Photo credit
Curtis Perry

Biography

Conyer Clayton is a writer, musician, and editor who was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. They now happily calls Ottawa home. They have a MA and BA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Louisville. Their most recent collection is But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves (Winner of the Archibald Lampman Award, A Feed Dog Book by Anvil Press, 2022), a collection of surrealist prose poetry. Her first book, We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite (Guernica Editions, 2020), won the Ottawa Book Award and was a ReLit finalist. Their poetry and nonfiction is published widely throughout Canada in journals and magazines like Room Magazine, THIS Magazine, filling station, Best Canadian Poetry 2023, Canthius, Arc Poetry Magazine, CV2, The Capilano Review, and others. Conyer works as the Nonfiction Editor for untethered magazine, a Poetry Editor for Augur magazine, and as a bookseller at Perfect Books.

Conyer's various writings vary greatly in style, but their often multi-genre work explores grief, disability, climate crisis, and gender-based violence through a surrealist lens. Their work on abortion was read at city council by then-poet-laureate of Fredericton, Jenna Lyn Albert, and garnered national attention to the role of the poet laureate when some council members claimed the poem was "too political." Our identities and experiences are always worthy of being written about and shared, and doing so is a form of activism that can help create meaningful change.

Conyer's favourite writers include Mary Ruefle, Italo Calvino, Mariana Enriquez, Leonora Carrington, Carmen Maria Machado, Mikko Harvey, Kaveh Akbar, and Stuart Ross. But beyond words—lifting weights, bugs, toads, dancing, music, cows, squirrels, garlic, gardening, their family—all these things inspire her.

Micro-interview

Did you read poetry when you were in high school? Is there a particular poem that you loved when you were a teenager?

I mostly read prose in high school, but I find the line between prose and poetry is a thin (and maybe non-existent) one, hence my love for the prose poem, and many of my favorite poets were in fact prose writers: Italo Calvino, Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges. However, I did read H.D. and John Berryman's The Dream Songs extensively. My favorite was Dream Song 14, which begins, "Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so," and ends with "somehow a dog / has taken itself & its tail considerably away / into mountains or sea or sky, leaving / behind: me, wag." This poem, along with all the magical realism I was reading, helped me feel I could be honest in my writing without worrying about literal truth and logical meaning. This is a lesson I still work from today.

When did you first start writing poetry? And then when did you start thinking of yourself as a poet?

My first published poem was in 1st grade in my school's literary magazine. It was a minimalist poem about my mittens that I am rather sure I plagiarized. From there though, I must have caught the poetry bug, and began writing my own (not plagiarized) work through middle school, which I mostly kept private. I began thinking of myself as a poet in high school when I took my first creative writing course in 12th grade, and was appointed the editor of my high school's literary magazine. My teacher's trust in me in that role gave me a lot of confidence in my creative intuition.

What do you think a poet’s “job” is?

To enjoy writing. Frankly, I feel it is as simple as that. That is not to say it will not sometimes be difficult. Certain subjects can be immensely difficult to spend time with. Editing can be tedious and long and challenging. However, if a writer is not finding joy somewhere within the act of writing, or in the final product, what is the point? What our work does from there goes beyond us. Sometimes poetry can create awareness and conversations that create change within the world. Sometimes a poem can help someone else through their grief, through a traumatic experience. Sometimes a poem simply makes another person smile. All of these are great things. But what our poems do once they leave us is not really up to us, so we must concern ourselves first and foremost with what writing does for us — so if you don't enjoy it, why do it?

If you had to choose one poem to memorize from our anthology, which one would it be?

I would choose "The ABG (The Able-Bodied Gaze)" by Therese Estacion. Firstly because I am drawn to disability poetics, but also because this poem makes such creative and interesting use of visual space, formatting, and the page, that it would be a fun challenge to see how one could go about doing it justice using only the voice!

Publications

Title
But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves
Publisher
A Feed Dog Book by Anvil Press
Editors
Stuart Ross
Date
June 2022
Publication type
Book
Title
We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite
Publisher
Guernica Editions
Editors
Elana Wolff
Date
2020
Publication type
Book
Poem title(s)
Pistil Pumping
Title
Best Canadian Poetry 2022
Publisher
Biblioasis
Editors
John Barton
Date
2022
Publication type
Anthology
Start here: