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An Interview with Claire Oleson, author of THINGS FROM THE CREEK BED WE COULD HAVE BEEN, by Andrea Caswell

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An Interview with Claire Oleson
Author of THINGS FROM THE CREEK BED WE COULD HAVE BEEN
Newfound Press, 64 pages
by Andrea Caswell

Things From the Creek Bed jacket copyClaire Oleson’s chapbook, Things From the Creek Bed We Could Have Been, is the winner of the Newfound 2019 Prose Prize, awarded annually to a chapbook-length work of exceptional fiction or nonfiction that explores how place shapes identity, imagination, and understanding.

In the following interview, she discusses the work, and how making art can reshape our understanding of what we see in the world.

Andrea Caswell: The stories in this collection are language-driven, intensely intimate, and saturated with beautiful images. Did any of these stories begin as poems or prose poems?

Claire Oleson: I enjoy navigating in the spaces between prose and poetry; in Creek Bed, I hope a poetic dedication to the individual word is visible alongside the breathing space that prose gives to its subjects. I wanted the size, the “living room” of a story, with the minutia and pace that poetry can offer. Also, somewhat in retrospect, I’ve found my writing across genres is often propelled by sight more than distinct action. I wanted image to offer propulsion, like plot can, but I wanted everything I included to belong to sensation, to be incapable of happening anywhere outside of a body.

AC: The artist Corita Kent said, “Art does not come from thinking, but from responding.” To what are you responding with Things From the Creek Bed We Could Have Been? 

CO: Alongside this desire for the writing to feel embodied, I also want the readers who come to it to feel like they belong inside its feeling. Here, I don’t mean that they “belong” in the sense that there’s a neat space carved out for an audience-surrogate, but far more that the story isn’t complete until someone is in it, feeling it. Following the quote you provided, I think it’s fair to say that if I wanted to be easy, to be point-blank, and solely focused on convincing, I would have written an extended essay on image, gender, bodies, and ownership. This would have been neater than what I’ve chosen to do: a slew of surreal-adjacent and often absurd stories that take longer to tell you what a thesis could blurt. But I come to you with no footnotes and more mess because I agree with Corita Kent here; this isn’t art until it’s being responded to, occupied, waded in. In that same vein, certainly everything I’ve written can be taken as a form of response. I’d love to say I’ve involved some thought too, but absolutely, the best feelings and needs and evenings I’ve communicated in Creek Bed come from having carried feelings and needs and evenings.

I want these stories to be spaces people come to live in, if only briefly, and to encounter as potential lives or ways of living. —Claire Oleson

AC: Tell us about the title.

Claire Oleson

CO: I thought about pulling a title from one of the interior stories, but this felt like a missed opportunity to sneak more writing in, and I didn’t feel it would envelope everything included with a flexible but precise name. Things From the Creek Bed We Could Have Been is a stupid title because it’s long, it takes time to write out, type out, google, or tell someone. I sort of love it for being a little bit stupid, but in all earnestness, I made it and picked it because I feel it presents a sense of possibility, calmness, fear, and absurdity in one (labored) breath. I want these stories to be spaces people come to live in, if only briefly, and to encounter as potential lives or ways of living. There’s a lot of water in these pieces and the first piece opens inside a creek, so I feel invoking an immediate sense of setting from the cover that flows right into the first story offers an organic and (forgive me) fluid entrance. Oh also, god, I will confess that I was thinking of the poet C.D. Wright who has a book legitimately titled The Poet, The Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, A Wedding in St. Roch, The Big Box Store, The Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All. To me, this is superb. It gushes and it leaves things behind with you. A title like this feels like someone is standing in front of you, continuing to hand you delicate things you can’t possibly carry but also can’t afford to drop. You just have to be overwhelmed. I thought of doing something more stupid and longer than Things From the Creek Bed We Could Have Been, but in the end, I thought C.D. Wright has already done this so well, I might as well be humane to my publisher and cover artist.

