselves—whether in theme, image, or phrase. By the time I wrote the title essay, I was starting to really get in the groove of research-write-revise-circle back. The original manuscript did not have “Re: Collection” in it (the essay you guys published called “Collection”). Red Hen Press had asked me to write one more essay about my father that would give the collection a more complete feel to it. I think that essay really brings everything together.
There was only one essay that didn’t make the cut—“Graftology.” (The Tishman Review published it a few years ago and it will be in my next collection I’m working on. More on that in a bit.) By the time I had 7 of the 12 essays that ended up in the collection, I knew what book I was writing and was able to write the remaining essays in that form and style, and to go for some of the themes I knew I wanted to be more enhanced in the collection. My editor with Red Hen, Keaton Maddox, did such a great job helping me to revise some of the essays so that they started to speak more to one another as a complete collection. I’m super-appreciative for all of the hard work he put into the manuscript!
Interesting side note: When I had what I considered a final draft ofCircadian, I gave it to a writer mentor of sorts to read. She read it and said that it was in NO WAY a book, and that I had a lot of work to do if I wanted to turn it into a book. I disagreed and submitted THE EXACT SAME MANUSCRIPT to the Red Hen Press 2015 Nonfiction Manuscript Award. It won. So, basically, the entire book was “cut” by a writing mentor. I’m glad I did not agree with that.
JJ: When I've worked on personal essays of my own, I find myself returning to many of the same events and obsessions, and then I think, "I can't write about that again. I need to live more life or get a different distance from what I've lived to write nonfiction again." I love the way you reframe and revisit events throughout this book. It really woke me up to thinking about how it's totally worthy and valid to stay stuck on what's occupying your mind and to keep turning it over. Was it a process for you (like me) to come to this mindset or was it always obvious to you?
CC: When I first started writing back in 2011, I kept telling myself, “Chelsey, you can’t keep writing about your dad. You’ve already written an essay about your dad.” But then I realized that, at least for my writing, I try to explore different events rather than write about them, if that makes sense. So while there are a few main experiences in my life that I obsessively write about (suicidal father, sexual assault, alcoholism, mental illness), I finally realized that I could write about the same experience over and over again as long as I was exploring a different aspect of the event each time. I mean, “Outline for Change” is an essay where the form is what creates the “purpose” of it—putting a chaotic situation into a very structured and organized format. A lot of what I write about in that essay is either mentioned in or looked at in other essays in Circadian as well as in my first collection, BodyHome. But it’s the form and the way I approach those instances that make each essay different. So yeah, I’m writing about the same shit over and over again, but each time that I write about it, it becomes something different.
JJ: Many of these essays felt really hard to read because we knew each other quite well when some of this was happening, and I found myself having to put the book down and take a break. Clearly I wasn't experiencing an iota of what you were, but I remember feeling so helpless and angry. In the essay "Trigger Happy" you make a case for people setting their own boundaries, but for the value that can be found in pushing ourselves through the content that causes us discomfort. Are there books you've had to give up on because it felt like too much?
CC: Can I just say that I love the fact that I’ve known you for so long?!? One of my favorite moments in life is when you were sitting at the computer near the front counter and you said, “Oh my gosh. My novel just got accepted for publication. Sorry that I’m checking my personal email at work.” It was such a calm and funny moment, and when I think about it now, I’m just like, “OH MY GOD I WITNESSED THE MOMENT YOUR NOVEL GOT ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION AND YOU WERE SO THRILLED YET ALSO CALM ABOUT IT THAT YOU EVEN APOLOGIZED!” (I’m laughing my ass off right now as I write this, btw.)
I don’t think I’ve ever given up completely on a book because it was too hard to read, but I have definitely had books that took me months to get through because it was too intense. Madness by Marya Hornbacher, for example, was a book that took me a year to read. I identified with what she was writing about SO MUCH that it was hard to read. It was like looking in a mirror, and because I was still drinking at the time that I first read that book, it was a mirror I didn’t want to look into. Now, whenever I sit down to revisit that memoir, I usually read it in one night. I completely engulf it because now Marya’s work speaks to me in a way that I LOVE to hear.
JJ: There are moments in these essays where the language and images take over and the essays seem to let logic be dictated by the words themselves, versus, say, the language being manipulated toward getting a fully formulated thought across. Do you know what I'm talking about? Those sorts of moves assume and trust the reader to make those leaps with you as the writer, but the ways readers might fill in those gaps (those famous white spaces of the lyric essay, too) might not match what you intend. What are you feelings on that space and its malleability?
CC: I love language and white space because it gives the reader room to explore. And that’s what I feel like is most astonishing about lyric essays—the reader doesn’t just read the work, she experiences it. I think reading authors like Lia Purpura, Ander Monson, Julie Marie Wade, and Maggie Nelson taught me that form and language can be, in and of themselves, what an essay is about. I love Jorie Graham’s poetry, but honestly I never have a clue what the hell she’s talking about. It’s the bits of phrases and the sound of her work that makes me fall in love with it. So, I concentrate on a theme in each essay, but I let the language drive it because I feel like sound and pace are almost more important than story. Every reader is going to interpret a piece of writing in a different way because of their own past experiences. So for my writing, I don’t want to tell the reader a story—I want to give her language to influence the way she experiences my essays which, I hope, inspires her to explore her own experiences. Maggie’s book Bluets does this to me—every time I read that book it takes on a different meaning. So that’s the type of experience that I hope to give my readers.
JJ: What's next?
CC: I have a collection of essays I’m revising right now and working on a few more essays to go into it. It’s called Human Heartbeat Detected and looks at the ways in which we are “human” to one another. I also have a craft book called Sound It Out that I’m working on. It has a lot of craft essays in it that are written in a lyric essay sort of way, plus a long and more academic essay on form and structure. It also has a section that consists of all the columns I’ve written for WOW! Women on Writing that are about the submissions process. Finally, I started writing an essay last year that was about my grandmother, swans, marriage, and the healing power of silence. Well, since the time I started that essay, my grandmother died and I got a divorce. That essay is now turning into a book.
