Queer Writer, Repd by Janklow & Nesbit, 2020 Center for Fiction Fellow, Brooklyn
202 posts
Latest Posts by claireoleson - Page 6
Advice for someone wanting to get published?
Okay, here are my top 3 tips based purely on my experience on both the submitting and accepting/ rejecting side of publications.
1. Proofread - nothing sets your piece back more if it’s on the fence of being accepted than grammatical errors that are easy to remedy.
2. Research publications before submitting - Databases for publishers like the one offered by Poets and writer’s (http://www.pw.org/literary_magazines) are really helpful for finding publications that may be looking for your style/ genre of writing.
3. Look for small, maybe even local publishers at first - They are more likely to have the time to really look at your work if you’re submitting for the first time and are much more likely, if they give you a rejection letter, to reject with reasons saying why and explaining what they also may have liked in the piece.
*Also know that rejection happens to everyone!! Keep writing and trying and researching. Sometimes thorough and kind rejection letters are even more helpful in the long-run than acceptance letters that tell you nothing of why you were accepted.
I hope this helps!
Please feel free to send in any more college/ kenyon/ writing/ publishing questions! I have a lot of time today.
what is your most favorite piece that you've written?
Agh I’m not entirely sure but I wrote a short story about gender dysphoria and greyhounds that’s coming out in the fourth issue of Bridge Eight Magazine that I’m a bit fond of at the moment.
Please feel free to send in any more college/ kenyon/ writing/ publishing questions! I have a lot of time today.
What are some of your favorite things about Kenyon?
- Class sizes: the largest class I’ve been in, as a freshman, was about 25 students. This is seriously such a big deal for me, it makes the class relations much easier and peer conversation much more possible. The professors know your name, recognize your participation, and are much more likely to empathize if you have a sick day/ need to take a mental health day.
- The people: Everyone is interesting in one way or another. I’ve gotten to meet a lot of people and gotten to know several of them in a fairly significant way. It’s a small school so running in to people you know is not hard to do. This is a bit of a personal preference, but I’d rather really know five people than know the names of fifty.
- Professors: So far I’ve had no TAs teaching courses and all my professors have held office hours that are accessible to me and or have been willing to schedule time outside of them to meet. The professors I’ve had are invested and interesting and encourage students to come to their hours just to discuss the subject they’re teaching. I had a friend go in to speak to a professor about multiple-worlds theory in literature just for kicks and he responded by giving her more resources and ideas.
I hope that helps! All of this is of course purely based on my experiences so far and certainly does not reflect everyone’s opinion of the institution. But I love it!
Please feel free to send in any more college/ kenyon/ writing/ publishing questions! I have a lot of time today.
Questions? You should send in questions, I have five hours of being alone in a house, I can’t do homework the entire time without breaks. Send questionnnsssss.
(Especially about college, Kenyon, writing, publishing, books etc.)
my lungs, tonight, are fruit- baskets for the wind. I take the peaches right out of the blue-clear blows, and get to the pit; that’s my face going raw.
the breeze-burn is just the rise of blood to the skin, all that red running up to get to the windows of cheeks and pounding cell-sized fists at the border between gale and girl; that’s what I meant by a peach.
- C. Essington
my lungs, tonight, are fruit- baskets for the wind. I take the peaches right out of the blue-clear blows, and get to the pit; that’s my face going raw.
the breeze-burn is just the rise of blood to the skin, all that red running up to get to the windows of cheeks and pounding cell-sized fists at the border between gale and girl; that’s what I meant by a peach.
- C. Essington
- C. Essington
Dried Dates
sitting purple and unkissed on the crests of our lips. is your fish all right tonight or have they drowned it too deep into the cream?
the whole of the night lays soft and creased with sun, like it wasn’t held in the wine we drank but dragged out on the rocks by the shoreline. it feels distant and violet, like a cold bruise or a hickey that you gave to yourself which you can see in the bathroom mirror from the far end of your bedroom. your bedroom, which we keep closed.
even though it’s right here, rounded over tines and tablecloth and third rounds of water. the water which comes on the tongue like it’s been salted by air and muddied with the brine from the bottoms of our shoes that stood on the stoop for so so long.