AC: Visual arts, such as photography and painting, are integral to many of these stories. How would you describe the role of other art forms in your creative life?

CO: There is a lot of visual art and I put it in to continue to ask people to see as they’re reading. I love knowing that every piece hung/illuminated/shoved/presented in these stories is going to be completely different, reader to reader, despite their semi-static existence in the inked word. Everyone leaves with their own different gallery and there’s no one right, Platonic canvas or neon light. The seeing done by reading makes them, again and again, and it recruits the reader in their making. Because many of my characters are teetering on deciding whether or not what they’re making is “good” or “beautiful” or “ignorant, insufficient, unworthy,” some of that decision gets to come from how the reader decides to hang, frame, and know them. In my life outside of writing, I like to keep up drawing and a pinprick of painting when supplies are handy. I think I know just enough of each to know that I’m a hobbyist (but, with adoration). Having worked at both has taught me the delightful truth that, all day, we are seeing wrong. It’s not until you sit to commit something in front of you to paper or canvas or cardboard that you process what you think a face looks like is entirely wrong, in a series of minute but critical ways. It’s really wonderful to be so incorrect about what we take to be the basics. Seeing, a lot like reading, is often taken as a passive task, something that just inhales. Making art and looking at art is quick and elated to show you that seeing is something you do and can learn to do better but not perfectly. Reading, too, is a work. Reading is deciding to believe in small and nonexistent rooms and move things around in them for a while. Please, if you’re reading this, come into the Creek Bed and mess up the furniture.

AC: Each story in the collection is narrated in the first person. What were some of the narrative decisions you made as you wrote these?

CO: I wanted everyone written to feel like they were speaking for themselves. I wanted every protagonist to have both the freedom and constraint of being steeped in their own thoughts alone. With some free indirect discourse, the reader gets gleams of other characters’ priorities, but the bulk of narration is dedicated to one person at a time. This is, I think, the hardest number of people to be at a time. Amidst the teetering moments of emergency or non-emergency that my stories center on, the feeling of being in one brain can manage to be both the most comforting and most alarming thing. First-person is an allowance to be candid alongside the pressure to be impressive, coherent, and interesting, for both the characters and writer; so I hope my teetering, one-at-a-time people are just that. And if they’re average and incoherent, hopefully they’re at least devastatingly fascinating to make up for it.

AC: Tell us about Newfound. What inspired you to enter their chapbook competition? What have you enjoyed most about working with them?

CO: I’d seen Newfound’s chapbooks prior to submitting and I think the physical books they produce are made with such detail, care, and clear desire to thoughtfully make a fitting physical body for a work of writing. Coming to the end of my undergraduate career, I had begun to amass pieces from workshops that I still liked even after bringing them through everyone’s teeth. I wanted to do something with them that would let them belong to and with one another. I think these contests offer a wonderful gateway into publishing for authors who are looking into the world of books after having appeared in journals. Chapbooks are also so digestible and offer a lot for the short prose or poetry writer while still providing the distinct and individual object that’s dedicated to one author. Working with Newfound has been lovely; they’re responsive, kind, invested, and showed enthusiasm for my work from the time of my initial submission to the binding and distributing of the books.

AC: What are you working on now?

CO: Ooh, surviving. Some writing is happening. I’m mostly invested in finding productive and lucrative-enough work in the current climate. But I’ve made some poems I’m not unfond of, some lavender simple syrup I’m very fond of, and I’m preparing to prepare to cultivate the desire to make a full-length manuscript.

To purchase a copy of Things From the Creek Bed We Could Have Been, click here.

◊◊

Claire Oleson is a queer writer hailing from Grand Rapids, Michigan. She has a B.A. in English and Creative Writing from Kenyon College, where she won the Propper Prize for poetry and the Denham Sutcliffe Memorial Award. Her writing has been published by Limestone, Newfound, Bridge Eight Magazine, Sugar House Review, and the Kenyon Review online. She is the senior poetry editor for Cleaver.