Chelsey Clammer — The TNB Self-Interview
By Chelsey Clammer
February 25, 2015
Self-Interview
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So what, exactly, does “BodyHome” mean?
BodyHome means that our bodies are a type of home—that safe space we return to again and again in order to know who we are and who we have been. I’ve moved around a lot in my life and don’t have a “childhood home” to return to, so I look for my home in my body. It’s like if you can feel at home in your body, then you can feel at home wherever you are. Also, in the same way that an actual house can hold all of those memories, the body’s doing that, too. Right now. You’re breathing and it’s moving and when things happen to you—good or bad—your body will remember them and eventually start to talk about the memories through movements and gestures. In my writing, I’m always questioning “Where is the body in this essay?” It’s like our bodies are a great foundation and structure for spiritual and narrative growth—even if we’re just a little weed pushing itself up between a crack in a sidewalk in order to get some necessary sun, we’re keeping at it. Also, fun metaphors/comparisons: skeleton (of body, of house—our structure), insulation (does that word make me look fat?), plumbing (I almost pissed myself!).
BodyHome CoverWhat influenced your brain to think in this way?
I’ve been obsessed with the body for, well, for forever. I started out pre-med in college because I liked thinking about the body. I had to take Chemistry, though, and I don’t like chemistry (perhaps hate is the better word to use here. Or despise? Makes me want to perform a successful suicide, because ohgodkillmbeforethenexttest) I switched my major to English. Within the next semester, I realized that every lit class I was taking was cross-referenced with Feminist Studies. Hello major #2. Through my degrees in Feminist Studies and Women’s Studies (yes, there’s a difference), I was able to really look at the body—not the gooey stuff inside us, but the visible skin and our movements that convey the ways in which we live and relate to the world. I always loved the body, but it took me a few years to realize it wasn’t the anatomical body I was intrigued by, but what those bodies meant in our society. Also, after I was assaulted in my mid-twenties I felt my body shut down. Withdraw from the world. It felt like a type of silence, and the comfort of my bodyhome felt torn out of me. And yet I proceeded with life because I didn’t know what else to do. I needed to re-build. Eventually, I started to learn how to listen to my body in order to see how I felt in the world. It’s about survival, it’s about how there’s always a conversation going on even when everyone is silent. I read your body, you read mine, and we become acquainted with the sheaves of each other’s skins. Our stories.
What’s with all the lists in it?
-Variety
-Getting to the point
-As in, succinct
-Letting words stand on their own
-Move the reader along
-Think about the different and inventive ways we can tell and listen to a narrative
-I like lists. They’re easy to understand
Some of the essays are wicked funny and some are terribly sad (in a good way). How many writing voices do you have and which one feels most natural?
Oh damn—I’m about to get multi-personality-ed on myself. Here we go: I find myself going back and forth between two different voices because that’s how my brain works. Bitchy yet caring. Sarcastic yet compassionate. Just funny and weird. I can throw down some sass when you piss me off, or I can give off some high, exuberant attitude when you crack me up, or if I come up with an excellent line, too. That’s all giddy, all the time. For instance, one of the youth I used to work with said the following line, which I have now used as the first line of an essay I’m working on about social roles and how we can react to any bullshit should there be bullshit thrown upon us: People ain’t going to be getting their hair did when the economy goes to shit. Word, old wise owl. Word. That’s just a damn good first line! Right? So when I get a good line, I get all giddy and fly through my notebook, scratching down any thought I can grasp before it all zooms past me. So that’s where that energy comes from. Then for the “sad” stuff, well, it actually feels kind of meditative to me. Like, how I can take these emotions and turn them into something beautiful. I get my inner poet going and while I don’t write poetry, she helps to guide me through that softer, more relaxed feel of an essay. She shows me beauty where I thought all that was left were razor blades and Band Aids.
Would you rather spend thirty minutes free-flow writing or editing one sentence?
Give me the edits! Love doin’ them edits. It’s like this awesome science to me where I get to figure out what’s the best combination of these words that I can place in a particular order to get at what I’m saying. Free-flow is how I get the thoughts out of me, and editing is how I make sense of them—which, for me, is more thrilling than making the words in the first place, unless I get a really good flow going on—and that’s the sweet spot.
You have some mighty revealing sex scenes and a whole essay on masturbation in this book. Has your mom read it? What does she think about it?
What do you do for a living?
Write and edit. But if you’re talking day job stuff, then I’d still answer write and edit. Which is another way of saying that writing is what I do and that’s what keeps me sane and alive regardless if it pays or not.
How many journals do you edit and/or write for?
The Doctor TJ Eckleburg Review + The Nervous Breakdown + Pithead Chapel + Soundings + MsFit magazine + The Review Review + Electric Lit = 7
Whatchya working on now?
1.) A collection of essays, titled Circadian that weaves scientific facts with personal stories in order to look at the poetics of the body. (See? I can’t get away from the body! Duh.)
2.) A memoir about mental illness and sexuality
3.) A chapbook of flash essays about different relationships I’ve been in and each essay is presented within the context of some of the huge, influential theories humans have created in order to understand the world and what the hell we’re doing here (like gravity, relativity, atomic, etc)
4.) A handbook of sorts for how to become a hasbian!
Interview with Chelsey Clammer, Author of “BodyHome”
Photo Credit: Sofie Egan
Photo Credit: Sofie Egan
Brief Biography:
Chelsey Clammer has been published in The Rumpus, Essay Daily, The Water~Stone Review and Black Warrior Review (forthcoming) among many others. She is the Managing Editor and Nonfiction Editor for The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review. Clammer is also the Essays Editor for The Nervous Breakdown. Her first collection of essays, BodyHome, was released from Hopewell Publishing in March 2015. Her second collection of essays, There Is Nothing Else to See Here, is forthcoming from The Lit Pub, Summer 2015. You can read more of her writing at: www.chelseyclammer.com.
