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WORK TITLE: Disasters in the First World
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.olivia-clare.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/olivia-clare * https://www.olivia-clare.com/about-olivia-clare * http://www.shsu.edu/academics/english/creative-writing/faculty.html * http://www.shsu.edu/today@sam/T@S/article/2016/clare-reading
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1982, in New York, NY.
EDUCATION:University of California, Berkeley, B.A.; Iowa Writers’ Workshop, M.F.A.; University of Southern California, M.A.; University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Poet, short-story writer, novelist, editor, and educator. Sam Houston State University, assistant professor of creative writing.
AWARDS:O. Henry Prize, 2014, for short story “Petur”; Rona Jaffee Foundation Writer’s Award, 2014; Tin House Writers’ Workshop Scholar, 2015; Ruth Lilly Fellowship, Poetry Foundation; Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship, Colgate University; recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center, Black Mountain Institute, and Djerassi Resident Artists Program.
WRITINGS
Contributor of fiction to periodicals, including Granta, Southern Review, Catapult, Boston Review, and Kenyon Review; contributor of poetry to journals and periodicals, including Poetry, Southern Review, FIELD, and London Magazine. Texas Review, cofiction editor.
SIDELIGHTS
Poet and short-story writer Olivia Clare was born in New York City and grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Her first published story, “Petur,” earned her an O. Henry Award. Additional awards include the Rona Jaffee Foundation Award, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and fellowships at the MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. Clare holds a B.A. in English from the University of California, Berkeley, an M.F.A. in creative writing from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, an M.A. from the University of Southern California, and a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Disasters in the First World is Clare’s debut collection of short stories. “Petur,” Clare’s O. Henry Award–winning story, concerns Laura and her adult son, Adam, as the two take a vacation in Iceland. When a volcanic eruption occurs, they find themselves unable to leave. In the ash-filled, darkened environment, Laura imagines a lover living in the house next door—a person who may or may not be real. The main character of “Olivia” tells the host in the house where he is staying daily stories about an imaginary cat who comes to visit him regularly. The host’s confusion turns to anger as the stories about the cat continue. “The Visigoths” finds a twenty-eight-year-old woman attempting to find a connection with herself and her significantly younger half-sibling. A couple has to deal with the ramifications of a possibly fatal medical diagnosis in “Creatinine.” The narrator of “Two Cats, the Chickens, and Trees” comes to love her mother-in-law but must endure a tragic ending to the story of herself and the older woman.
Clare’s “characters are believable in their frailty and vulnerability, and the clarity and strength of her voice gives these stories a lingering power,” commented a Publishers Weekly reviewer. Booklist writer Leah Strauss concluded that Clare “presents characters who, instead of begging for sympathy, seem to desire clarity.”
Clare is also the author of a poetry collection, The 26-Hour Day. Many of the poems in this work are concerned with time—its passage, its measurement, its powerful effects as an inexorable force in the lives of everything that lives. The subjects involve art, from painting to music; important geographical locations, such as Jerusalem’s Western Wall and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch; and the future, where it is possible to meet a child who was never conceived or a spouse who has died and come back.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May 15, 2017, Leah Strauss, review of Disasters in the First World, p. 14.
Publishers Weekly, April 17, 2017, review of Disasters in the First World. p. 37.
ONLINE
Olivia Clare Website, http://www.olivia-clare.com (January 8, 2018).
Poetry Foundation Website, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/ (January 8, 2018), author profile.
Sam Houston State University Website, http://www.shsu.edu/ (November 2, 2016), Scott Kaukonen, “New English Professor to Share Creative Writings”; (January 8, 2018), author profile.
Olivia Clare is a fiction writer and poet. She was raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and she's since lived in California, Iowa, New York, and Nevada. She currently lives in Texas.
Her short story collection, Disasters in the First World, was published by Grove Atlantic/Black Cat in June 2017. Her novel from Grove Atlantic will follow. She is a recipient of a 2014 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, and winner of a 2014 O. Henry Prize for her first published story, “Pétur.” Her stories have appeared in Granta, Southern Review, n+1, Catapult, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere.
She is also the author of a book of poems, The 26-Hour Day (New Issues, 2015). She is a recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and the Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship from Colgate University. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Southern Review, London Magazine, FIELD, and other journals.