Andrea Caswell holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and is a fiction editor at Cleaver Magazine. Her work has been published by River Teeth, The Normal School, Fifth Wednesday, Columbia Journal, and others. In 2019 she was selected as a fiction participant for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. A native of Los Angeles, Andrea now teaches writing in Newburyport, Massachusetts.

 

 

 

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I DON’T WORRY ABOUT LOOKING BACK A Conversation with Poet and Editor Grant Clauser

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

I DON’T WORRY ABOUT LOOKING BACK
A Conversation with Poet and Editor Grant Clauser

Interview by Natalie Kawam

On Cleaver’s five year anniversary, we continue to celebrate with interviews featuring our senior editors. Grant Clauser is the Poetry Craft Essay Editor for Cleaver, and he also reads poetry submissions. His most recent books are The Magician’s Handbook, published by PS Books, and Reckless Constellations, winner of the Cider Press Review Book Prize. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Cortland Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Tar River Poetry, and others. He runs workshops at Rosemont College’s Writer’s Studio and can be found on Twitter via username @uniambic. He is also a home technology editor at Wirecutter.

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Natalie Kawam: When did you join Cleaver?

Grant Clauser: A little more than a year ago.

NK: How did you find out about it?  What do you like about it?

GC: I knew that Karen Rile previously published a few of my poems, and we were connected through the Philadelphia literary scene.  She was looking for someone to help write and recruit writers for craft essays, and reading poetry submissions.  I like doing those things. So, I volunteered.

NK: Why do you like Cleaver?  What sets it apart from other publications for you?

GC: Cleaver is unique in that it is one of the more dynamic publications around now.  It tries new things.  Most of your online or lit pubs break themselves into poetry, fiction, maybe non-fiction.  Cleaver has a little bit of everything for the creative person, not just writers, because there’s also audio plays and art features and things like that. Cleaver never stops trying to do something new.  There’s the Life As Activism section, there’s the blog with interviews, there’s the craft essays.  And then, the core literature sectioNK: poetry, flash fiction, short stories.  In fact, right now there’s a graphic narrative feature on the website.  Then of course the Ask June advice column, which is one of my favorite parts.  So there’s a little bit of everything, and you just don’t find that in any other publication.

NK: What sparked your interest in writing poetry?

GC: I just enjoy how dynamic language can be.  My interest in poetry actually started in seventh grade when I memorized Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven.”  I just loved the music of it so much, and the imagery that it evoked in my mind.  It’s amazing that it can sound and create an experience within you rather than just be words on the page.  Shortly after that, I got into reading Poe for those two elements, sound and images, and it sort of went off into mania from there.

NK: You have two new books, is that correct?  How is that going?

GC: It’s great!  It’s a bit of luck that two of them happened very closely to each other.  The most recent one, Reckless Constellations, just went on sale this past January.  The one before that in October, The Magician’s Handbook.  So now I have a lot of readings and events planned for the year, to go out and try to get people to like them.

NK: Well, congratulations!  It always seems to happen that way.  It always comes at once, and then it works out until you go through that period where you can’t write anything!

GC: I’m actually not writing nearly as much now as I had been a year ago, and maybe that’s because I need a rest period.

NK: Who or what are you reading?

GC: I subscribe to a ton of print publications as well as online journals. At the moment, I’m reading the publication that showed up in the mail just yesterday, which was the Southern Review. Also, a book that I bought, which arrived in my mailbox about two days ago, from Devin Kelly called In this Quiet Church of the Night, I say Amen.  Kelly’s a person I ran into on Twitter.  I started reading some of his stuff online. So I ordered his book and I’m blown away by it.  I need to tell everyone I can to get this book. It’s fantastic.

NK: That’s great.  It’s one of the best feelings.  You feel like you’re being acknowledged through your own pursuit of finding things to read, and it almost feels as good as writing itself.

GC: Yeah. I buy about two books a week, and I subscribe to a lot. So I always have a pile of things to read.

NK: What are your go-to journals or literary magazines?