Geosi Gyasi: Could we begin by talking about your debut essay collection, “BodyHome”. Why did you decide to write essays at this point in your life?
Chelsey Clammer: BodyHome is a collection of essays I wrote when I first started writing back in 2011. The essays within it all respond to the thought that the concept of home can be found in our bodies. They’re all personal essays and range from upbeat and witty, to meditative and, at times, dark. I don’t feel like I necessarily decided to write essays. I liked writing, and that was the form that felt most exciting for me.
Geosi Gyasi: Could you tell us if there is any difference between essay and non-fiction?
Chelsey Clammer: For me, nonfiction is just a broad name of one genre and essays are more specific as they are self-contained. Essays can be academic or personal, where nonfiction can be anything that’s, well, not fiction. I usually write lyric essays, which are essays that play with form, structure and language in ways that the more conventional linear personal essays do not..
Geosi Gyasi: How difficult is it to write an essay as compared to fiction or poetry?
Chelsey Clammer: On average, I write about one poem and one short story per year. And all two of the poems I have published were originally micro essays that I turned into poems. In comparison, I have over 100 published essays. My brain has a hard time writing fiction, though all the short stories I have written have been published. So I must be doing something right! Either way, I feel like my mind is able to be more creative when I’m thinking about past events and experiences—like because I already know what the story is, I can then concentrate on form and sound.
Geosi Gyasi: Have been writing for a long time?
Chelsey Clammer: I started writing in 2011, though I have been keeping a journal since I was nine. I’m thirty-two now.
Geosi Gyasi: You are currently enrolled in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA program. Why did you decide to pursue an MFA?
Chelsey Clammer: I actually never wanted an MFA, as I think a writer doesn’t need the degree to write. So I never pursued one. A few years ago, though, I realized that I wanted more feedback on my writing in order to continue to improve it, and did some research to see if any of the authors I most greatly admired taught any low-residency programs (I wanted low-residency, because I didn’t want to have to move again for graduate school). Lia Purpura is one of my favorite authors, and so when I discovered that she was on the RWW faculty, I looked into the program and decided to apply. I feel blessed, because last year (my first year in the program) I was able to work directly with Lia. Hello dreams coming true.
Geosi Gyasi: What do you actually do as an editor?
Chelsey Clammer: For my freelance clients, I do anything from general feedback to line edits. I have a hard time not doing line edits, though, because I love editing even more than I love writing. I read for sound and pace and rhythm and language and structure and organization and flow and purpose and form. When I edit, I EDIT. I dive into the piece, see what’s working in it, what’s not, and use that knowledge to drive every little edit I make.
Geosi Gyasi: Do you edit your own works?
Chelsey Clammer: Yes. Like I said, I love editing. To me it’s like a science or maybe a puzzle. Writing empties my brain, and editing makes sense of all of it. I get so into editing that I’ve spent a half hour a few different times editing one sentence.
Geosi Gyasi: Could you tell us about your association with “The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review”?
Chelsey Clammer: In 2012, I had a piece accepted by the journal. Upon acceptance, Rae Bryant (the Editor-in-Chief) invited me to be a columnist for the journal. A few months later, she asked me to be the assistant nonfiction editor. A few months after that I became the Nonfiction editor. And few months after that I became the Managing editor. Now, I am also a workshop instructor for the journal. Rae has given me such great guidance in my writing and editing life. I’ve worked with her for almost three years now. Funny story—we’ve never met. She lives in Maryland and I’m in Colorado.
Geosi Gyasi: Do you mind giving us an insight into your forthcoming collection of essays, “There Is Nothing Else to See Here”?
Chelsey Clammer: The concept of this book is to look at some traumatic events I have experienced and, in a way, zoom in on a certain aspect or detail of each one in order to look deeper into the experience. For instance, when my mother found my father dead on the bedroom floor, she tried to give him CPR, which didn’t work. Instead of describing the situation from a more narrative point of view, I concentrate on what her hands were doing during this experience in order to look at the different ways in which we di and grieve. The essays in this collection are more meditative and lyrical than the ones in BodyHome.
Geosi Gyasi: What inspired your poem, “Attempt” as published in the winter issue of the “One Throne Magazine”?
Chelsey Clammer: The events in the poem actually happened (see—I’m a nonfiction-er!). I was terribly grieving the young woman’s death, trying to make sense as to why it all happened. I don’t think any sense will ever be made with how she fell off the ledge as she turned around to climb back over it, because there is no sense to it. However, I think in these types of horrid situations, it can be healing to see the events in a more logistical sort of way. I needed to explain exactly what happened in order to then be able to see it differently, to see how I actually felt about the situation. The poem is brimming with grief, as well as a type of beauty that can be found in the vulnerability that grief creates.
BodyHome by Chelsey Clammer
BodyHome by Chelsey Clammer
Geosi Gyasi: Are you so much particular about “style” when you write?
Chelsey Clammer: Currently, my writing is really experimental. I just finished writing the essays for my next collection, Circadian, all of which have some sort of an unconventional structure or way in which to tell a story. Each essay also takes some sort of science, medical, grammar, or mathematical “facts” and integrates them with personal stories. I’m loving this style right now, as I get to research a bunch of topics and then use them as a way to guide the personal story I want to tell.
Geosi Gyasi: How long does it often take you to write a single poem?
Chelsey Clammer: I have written a total of two poems in my life (one of which is “Attempt”) As mentioned earlier, each poem was originally a micro essay. Essays for me are really easy to write, so that actual writing of the piece took just about ten minutes or so. Then, I changed their structure into a more poem-like form and editing each one for a few days before submitting them. So, I guess a few days would be the answer, if even.
Geosi Gyasi: Which genre of literature do you feel more closely attached to?
Chelsey Clammer: Lyric essays. Absolutely. I love being able to write and read in more challenging and weird ways.