there is sodium in the lamplight, there is anointing oil shining just behind your irises but you won’t spend it tonight, because we’ve got nothing but dimmest and most practical sugars to bless. besides, the dinner was nice and cost you.
it is not good but it has been soft, the night, the date, I could take it on a hike and know it would not spoil from hours in the heat and sweat of going uphill. we rove around the pit, don’t kiss, and shuck the waxy hide of it on the corners of our “goodnights”
for the sake of health, some people substitute this sort of thing for its betters and broaders and deepers. for the sake of health, you can pit one date and eviscerate it, out of its stretched-globe shape, so it sits only in name and color.
from here, it is pureed with hot water until the mastication of blades yields a warm paste not wholly unlike the first date you had before. this is what you do instead of lofting one white hill of sugar from bag to cup to cake.
this is what you do when you walk away into the damp summer night, ragged with the sharp cuts of car lights, tossed against the plastic edges of being polite for hours.
you take your drenched self home, the whole of you lukewarm and cast into a tepid magenta.
- C. Essington
- C. Essington
Dried Dates
sitting purple and unkissed on the crests of our lips. is your fish all right tonight or have they drowned it too deep into the cream?
the whole of the night lays soft and creased with sun, like it wasn’t held in the wine we drank but dragged out on the rocks by the shoreline. it feels distant and violet, like a cold bruise or a hickey that you gave to yourself which you can see in the bathroom mirror from the far end of your bedroom. your bedroom, which we keep closed.
even though it’s right here, rounded over tines and tablecloth and third rounds of water. the water which comes on the tongue like it’s been salted by air and muddied with the brine from the bottoms of our shoes that stood on the stoop for so so long.
there is sodium in the lamplight, there is anointing oil shining just behind your irises but you won’t spend it tonight, because we’ve got nothing but dimmest and most practical sugars to bless. besides, the dinner was nice and cost you.
it is not good but it has been soft, the night, the date, I could take it on a hike and know it would not spoil from hours in the heat and sweat of going uphill. we rove around the pit, don’t kiss, and shuck the waxy hide of it on the corners of our “goodnights”
for the sake of health, some people substitute this sort of thing for its betters and broaders and deepers. for the sake of health, you can pit one date and eviscerate it, out of its stretched-globe shape, so it sits only in name and color.
from here, it is pureed with hot water until the mastication of blades yields a warm paste not wholly unlike the first date you had before. this is what you do instead of lofting one white hill of sugar from bag to cup to cake.
this is what you do when you walk away into the damp summer night, ragged with the sharp cuts of car lights, tossed against the plastic edges of being polite for hours.
you take your drenched self home, the whole of you lukewarm and cast into a tepid magenta.
- C. Essington
Fire Place
outside, it is bright and careful. the light has laced the snow with wrist-wide streaks of yellow: made-up bodies that stretch their glowed joints in between the tall and scattered grey-matter of oak trees.
the sun rings on the curve of hill — a loose corset, looped and cross-hatched all the way down to the pond where we can walk towards the ice, and, easing onto its pearled surface, play at going far, listening for the promise of water in a crack and hoping, to no one, that it doesn’t come.
our eyes squint, making the white of the air into an animal that doesn’t start or end, (just like your car,) so we tug at reality with our ears instead, pulling sound in from the corners of the sky to hear the shifts of a huge nothing making up the cold.
we are calm but braced for the noise of wet glass, two months thick, breaking under our weight.
the well-fed sleep of pond goes on, unconscious and below, maybe dreaming up a school of silver-flanked fish that fill their lungs to the thrum of a winter that will never touch their backs with snow or pale the white-wine yellow from their eyes; we drink to breathe, because the wind feels like coffee on our cheeks. in three hours time, we should be awake.
- C. Essington
The Paper Just Said a Boy Left, The Obit Did Not Specify Homicide or Suicide.
the blue house catches on fire and passes it on like a secret, making lips out of wind, whispering its neighbor to charcoal.
in the basement of the house that heard and caught, a boy is already lighting something of his own and signing it off in kerosene as if that clear, chemical wash of to-be light is exactly what letters are made of.
he goes up to his bedroom on the third floor to wait for the rise. the ceiling caves in as the carpet starts to fester with heat. the room is biting down, rafters and floorboards chew in towards heartbeats. the boy forgets his name, tries to say it to himself, but without air to inhale, the sounds he keeps his brain in feels too see-through to say.
he stands up, waiting, his biology screams. he manages to squeeze out a sentence, one sentence to himself once he figures that two fires are at work. it’s a little question, and it happens over and over running over tongue it until it smokes, like a match that goes too black to light. he asks: “which one, which one, which one?”