She's been awarded fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program; in fiction, she was a 2015 Tin House Writers’ Workshop Scholar. She has a master’s degree from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a master’s degree from the University of Southern California, and a Ph.D. in Literature with Creative Dissertation from the University of Nevada, where she was a Black Mountain Institute Fellow. She is an Assistant Professor in Creative Writing at Sam Houston State University.
Olivia Clare
b. 1982
Olivia Clare was born in New York in 1982 and raised in Louisiana. She earned a BA in English from University of California, Berkeley and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her work has been published in Southern Review, London Magazine, Poetry, FIELD, and other journals. She was the 2008-2009 Olive B. O'Connor Fellow at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. She is also working on a collection of short stories.
Olivia Clare
Assistant Professor
(Ph.D., University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 2016)
Creative writing, fiction and poetry
Office: Evans 211
Phone: (936) 294-3156
E-mail: olivia.clare@shsu.edu
Olivia Clare is the author of a short story collection, Disasters in the First World (Grove Atlantic), and a book of poems, The 26-Hour Day (New Issues, 2015). A novel is also forthcoming from Grove Atlantic. Her awards include a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award (in fiction), the Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship from Colgate University (in poetry), a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and fellowships from the Tin House Writers' Workshop, the MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center, and Djerassi Resident Artists Program. In 2014, she won an O. Henry Prize for her first published story, “Pétur.” Her stories have appeared in Granta, Southern Review, n+1, Boston Review, Ecotone, and elsewhere. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Southern Review, London Magazine, FIELD, and elsewhere. She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a master’s degree from the University of Southern California, and a PhD in Literature with Creative Dissertation from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she was a Black Mountain Institute Fellow. She is co-fiction editor of the Texas Review. www.olivia-clare.com
New English Professor To Share Creative Writings
Nov. 2, 2016
SHSU Media Contact: Jennifer Gauntt
Share|
Story by Scott Kaukonen.
Consider it an introduction.
Olivia Clare, poet, fiction writer and new faculty member in the Sam Houston State University Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing, editing and publishing, will read from her work on Monday (Nov. 7), at 5 p.m. in Austin Hall.
“We are thrilled to welcome Olivia to our faculty,” said Scott Kaukonen, director of the MFA program. “Professionally, she’s an outstanding writer who has already published in some of the leading venues for contemporary writing, and she’s an enthusiastic and inspiring teacher who has made an immediate impact on campus and in the community. She brings so much energy and wisdom, and our students are and will be so fortunate to work with her.”
OliviaClareThe event is free and open to the public.
Clare’s collection of poetry, “The 26-Hour Day,” was published by New Issues Press in 2015. Her individual poems have appeared in journals such as Poetry, Pleiades, London Magazine, Denver Quarterly, and Ninth Letter.
Her collection of short stories, “Disasters of the First World,” will appear this summer from Grove Atlantic publishing, with a novel to follow a year later.
Her very first published short story, “Pétur,” appeared in the literary journal Ecotone and was subsequently reprinted as part of The O. Henry Prize Stories 2014. Other stories have appeared in Granta, n + 1, Epoch, The Yale Review, The Boston Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere.
“I see myself as both a poet and fiction writer,” Clare said. “When I was getting my first MFA, in poetry, I didn’t even think about writing fiction. My brain wasn’t there. Later, I started writing longer things that felt like they had a narrative. Those were still long poems to me, but somewhere along the way, I started calling those things short stories.
“In my fiction, I approach the sentence the way I approach the line in my poems,” she said. “Sometimes the rhythm of a sentence comes to me before anything else. My sentences tend to proceed in a nonlinear fashion. For me, all that comes from my experience as a poet. The short story has so much in common with the lyric poem.”
Author Marie-Helene Bertino has said about Clare’s collection of stories, “The characters who haunt these pages are marked in their depths by their profound and painful stumblings toward connection.”
“I write about solitude and loneliness a good deal,” Clare said, “but the characters always want something else—some real, or even unreal, contact. A friend has called (my stories) ‘tilted,’ as though they’re in a tilted world. That makes sense to me. Words like ‘strange’ and ‘otherworldly’ come up quite a bit to describe the stories.”
Clare is a recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and the Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship from Colgate University, as well as a 2014 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. She's been awarded fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and she was a 2015 Tin House Writers’ Workshop Scholar.
Clare holds MFA degrees in creative writing from both the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Southern California. This past spring, she completed her doctorate in English from the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, where she was a Black Mountain Institute Fellow, before accepting the position at SHSU.