Geosi Gyasi: Do you often know when you’ve come to the end of a poem?
Chelsey Clammer: For essays, YES. First lines and last lines are my favorite things to write. I don’t know quite how to explain it, but I just get this awesome feeling when I come to a line that I know will be the last one. It’s like the world feels complete and that the essay will have a lot of power in it.
Geosi Gyasi: What has been your greatest challenge as a writer?
Chelsey Clammer: Fiction! My brain just doesn’t think in that way!
Geosi Gyasi: Do you have any writers you admire as a writer?
Chelsey Clammer: So many! A few: Marya Hornbacher, Lia Purpura, Maggie Nelson, Eula Biss, Ander Monson, and Jeanette Winterson, Ali Smith, Jorie Graham, Kevin Young, and Jenny Boully to name a few.
Geosi Gyasi: What inspired your piece, “Dear You”?
Chelsey Clammer: I love offensive rap music. I have my BA and MA in Feminist Studies, so I know that’s kind of weird. But you know what? Lil’ Wayne might have misogynistic and degrading lyrics, but he is a damn good writer. So I’m hooked on Lil’ Wayne now (I’ve even recorded myself rapping him—check out my website for that!) I wrote a fake lesbian manifesto using only Lil’ Wayne lyrics, and then the thought just came to me that it would be funny to take one of his songs that’s filled with a lot of better-than-thou attitude and use the lyrics to write a love letter. After I did that, I realized it would be funny to edit it and use Bette Midler lyrics. I’m not quite sure how I think of these things.
Geosi Gyasi: Do you have any secret flaw as a writer?
Chelsey Clammer: I can never remember when to use affect or effect.
Geosi Gyasi: Do you get any rewards out of writing?
Chelsey Clammer: Sanity. Spirituality. I’m an alcoholic and once I quit drinking, I started to write more and found that writing is my spiritual practice. It’s how we relate to one another in this world—through sharing our stories. If I didn’t have writing, I wouldn’t feel connected to this world or anyone else. It’s what keeps me alive and here.
Geosi Gyasi: What is your relationship with “The Nervous Breakdown”?
Chelsey Clammer: I am now the Essays Editor with The Nervous Breakdown. They published a few of my pieces in the past—one in which I use offensive rap lyrics to explain ecofeminism, and a book review for Dinah Lenney’s The Object Parade. I emailed them to see if they needed any help reading submissions or editing, because I love being involved with literary journals—you get to see all of the new stuff that’s being produced and start to learn who a lot of writers are. I was brought on as the Associate Essays Editor, and in this past week transitioned into the head Essays editor.
Geosi Gyasi: Do you see yourself writing more essay books as compared to poetry?
Chelsey Clammer: I actually don’t seem myself writing a collection of poetry. Well, sort of. I’ve taken a few of my segmented lyric essays and have turned them into a few different chapbooks, because they kind of read like prose poems. For now, though, I’m sticking with essay collections but am always keeping poetry in my mind.
END.
What Does It Take to Transform Trauma Into Art?
Chelsey Clammer's award-winning essay collection maps the non-linear.
Posted Dec 04, 2017
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Chelsey Clammer, used with permission
Source: Chelsey Clammer, used with permission
Winner of the Ren Hen Press nonfiction award, Chelsey Clammer's new essay collection, Circadian, merges genres as it illuminates the effects of alcoholism, PTSD, love, and mutual aid on one woman's biography-in-progress.
Living with "a slew of mental illnesses," Chelsey has developed a writing style that moves with rather than against her own neurodivergent thought patterns. The result is a dazzling—and radical—acceptance of the different ways each of us experience the world.
The author of a previous collection of essays, BodyHome, Chelsey is also the essays editor for The Nervous Breakdown.
Ariel Gore: Circadian is the best essay collection I’ve read in a long time, can you talk a bit about your writing process—the way form meets function? You use a number of experimental techniques and brilliantly evoke what it’s like to be haunted by memories and experiences. So I wonder: Do you start with form—"I’m going to write an alphabet essay" or do you start with what haunts you? Or do the form and content come to your brain together?
Chelsey Clammer: Thanks for the kind words about the collection! I started these essays in 2013 when I began my MFA program at Rainier Writing Workshop. Circadian was actually my creative thesis for that program. I wrote all the essays in two years, with the exception of “Re: Collection.” That essay was one that Red Hen Press asked for me to write to give the collection a more complete feel to it. As is true for all of my writing, when I started these essays I didn’t quite know what I had in mind for them. I just had an idea and then I started writing to see where the concept would go and what form it would find.
The only essay in the book that I started with form rather than story idea was “Outline for Change.”
I knew I wanted to write an outline essay, but didn’t quite know what its purpose would be. As I started writing, I soon realized that I was trying to bring some order to the chaos I felt while growing up with an alcoholic father.
For all of the other essays, though, the form started to emerge as I wrote them. One thing to know is that my brain doesn’t think in a linear way. I’ve tried to do that before—write chronologically from beginning to end—and each time I do it, I end up boring myself and skimming over details. So, for my writing, I have to follow the way my brain thinks—which is in flashes and concepts and ideas that might not usually speak to one another, but somehow start to make connections in my brain—such as using the mathematics of packing up a house and moving to explore more about how alcoholism can affect a family.
Also, when we experience something traumatic, our brains remember it not in a linear trajectory, but through different flashes of moments. For me, that is how I have to write about those experiences. No other way makes sense.
I feel like the essays found their form as I figured out what I was saying. Then, once I found that form, I was able to tailor my writing towards making larger connections. I kept getting new ideas and further explored what the form had to say about the story, and vice versa. Writing is an act of observation and movement—you observe, then you write, then you observe the movements that the writing makes, and then you write more.
Chelsey Clammer, used with permission
Source: Chelsey Clammer, used with permission
Ariel Gore: The idea of a connection between madness and genius is loaded—and for good reasons—but there’s often such a manic-genius energy to your writing and I wonder how you feel about that loaded connection.
Chelsey Clammer: When people ask me what type of stuff I write, I usually say, “Weird shit.” In my head, I feel like you have to be a little crazy to come up with something that’s a little weird. I have bipolar disorder and I think my experience of it, as well as that of alcoholism and having PTSD, taught me that the narratives of our lives shift as our emotional perspectives on them also shift. In other words, because I’ve experienced mania, I know how to write in that sort of way (long sentences with a ton of words and barely any commas and there must be some super-quirky wording). Depression has taught me how the world slows down, and PTSD has proved to me that our brains think in flashes. I think what’s interesting about all of this is that some of these essays took months to write and I had to do a TON of revisions to get that “manic-genius” energy onto the page. It didn’t just sprout out of me—I had to revise my way there. This is where I think personal experience influences the ways we write. I’ve had all of these experiences and I know how I felt during and after them, so my job as a writer is to create the tone and energy that I felt during those moments and then shape them into something cohesive-ish on the page. This is where craft and technique come in.
Ariel Gore: That's so interesting to me—and something I can relate to as a writer. It takes a tremendous amount of slow work to capture the energy of mania—
Annie Dillard, I think, used to talk about not leaving the price tag on a piece of writing, which I interpreted as allowing the piece to appear to have sprung fully-formed from one's Zeus-head. You achieve that in these essays. I guess that’s where the genius comes in—in being able to sit down and do the slow and hard work of translating a fleeting mental state.
Chelsey Clammer: All of that said, though, I wrote “Lying in the Lyric” in one rush of pen to page. It just came out of me. The story itself had been building up in me for a few months, but each time I tried to address the issue in my writing, it wasn’t feeling like how I wanted it to feel. Then, that first line came to me: “I know I can make this all poetic and shit…” and then the essay just soared. What’s interesting is that in “Lying in the Lyric” I discuss how we try to bring our pain into a space of poetics by using beautiful language to explore it. Well, that technique wasn’t working for me. Writing in a pretty way about something super-ugly just wasn’t quite clicking. So I started to write about my process of trying to write beautifully about bulimia. Once I allowed myself to look at why I was having a hard time writing that essay, my brain just latched onto that idea and couldn’t let go of it. I revised the essay a few times right after I wrote it, then submitted it for publication that day. It was accepted a few hours later and published two days after that. So aside from that unique experience, the energy of each piece is crafted to feel kind of crazy. The energy and tone match the subject matter, and I think that any writing that attempts this is amazing.
Chelsey Clammer, used with permission
Source: Chelsey Clammer, used with permission
Ariel Gore: You write a lot about trauma. Your writing is healing for the reader. There has been recent research showing that writing about trauma can be incredibly healing for the writer, too. But of course there is the concern that in writing, we'll re-traumatize ourselves.
Writing isn't therapy, but what is it? What is it for you in relationship to traumatic experiences?
Chelsey Clammer: First, there’s the purge. It’s that initial stage of putting pen to page and just getting everything out of me. That, I think, is the therapeutic part, and that fact is exactly why I have to write everything by hand first. That whole feeling a connection thing. Sometimes purging those words about trauma can be triggering. The essay “Hands” that’s in my first book, BodyHome, is about the night that I was sexually assaulted. The assault was in 2008 and I wrote the rough draft of that essay in 2011. Each time I sat down to write more of it or to revise it, I had to have someone else in the room with me. Same thing with the essay in Circadian called “A Striking Resemblance.” There are some moments in our lives that are just hard to face, so being able to have someone in the room with them as you face these memories can help so much.
For my other essays, after that therapeutic purge, working with them becomes a sort of art and science for me. I’m focusing on the sound of each word, on the flow of each image, on how one sentence moves into the next. The meaning of those words are still present in my mind and I still focus on content, but for me revision is the place where I get to heal from trauma. As in, here’s something terrible that I experienced, here’s me not silencing myself about it, and now here’s me working with it and shaping the trauma into how I want it to be. I feel like each word about trauma that I write and revise is, in a way, an act of empowerment.
Ariel Gore: In the essay "Mother Tongue," you talk about a Lexical-Gustatory Synesthesia diagnosis—basically being able to taste your words—and you use the well-placed line, “How jealous are you?” Of course those of us who struggle with mental illnesses struggle with them, but I like that you’re not afraid to talk about some jealousy-inducing perks to not experiencing the world in a neuro-typical way. Do you ever struggle with how real to be when you’re writing about lived experiences that include experiences that are also diagnostic criteria?
Chelsey Clammer: I don’t ever struggle with this because I tend not to care about revealing too much of myself on the page. I have a slew of mental illnesses, and I don’t take any of them personally. They are who I am in the same way that having dreadlocks and white skin is who I am.
In fact, I feel like writing about these subjects is, in a way, a type of advocacy. I’m giving my experiences a voice and allowing myself to not worry about what other people think about me. I write about these subjects because if I’m going to write a personal story, why hold back any? What else are we to do with these experiences but find meaning in them? And that’s why I write—to understand my own life and to encourage other people to give their tough experiences a voice.
Ariel Gore: Before my mother died she asked me if memoir writing was a way to pay tribute or a way to express anger, and I thought that was a good question. Your father’s death plays a huge part in the narratives in Circadian, and I’m assuming your mother is still alive. Whether our parents are living or dead, do you ever find a conflict between being a daughter and being a writer? Do you find the opposite of a conflict?