- C. Essington
Fire Place
outside, it is bright and careful. the light has laced the snow with wrist-wide streaks of yellow: made-up bodies that stretch their glowed joints in between the tall and scattered grey-matter of oak trees.
the sun rings on the curve of hill — a loose corset, looped and cross-hatched all the way down to the pond where we can walk towards the ice, and, easing onto its pearled surface, play at going far, listening for the promise of water in a crack and hoping, to no one, that it doesn’t come.
our eyes squint, making the white of the air into an animal that doesn’t start or end, (just like your car,) so we tug at reality with our ears instead, pulling sound in from the corners of the sky to hear the shifts of a huge nothing making up the cold.
we are calm but braced for the noise of wet glass, two months thick, breaking under our weight.
the well-fed sleep of pond goes on, unconscious and below, maybe dreaming up a school of silver-flanked fish that fill their lungs to the thrum of a winter that will never touch their backs with snow or pale the white-wine yellow from their eyes; we drink to breathe, because the wind feels like coffee on our cheeks. in three hours time, we should be awake.
- C. Essington
The Paper Just Said a Boy Left, The Obit Did Not Specify Homicide or Suicide.
the blue house catches on fire and passes it on like a secret, making lips out of wind, whispering its neighbor to charcoal.
in the basement of the house that heard and caught, a boy is already lighting something of his own and signing it off in kerosene as if that clear, chemical wash of to-be light is exactly what letters are made of.
he goes up to his bedroom on the third floor to wait for the rise. the ceiling caves in as the carpet starts to fester with heat. the room is biting down, rafters and floorboards chew in towards heartbeats. the boy forgets his name, tries to say it to himself, but without air to inhale, the sounds he keeps his brain in feels too see-through to say.
he stands up, waiting, his biology screams. he manages to squeeze out a sentence, one sentence to himself once he figures that two fires are at work. it’s a little question, and it happens over and over running over tongue it until it smokes, like a match that goes too black to light. he asks: “which one, which one, which one?”
- C. Essington
The Desk Lamp as an MRI
waking up mid-self, she saw the window snarl with a girl in its teeth, skin and hair and eye-contact caked between the panes. it was her size, though grey and smeared, but not her girl.
afraid the light would hear, she kept her mouth half-closed in the shape of a cut, the depth of slick and coming rain. behind the window’s molars, the winter woods, white and black and curdled with the night: undrinkable.
beyond her body, in the shape of her chest, birches rose and fell like breathing. they kept tempo with her lungs but took in more air than she could ever court behind her throat.
the tree transposed behind her left eye hefts a knotted burl into her head, a whorl of bark, a way of stopping, a tumor in the brain, exactly her type of cold.
she diagnoses in the dark, in her mind of snowbank and its thoughts, unmigrated birds, that she wings over her dimmed out cells, those fallen branches, ribbed as though with veins.
she traces lengths of skin. the glass has a purl of flesh dressed up like the early morning and the storm that never came. waking up mid-self, she saw the window snarl it was her size, though grey and smeared, but not her girl.
- C. Essington
Joan of Arc’s Area Code
I have kept the fire on hold for eight months now- the dial tone is burning my left ear into decibels of charcoal.
I have re-recorded my answering message to say that I am out of town (and also newly made of ash and second-story window exits.)
I have slept next to the receiver, receiving, as the blips of flame came at me like candle light.
I know that, on the other side of the spiraling teal cord, there is an orange and a yellow and a red all gnawing through the same heated throat, all of its light just waiting to get to the talking.
But I do not want to start with the hellos or the incinerations; I would like to skip the going down and get right to the coming up for air- as though this were water, as though all the ocean’s burning salts were synonymous to a lit stove.
I want the after photo — the stale, post-noise sound of nothing happening. That saw-tooth quiet coming in like a wave.
I want the lost-conversation hum of the house being suddenly empty and the me being suddenly not on fire —
the phone cradled in a soft, home-dialed, plastic-blue.