“I am overjoyed to be back (in the South),” Clare said. “I grew up in Louisiana. My parents are there, and they’re thrilled to have me nearby. My novel (in progress) takes place in Louisiana; being back in the South means so much to me and to my novel’s characters. I am loving Texas so far. I say ‘y’all’ every chance I get.”
Clare is one of two new faculty members in the MFA program this fall, along with Ching-In Chen.
“I am so impressed by the students at Sam Houston,” Clare said. “It’s an honor to be in the classroom with them. I try to extract bits of knowledge and lessons for myself, taken from my writing life, for my students. On my computer, I have a long, long document called ‘Teaching Notes.’ If something comes up while I’m writing—something I’m learning—I write that down.
“Every now and then, I’ll bring up an anecdote from my writing life. But I also hope my students learn from some of the things that slowed me down at first. For example, I ask my students to write thorough backgrounds for their main characters. I used to resist doing this for my own characters, and I always resented this assignment when I was a student. Now, I tell them, I use character backgrounds while I’m drafting all the time. Something that can feel so basic or unnecessary is actually essential . . . and a pleasure.”
The evening’s event continues the ongoing reading series sponsored by the MFA program. It will continue on Nov. 29 and 30, when the graduate students in Kaukonen’s creative nonfiction workshop share their work at the Wynne Home. Those readings will begin at 6 p.m. each night.
For more information, contact Kaukonen at kaukonen@shsu.edu or 936.294.1407.
- END -
Disasters in the First World
Leah Strauss
Booklist.
113.18 (May 15, 2017): p14.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Disasters in the First World. By Olivia Clare. June 2017.192p. Black Cat, paper, $16 (9780802126610).
Clare's debut short story collection explores the lives of varied characters-lovers, family, and tenants; the
links they forge with others; and the odd, confounding worlds they inhabit. In "The Visigoths," a 28-yearold
narrator struggles to connect with her much-younger half sibling while attempting to reconcile her own
shortcomings. "Petur" follows Laura and her adult son, Adam, on a vacation in Iceland. The two find
themselves unable to return home after a volcanic eruption shuts down all forms of travel, and the ash-filled
terrain creates an unsettling ambience further heightened by Laura's puzzling behavior. "Creatinine" follows
a couple grappling, in their own unique ways, with the fallout of a potentially life-threatening diagnosis. A
nightclub singer in "Eye of Water" is at first ecstatic when her new roommate, Willa, finds a way to curtail
the town's strict water restrictions. But soon, Willa's presence coaxes out insecurities, along with new
possibilities. In these thoughtful tales, Clare, winner of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award and an O.
Henry Prize, presents characters who, instead of begging for sympathy, seem to desire clarity.--Leah Strauss
Strauss, Leah
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Strauss, Leah. "Disasters in the First World." Booklist, 15 May 2017, p. 14. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A496084719/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=bb6ebf80.
Accessed 24 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A496084719
12/24/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1514142912442 2/2
Disasters in the First World
Publishers Weekly.
264.16 (Apr. 17, 2017): p37.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Disasters in the First World
Olivia Clare. Black Cat, $ 16 trade paper (192p) ISBN 978-0-8021-2661-0
Its provocative title notwithstanding, Clare's debut collection features 13 sensitive stories whose dramas are
more intimate and incisive than earthshaking. In "Olivia," a houseguest drives his hosts from initial
confusion to anger with his daily accounts of a nonexistent cat whom he claims visits him regularly in his
room. "Petur" tells of a middle-aged mother, trapped with her son in Iceland following a volcanic eruption,
who finds fulfillment in a lover whom she imagines into being in the uninhabited house next door. In
"Pittsburgh in Copenhagen," a pair of lovers unfaithful to their spouses find the uncertainties in their
relationship magnified by a mysterious delivery of flowers to the woman's apartment. Most of Clare's
stories feature characters who try with only marginal success to communicate their feelings to one another.
"Things That Aren't the World" is presented as a series of letters and messages through which a son and
mother argue over the welfare of a younger sibling who is content living in her delusory world. "Two Cats,
the Chickens, and Trees" ends devastatingly with a woman thinking of the mother-in-law whom she
increasingly comes to love, "You must never admire her without wishing to be unlike her. You must hate
when someone else loves her." Clare's characters are believable in their frailty and vulnerability, and the
clarity and strength of her voice gives these stories a lingering power. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Disasters in the First World." Publishers Weekly, 17 Apr. 2017, p. 37. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A490820744/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=313cb5b7.
Accessed 24 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A490820744