Chelsea Clammer: My father died in 2004, and I’ve always said that it’s because of him and his death that I have stuff to write about. Which is true. I don’t know if I would have been able to write some of these essays about him if he were still alive. But, had he not died 13 years ago, maybe our relationship would be more like what my relationship with my mother is in terms of my writing—encouraging, caring, and supportive. My mother is my first reader for everything. EVERYTHING. Even if it’s just a short bit I wrote that I think is at least semi-interesting, I’ll email it to her right away. Even if there’s sex in it. Even if there’s not-so-nice words about people she knows in it. Even if it’s about her. Even it’s about a topic that doesn’t interest her. Even if the details are probably wrong (which she’ll point out as needed). My mother reads everything. This isn’t about approval or anything, but about the ways I share my life and my writing with my mom. I feel like our relationship has become stronger because of my writing. Through essays, we’ve been able to face the different aspects of our shared past together. Each essay she reads gives her that much more insight into who I am as a person, and each time she responds to something I wrote I get that much more of a deeper sense of our connection.
Proof of how awesome my mother is: my first reading for Circadian was in New York City a few weeks before the book was to be released. I had only given a handful of readings in my life, and most of those were at coffee shops or bookstores that I worked at. So here was this NYC trip—my first experience that I knew would make me feel like a “real” writer. The day before the trip, though, I got really sad because I wouldn’t have anyone to celebrate the experience with. When I told this to my mom, within a few hours she bought plane tickets to come and join me the next day! I told her she could stay with me at the aribnb place since I had already reserved it. When we got there we found out that my “room” was really a cot-sized mattress on a makeshift loft the dude had put up above his kitchen. My mom and I totally slept in that bed together. We didn’t exactly cuddle, but there definitely wasn’t a lot of room up there.
So, that’s us.
Chelsey Clammer
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Denver, CO
E-mail:
chelsey.clammer@gmail.com
Website:
www.chelseyclammer.com
Author's Bio
Chelsey Clammer is currently enrolled in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA program. She has been published in The Rumpus, Essay Daily, The Water~Stone Review and Black Warrior Review (forthcoming) among many others. She is an award-winning essayist, and a freelance editor. Clammer is the Managing Editor and Nonfiction Editor for The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, as well as a columnist and workshop instructor for the journal. She is also the Essays Editor for The Nervous Breakdown. Her first collection of essays, BodyHome, looks at how we can find the concept of home in our bodies. Her second collection of essays, There Is Nothing Else to See Here, is forthcoming from The Lit Pub, Fall 2015. You can read more of her writing at: www.chelseyclammer.com.
Publications and Prizes
Journals:
Gravel, New Delta Review, Pithead Chapel, Red Fez, The Nervous Breakdown, The Rumpus
Prizes Won:
Second place, Black Warrior Review 2014 Nonfiction Contest Second place, Water~Stone Review 2014 Nonfiction Contest Owl of Minerva Award, 2014 Editor's Pick, Revolution House, Nonfiction 2012 First place, Cobalt Review Nonfiction contest, 2012
Reviews, Recordings, and Interviews
The Nervous Breakdown Self Interview (The Nervous Breakdown)
A Conversation with Chelsey Clamm (The Coachella Review)
Blurb on Second Place for Black Warrior Review contest (Black Warrior Review)
More Information
Listed as:
Creative Nonfiction Writer
Gives readings:
Yes
Travels for readings:
Yes
Identifies as:
Caucasian
Prefers to work with:
Adults, At Risk Youth, Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgender, Homeless people, Mentally Ill, People with Disabilities, Prisoners, Teenagers
Fluent in:
English
Born in:
Laramie
Raised in:
Austin, TX
Please note: All information in the Directory is provided by the listed writers or their representatives.
Last updated: Mar 03, 2015
Clammer, Chelsey: CIRCADIAN
Kirkus Reviews. (Aug. 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Clammer, Chelsey CIRCADIAN Red Hen Press (Adult Nonfiction) $14.95 10, 3 ISBN: 978-1-59709-603-4
Unconventional essays offer intimate glimpses into a writer's heart and mind.In her second collection, Clammer (BodyHome, 2015) once again stretches the boundaries of the form, pushing against "the tenuous fences between poetry and fiction and nonfiction and humor and critical writing and academic writing and blogging and every other genre that has existed, ever, in order to discover how to discuss our lives." The essays are notable for their inventive language; many take the form of prose poems or verbal collages; one is constructed of bullet-pointed sentences; another, like a class syllabus. As the title suggests, the essays circle around several recurring themes: Clammer's relationship with her father, an "outstanding alcoholic" and "the catalyst," she writes, "for every problem in my life"; her various health problems, including PTSD, an eating disorder, bipolar disorder, and alcoholism; suicide (she made two attempts); and the writing life. The title essay focuses on a particular circadian image: her father, pacing in circles as he tried to get relief from the "throbbing, clobbering" cluster headaches that blighted his life, the aftereffect of a head injury. Sometimes he howled with pain; he self-medicated with alcohol, and he tried to kill himself. After he died, Clammer was left with traumatic memories of his suffering: "there was no healing. No desire for sobriety. No want for life. The only thing present was his continuous hurt." Suicide recurs in several pieces, especially one essay about her work in a mental hospital for homeless adolescents with addiction and mental health issues. "I was just a woman with a sober heart, with a steady and medicated brain, with a belief in each youth's sobriety," she writes. She felt attached to one girl, who eventually died--accidentally, though she often threatened to kill herself--and Clammer struggles to understand the depression, vulnerability, and fear that led to the young woman's death. An affecting memoir emerges from a dozen circuitous, digressive essays.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Clammer, Chelsey: CIRCADIAN." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A500364837/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=902f9537. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A500364837
Circadian: Essays
Publishers Weekly. 264.28 (July 10, 2017): p76.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Circadian: Essays
Chelsey Clammer. Red Hen, $14.95 trade
paper (178p) ISBN 978-1-59709-603-4
Clammer (BodyHome), a contributor to McSweeney's and the Rumpus, engages with trauma, letting go, and the pleasures of writing in this collection of 12 lyric essays. She is a compassionate and self-reflective narrator, weaving the personal into experiments with form. In "Outline for Change," she includes mathematical formulas and a diagrammed sentence in recounting her father's descent into alcoholism and chronic pain from cyclically recurring headaches. Throughout the collection, Clammer moves between the serious and the playful, confessing how her father's struggles and how being a victim of sexual violence affected her, but also reveling in the joys of language. In "I Could Title This Wavering," she tells us: "I know I'm really into verbs and nouns right now. Which is to say writing. Pen to page then fingers to keys, QWERTYing." She analyzes oppression through the lexicon in "Mother Tongue," an essay on how phrases such as "wife beater" and "Indian giver" denote inequality. For "Trigger Happy," Clammer interviews Lacy M. Johnson, a writer and survivor of sexual violence, to arrive at the conclusion, "Push harder to think critically about your discomfort." Each essay builds on the one before, demonstrating the author's evolution as a writer and survivor. Clammer has successfully bridged genres here while exploring difficult subjects. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Circadian: Essays." Publishers Weekly, 10 July 2017, p. 76. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499720100/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=98bc1c79. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A499720100
Review: Circadian by Chelsey Clammer
April 2, 2018
Reviewed by Cate Hodorowicz
cover of circadian abstract graphics with titleChelsey Clammer’s Circadian (Red Hen Press, October 2017), winner of the 2017 Red Hen Press Nonfiction Award, uses experimental lyric essay forms to explore loss, trauma, and grief—and Clammer excels at her craft, making concrete the way memories circle, resurface, combine, cascade, and loop into exhausting obsession. This is not a pretty or comforting preoccupation, as the ambitious project requires the constant revisitation of suffering. But Clammer finds refuge in the thick of language, which becomes both sentence-level driving force and thematic glue.
Because Clammer knows that nothing is without its troubles, particularly the things we most love, her retreat to language isn’t one-dimensional. Instead, she embraces language’s complications. For example, “Mother Tongue” ranges over lazy Susans, oppression, White-Out, and Hurricane Katrina to engage the sexy, playful, fraught, and distasteful flavors of words. The sounds of the sentences create luscious rhythms and rhymes even as they engage the political: “We can’t ignore the lexicon we loathe, would love for the OED to declare dead.” This attention to sound creates pleasure and levity throughout the book even as Clammer evokes the relentless anxiety of a brain trying to heal from the suicides and untimely deaths of loved ones, the aftermath of sexual assault, and relentless survivor’s guilt.
Clammer wields her unconventional essay forms—including numbered lists, diagrams of cell mitosis, email exchanges, outlines, and the strange alchemy of numerology—with a deft hand. Likewise, her compelling voice and well-placed black humor guides the reader through challenging content. At the end of perhaps the most engaging essay in the book, “Then She Flew Away,” in which Clammer grapples with the death of a teen whom she mentored, a photo of the deceased girl slips from the cluttered surface of Clammer’s writing desk. The teen’s death involved a fall from a great height, and the last line, “Shit, Sophie fell again,” encapsulates the cyclical and sometimes grimly humorous tentacles of grief and memory.
But when “I Could Title This Wavering” demonstrates the speaker’s insecurity about spelling (“I still cannot remember when to use affect or effect . . . so I avoid all use [of them]”), Circadian doesn’t quite benefit. A move likely meant to demonstrate the speaker’s vulnerability, willful ignorance comes across instead. This seems odd: the speaker in earlier essays embraced the value of all words because of what they teach us, even if those lessons are hard, even if the words have gone the way of the dodo. Now, though, it seems she’d prefer to avoid words that give her technical trouble than go to the effort of teaching herself something new—which would give her more of the syntactical power she seeks.
And yet. The essay form at its best embraces human contradictions and messiness; it wrestles with the speaker’s—and the reader’s—sensibilities and convictions. This, too, is part of Circadian’s design: we’re not meant to like the speaker, her fretful mind, or its relentless returns to her traumas, especially her father’s alcoholic decline and suicide. There’s nothing to like about PTSD. But through it all, we see the speaker reclaim her self and find power by breaking and renaming linguistic moves; she creates the delightful term “caboosed verb” and “Chelsey[s] a sentence.” This is the playful, inventive persona struggling to come through, to live, in the aftermath.
Other excellent pieces include “Trigger Happy,” which engages smartly with the topic of trigger warnings, and the final and immensely satisfying “Collection,” which ties the loops of Circadian together and comes to a hard-won conclusion about how the speaker views the tragedies of her life. But just as Clammer would rather have at her disposal (nearly) all the words in the world, even the troublesome and outdated ones, one gets the sense she would rather have her father and friends alive than arrive at any kind of resolution about their fragmentation and loss.
Review: Circadian by Chelsey Clammer (reviewed by Amelia White)
March 27, 2018 · by jmwwblog · in Reviews. ·
Circadian
By Chelsey Clammer
176 PP
Red Hen Press, 2017
$14.95
ISBN-13: 978-1597096034
Circadian by Chelsey Clammer is a book that pushes boundaries – of genre, of subject and of the author’s own experiences. This collection of essays that defies classification does not offer clear answers or smooth narratives, but this quality echoes and deepens its heavy subject matter. Even as the work confronts very dark moments – the death of an alcoholic father, sexual assault – Clammer’s writing shimmers, shifting from one moment to the next, lyric, matter-of-fact, and often irreverent. This is a satisfying, challenging read that may deeply impact readers whose experiences overlap with the author’s.
The form of the essays changes from one to the next, creating a book that confronts the reader as boldly as Clammer confronts her past. Each essay seems to grab the reader and say, “You thought you’d figured things out? Ha!” before plunging on into another form, another facet of the author’s life and mind. The book begins as a list of bullet points that switches between fact (“A handle of 80-proof vodka contains 3,830 calories.”) and intimate details of the author’s family life (“A fifty-two-year-old businessman with no college degree who is fired because he drinks on the job possibly does not know how to solve the problem, either. Perhaps he doesn’t care to. Perhaps his life is a concept he will never get”). Many of the essays that follow hold some similarity to this: facts of either a personal or general nature, musings about life or language, all interspersed with visceral moments from the author’s life. Even so, the essays are unpredictable, veering unexpectedly from page to page, but somehow holding together. An essay that begins with Lazy Susan delves into the shifting sexism of words and language and the author’s own witty invented lexicon.