- C. Essingotn
The Desk Lamp as an MRI
waking up mid-self, she saw the window snarl with a girl in its teeth, skin and hair and eye-contact caked between the panes. it was her size, though grey and smeared, but not her girl.
afraid the light would hear, she kept her mouth half-closed in the shape of a cut, the depth of slick and coming rain. behind the window’s molars, the winter woods, white and black and curdled with the night: undrinkable.
beyond her body, in the shape of her chest, birches rose and fell like breathing. they kept tempo with her lungs but took in more air than she could ever court behind her throat.
the tree transposed behind her left eye hefts a knotted burl into her head, a whorl of bark, a way of stopping, a tumor in the brain, exactly her type of cold.
she diagnoses in the dark, in her mind of snowbank and its thoughts, unmigrated birds, that she wings over her dimmed out cells, those fallen branches, ribbed as though with veins.
she traces lengths of skin. the glass has a purl of flesh dressed up like the early morning and the storm that never came. waking up mid-self, she saw the window snarl it was her size, though grey and smeared, but not her girl.
- C. Essington
The Desk Lamp as an MRI
waking up mid-self, she saw the window snarl with a girl in its teeth, skin and hair and eye-contact caked between the panes. it was her size, though grey and smeared, but not her girl.
afraid the light would hear, she kept her mouth half-closed in the shape of a cut, the depth of slick and coming rain. behind the window’s molars, the winter woods, white and black and curdled with the night: undrinkable.
beyond her body, in the shape of her chest, birches rose and fell like breathing. they kept tempo with her lungs but took in more air than she could ever court behind her throat.
the tree transposed behind her left eye hefts a knotted burl into her head, a whorl of bark, a way of stopping, a tumor in the brain, exactly her type of cold.
she diagnoses in the dark, in her mind of snowbank and its thoughts, unmigrated birds, that she wings over her dimmed out cells, those fallen branches, ribbed as though with veins.
she traces lengths of skin. the glass has a purl of flesh dressed up like the early morning and the storm that never came. waking up mid-self, she saw the window snarl it was her size, though grey and smeared, but not her girl.
- C. Essington
(Spontaneous Writing Exercise)
big white hair as wide as the night, open with stars, novas of tangled ends, suns streaked over bangs until fire looks like a plaything next to her eyes, half- parted, so she can only see a pink strip of you and nothing else. the world opens on her like she’s the hinge of a pocket knife, blade-bright heart, saw-toothing the morning. eat your soft- boiled egg and turn in your wolf for a calmer way of breathing. Molars on a yolk that makes the plate so yellow that you don’t believe in yellow any longer. that’s how big that hair is.
- C. Essington
I work here as an associate for the Kenyon Review and it’s beautiful and I can’t wait to get back to Gambier Ohio.
Our office in the snow this morning.
On Asking Good Friend To Shave Your Head On A Sunday Night While Afraid
in going past military, past penitentiary, and past the stomach- drop of the arching pathways of a razor shifting in beautiful talented amateur hands —
in getting to a color more than a shape, in sitting the whole time, in being still in order to not get cut while being cut —
you get to your skull which, by the way, you’ve had the whole time but never had to actually meet.
you are grateful you are not a triangle but still terrified of looking too much like a globe, like an earth, like a skull, which everyone has had all along.
after, you feel sick and trace the rounded buzz like a waking bee hive or the valley of a missing tooth, fingers tonguing scalp over and over for blood or nerve or a way to call your parents and use the words “daughter” and “shaved” in the same sentence.
you do not recognize your shadow, it looks like the default human, the bald anatomy-textbook girl all too eager to show you her gallbladder and speak to you in latin about bowels and bile.
you put on lipstick to buoy these new waters, to put a pin in the sodium, to net the crabs of it and drag them to surface, those bottom-feeders.
it’s not wrong, it’s just a new way of having body you haven’t gotten around to naming just yet. you wriggle the knife of yourself, trying to re-sheath blade in this different cover.
if it doesn’t come soon, or ever, push open the cow-skin and demand a new definition of girl and sharp. bend a milked animal into the shape you need, into the kind of cradle all jagged edges need to walk down a street and keep their name clenched between cornea and pupil.