GC: What I end up doing a lot is following a number of poets and writers on Twitter. When they post poems they love, I click through.  So, I can’t say I have a lot of favoritism because I go through and read so much.

NK: I think that speaks to how people find poetry today, in this age.  It’s not just going through print journals or books, as they come out. It’s all over the internet.

GC: And there are a couple of writers who have been strong in promoting other poets, too.  Like Kaveh Akbar.  Any poem he falls in love with, he tries to makes sure everybody else reads it [on Twitter].  I’ve come across a lot of writers that I’ve heard of that way, from other peoples’ suggestions, which tells me there are less gatekeepers in the literary world now than there were twenty years ago.

NK: I think that’s one of the best things about Cleaver being online.  I know I have a number of peers that are also writers and, if I like their work, I know their influences are probably resources I’m going to love as well.  It’s an incredible network.

GC: Yes, absolutely.  Online pubs and social media have changed the poetry landscape in a lot of ways.

NK: What does your start-to-finish process look like for a piece? I know that it can vary and look very different for each piece, but which process is memorable for you?

GC: Oftentimes, my process starts with reading. I get ideas, or the feeling to write something, when I’m sitting down in the evening, going through a pile of books.  It usually starts with a word combo or an image that I like, and I try to build something around that. I think my poems are short. I don’t usually go over a page, that’s very rare. I’ll typically finish a draft within 30 minutes and then stare at it for a while, read it out loud to see how it sounds, play with it for a couple of hours, or the next day, and keep going back. That going back process is about looking for speed bumps, things I stumble over and want to correct.  Occasionally a poem comes out fully formed, but that’s rare.

NK: Do you feel like sometimes your earlier versions are better than your more revised versions?

GC: I hope not, because I don’t keep drafts! I don’t worry about looking back.

NK: How do you think American writing has changed or evolved in the past five years, specifically in response to the election?  

GC: What it’s done is—well, I don’t know that it’s changed writing as much as it’s changed writers. The election and politics, in general, have emotionally charged everyone, not just writers. There’s a lot more energy to express your thoughts and how you feel about the world. The result has been a lot more socially and politically charged poetry, because it is top of the mind for everyone, especially writers who are socially engaged in the world. Activism, or thinking politically about what’s going on in our country now, is so relevant that it’s going to express itself in their writing. Ten years ago, you wouldn’t wake up to think, “My god, what has our lunatic president done today?” Now, you do. That informs everything a person does, even more so if you’re an artist.

NK: What is your stance on writers having a social responsibility to affect societal change?

GC: I wouldn’t be the person to tell anyone what they should and shouldn’t be doing. Does poetry affect societal change? I would hope that a poem affects small changes in a person. Will it affect the way we feel about a social issue or political element? I don’t know. I can’t say whether it does or doesn’t; but the answer to that question shouldn’t affect whether you should do write poetry, especially if you feel you should do it.  If it’s a part of your experience, it’s going to be a part of your work.

NK: What do you hope to achieve in your future writing?

GC: I hope I’m able to still do it, and that people respond to the things I do in my work. And, that I don’t go broke doing it! I’m always going to be writing, and I’ve been lucky to have some recognition in that department. I feel lucky to have the opportunity to teach and share my enthusiasm about it. I want to continue all of the above.

NK: Lastly, why do you write what you write about? What is unavoidable for you?

GC: If it’s part of your experience, it’s going to be a part of your poetry. The two things I keep going back to is an outdoors style, and my family.  Both of those things are profound parts of what create my experience. In fact, my book, Magicians Hand Book was sort of a turn away from those two things [as subjects] because I think I was getting the reputation of being a nature poet. I thought, “I need to do something completely different.” The next book ended going back a lot to my own experiences.  

Social Media Maven Natalie Kawam is an undergraduate poet at Bryn Mawr College.  In May, 2016, she received the Academy of American Poets Prize at Bryn Mawr, and was published in September 2016 through the Academy.  See her poetry here.  Natalie is also a poetry staff reader for Glass Kite Anthology.