At the same time, though the form is varied, the personal elements of the book are heavily focused on two tight knots of the author’s experience: the death of her alcoholic father and her later sexual assault. While there are certainly other moments and characters explored, most of the essays contain one or both of these moments. Indeed, Circadian lives up to its title in this regard: it is cyclical, returning again and again to the same places, to the same pain.
The book is fearless, even in its confrontation of fear and trauma. In “A Striking Resemblance”, Clammer explores the obsessive feelings that she has for the man who assaulted her, and is not afraid to examine how closely these feelings skirt infatuation.
“Because I want to talk about lightning.
I want to talk about that magnetic moment.
I want to talk about him.
I want to talk about how he imprinted himself on my skin, how my veins still rattle with him.”
Often, the poetry of Clammer’s words is stark against with the violence of the moment. Or perhaps, it carries with it a closer understanding for the reader. She revisits the moment again and again, in great detail, pushing further into it with her language. The book is challenging, and Clammer knows this. She explores it extensively in “Trigger Warning”, in which she questions whether these warnings should be given, and how trauma always noses its way unexpectedly into daily life, how triggers are impossible to avoid.
The book is not all darkness, tragedy and trauma. It provides numerous respits, enough humor and philosophizing and little known facts, to give the reader moments to breathe. It is peppered with history and fact and wordplay. There is enough joy in the small things to show an author who has gained, at least fleetingly, some distance from her past. Still, as Circadian circles the same moments again and again, we do not follow Clammer to some sort of triumphant transformation. This book makes it clear how slow the grief and recovery are, how little reprieve is found, but how life and joy and art and humor continue on in spite of and often because of these traumas.–Amelia White
Book Review: BodyHome by Chelsey ClammerOn 04/01/2015 | 0 Comments
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Review by Lindsey Grudnicki
For the reader, it’s “the vulnerability of letting a story inside” (“Diving In”). For the writer, it’s the vulnerability of letting a story out, of putting your mind and heart and body on the page for a stranger’s eyes.
In her debut essay collection, Chelsey Clammer transforms that vulnerability into a bold, beautifully unapologetic honesty that dares the reader to take it all in – the love and hurt, the struggle and triumph, and, most importantly, the discovery. BodyHome is her journey, and Clammer invites you to sit down with her as she recounts the road she’s traveled – to defining herself, to finding peace, and to accepting the home that has been hers all along.
With her authentic, no-nonsense voice at the heart of each essay, the collection reads as Clammer’s testimony to the fact that coming to terms with your own truth is a process that demands all of you. To inhabit your body fully, you must look at all of the scars and know their origins; to heal your heart, you must pick up every broken piece and turn it completely around, investigating the source of the break and deciding whether that fragment might fit back in place or if it’s best to let it go and recreate. This kind of self-confession is at times amusing, but more often it is painful and difficult and terrifying. Clammer offers an account of that deep internal battle, one that stretches over years, takes on many forms, and shapes her relationships, choices, and identity. Her work chronicles the realities of addiction, mental illness, loss, and regret. Her essays bring the reader into the confusion and rage of the moment then ask them to bear witness to the clarity and recovery that comes from the passage of time and forgiveness.
It speaks to Clammer’s skill as a memoirist that she never leaves her readers as alone as she was dealing with these circumstances. Her compassion for others broadens her perspective and deepens her exploration of what it means to live and love. In BodyHome, she illuminates her own struggles by documenting the hardships of those around her. In “Howls,” Clammer seeks to understand her own pain by reflecting on her father’s suicide, her grandfather’s death, and the agony of a total stranger; in “Linda,” she learns that “it’s okay to scream” as she befriends and comforts a schizophrenic woman. Her ability to relate to those around her enriches her stories and ultimately drives her craft.
Though Clammer’s subjects are serious, her writing is often playful and rebellious. She experiments with language, structure, and form, testing her range and creating a lively voice that readers will relish. She also injects her own brand of humor into each piece, pointing out life’s ironies, highlighting the absurd and ridiculous, and charming you with her frank, engaging commentary. Just take a look at “The Family Jewels” – Clammer’s delightfully strange essay on the complicated sexual history of her family – for a glimpse of the author’s fondness for laughter and celebration of humankind’s eccentricities.
It is Clammer’s musings on memory, however, that captured me as reader. Her collection is strong from start to finish, but her thoughtful reflections on youth, family, and the things we carry with us speak to her curious mind, courageous heart, and undeniable talent as a writer. In “On Ecstasy,” she gives us a drug-clouded heart-to-heart between her and her father, and brings us with her to the revelation that it was his voice, not his words, that really mattered and stuck with her. In “Matchbooks, Pennies,” Clammer questions those things that stick with us, those relics (or burdens) we bear without fully understanding why. She examines the memories that enrich her life – a favorite hankie, well-loved books – as well as those that add mental clutter despite the innocence of the objects that remain. BodyHome explores how we choose to define ourselves and what we let define us, and Clammer uses her own quest for self to showcase how to move from letting the past hold our lives in an unhealthy bondage to bursting free in a body that listens to you and lives at its fullest capacity.
“I grasp myself with compassion for my perceived imperfections,” Clammer writes in the collection’s title piece. “In the same way I do not resent the drips coming from the faucet, the way the pipes in my apartment growl with noise, the floorboards that creak under my weight, I love the home of my body for what it is: a home with flaws, with scars, with fat where there used to be negative space. And it is a cozy home, a soft home that provides comfort, a home in which I can live.” From childhood to adulthood and from hurt to healing, BodyHome is about growing into yourself, learning the hard way, accepting the person you are as well as the person you’ll become, and – of course – deciding to live, compassionately and comfortably, in your own body.