- C. Essington
Creon Tells Antigone To Keep Her Arms At Her Sides When She Runs
Before the rope stippled with green pages of lichen is tied by hands, by mind, on purpose — Before the unburied brother with his chest surrendered to the wind, heart as still as a stone sunk to river-bottom — Before the girl tore off her name, swallowed it like a sword, and cursed her sister to live a lovely life, Creon sat with the blade-eater in the clutch of a marble chamber and talked to her in the dim slip of evening, backstage.
The chorus ran their tongues over a grooved government, lapping at stone for honey, while Antigone, with her pitch-dark hands, smoothed her skirt into an eddy.
Creon tells her it’s a nice knot, that she knows how to tie, she says she’s a sailor, her eyes fixed forward toward the barred wall, moonlight coming in like piano keys, she plays at the strands of string in the rope.
She says she’s a sailor, that she can always feel the water, that she feels it now, how it curves around her brother’s aorta as a courtesy, but will soon lend it to coral polyps shaped like loveliness, as the water always does.
His hand slides over the cold bench towards her crossed legs. In her head she covers his thumb with six-feet of soil. She holds the rope tighter, tracing the strands, feels her father’s tongue somewhere between wires, then bites it between two fingernails. The hand moves back.
When you run, he says, his eyes on the music of the iron bars, When you run, after you puppet yourself on this ceiling and leave two fingers of air between your neck and the world, do not let your elbows leak up passed your waist — it would only make your shoulders look tight, like your dad’s.
He had tight shoulders? she asks, her voice slipping under a loud question from the chorus, yes, Creon agrees with himself, tight shoulders and a mole on his clavicle, tight shoulders, among other things.
- C. Essington
I am in love with your writing x
AH thank you that’s very kind and greatly appreciated. May your Monday be really good in a really weird way.
On Asking Good Friend To Shave Your Head On A Sunday Night While Afraid
in going past military, past penitentiary, and past the stomach- drop of the arching pathways of a razor shifting in beautiful talented amateur hands —
in getting to a color more than a shape, in sitting the whole time, in being still in order to not get cut while being cut —
you get to your skull which, by the way, you’ve had the whole time but never had to actually meet.
you are grateful you are not a triangle but still terrified of looking too much like a globe, like an earth, like a skull, which everyone has had all along.
after, you feel sick and trace the rounded buzz like a waking bee hive or the valley of a missing tooth, fingers tonguing scalp over and over for blood or nerve or a way to call your parents and use the words “daughter” and “shaved” in the same sentence.
you do not recognize your shadow, it looks like the default human, the bald anatomy-textbook girl all too eager to show you her gallbladder and speak to you in latin about bowels and bile.
you put on lipstick to buoy these new waters, to put a pin in the sodium, to net the crabs of it and drag them to surface, those bottom-feeders.
it’s not wrong, it’s just a new way of having body you haven’t gotten around to naming just yet. you wriggle the knife of yourself, trying to re-sheath blade in this different cover.
if it doesn’t come soon, or ever, push open the cow-skin and demand a new definition of girl and sharp. bend a milked animal into the shape you need, into the kind of cradle all jagged edges need to walk down a street and keep their name clenched between cornea and pupil.
- C. Essington
Hello
to the new followers. Just broke 600 so, you know, it’s a whole bundle of lovelies. Let me know if you’ve got any questions!
- C. Essington
For the game: Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman
Food: Zucchini bread someone you care about made but burned a little
Location: An empty lighthouse on a cliffside that’s starting to lean out over the tide.
Thank you.
Send me a book title in an ask and I’ll reply with a food and a place I think fit with the piece.
Keep posting your art! I love your writing, but the art is definitely a nice touch and I really enjoy seeing it :)
Well thank you so much, I was hoping it wasn’t annoying.
What books have you been reading?
Thank you for the ask, here are my most recent ones:
1. Bird by Bird - Anne Lamott
2. On Writing - Charles Bukowski
3. Currently reading: Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
Sweet-Talked
This is mainly about glorifying one’s own internal circumstances so they come across as tolerable instead of possibly taxing.
(I know this is a writing blog, I will stop posting just art sooooon, thanks for dealing with me)
This is a finished version of a piece I posted earlier.
- C. Essington