What Is Your Most Favorite Piece That You've Written?

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 

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

the sky unclenches a mouth or two —  water trips out of the night  with the same sort of muscle your mother unbuckled to drop the bread knife on the tile. it all goes streaking past the long grey howl of window.

tonight, the house is a sound, the edges where the  rain dies into water. the roof is a flat noise painted awake by a thousand needle-wide of shots in the dark. 

the shrapnel catches in the ears, stays to make a soreness, and replicates a cloud’s shaking by jostling an eardrum. 

no wounds wake up from dreams to populate your skin. the dog is scared like the world’s already been done and undone  at least seven times 

and it has but tonight this house is a sound and the tips of bodies shaking here  only mean that it is being heard and there is an architecture to the thunder. 

                                       - c. essington 

Hi! Your writing is amazing and I always love reading it. I've been having writers block and haven't been able to write anything for a very long time. I don't write short stories or anything like that, but I do write songs and sometimes poems. Do you have any advice for writes block? Or any websites or apps that could possibly help? Thank you for your time! (:

Well thank you, and certainly, I am quite often plagued with  blocks so I’m familiar with that particular frustration. Here’s how I’ve dealt with it:

1. Read, and read broadly: watch how other writer’s approach scene, character, and plot. Don’t copy or steal, but observe and apply techniques. 

2. Engage in small experiences: eat something, go for a walk, stretch, run uphill for as long as you can. These sort of things, when really paid attention to, can get you to words. For example, if you eat a strawberry and really focus, you can often figure out something about its taste and texture that isn’t wholly obvious or stereotypical. 

3. Combine experiences: I’ve mentioned before that I don’t think you have to solely “write what you know” because this will often keep you from writing a lot of things. However, I do think you should try and have a gateway for writing an experience. Example: If you want to write about someone falling from the deck of a ship in a storm, you don’t have to have fallen yourself, but maybe do a trust-fall with someone or take a very cold shower. Theses are gates and platforms you can write from without actually having to drown to write a drowning. 

4. Get away: Stop trying to write and go somewhere far from pen and laptop. Do something you haven’t done, especially if that something involves another form of art. Museums are great.

Most of these tips are about attention. They revolve around really paying attention to where and what you are and what you’re experiencing. I love to write minutia and try to give it greater significance than its mass. In order to do this, particularly in an age where our attention is so spliced with ads and technology and ridiculous needs to never get bored, you’ve got to get away from thoughts and into feelings. Thoughts are excellent seeds for writing, but it’s very hard to think yourself into caring irrationally, which I believe is required in a lot of writing (to care about fiction,) so at some point, you’ve got to have an undiluted emotion to get ink from.

I hope this helps somewhat and I’m sorry for the length. As a side note, in the next couple of weeks I’m going to be starting a writing prompt column that I’ll be posting links to once it goes up. 

Best regards,

C. Essington. 

 haven’t posted in a while but today I won the Propper prize for poetry at my college and also I got a nice coffee so

I have been vividly inactive,,,, but now I have an important thing I am very  invested in and excited about!

I won Newfound Org’s 2019 Prose Chapbook Prize ^^^

And Things From the Creek Bed We Could Have Been is my debut collection of surreal short stories from this independent press and it’s out for preorder now in both ebook and print here!

https://newfound.org/product-category/print/chapbooks/prose/claire-oleson/

I’m very proud of this work and so delighted it’s found a home with a press that makes beautiful and hand-bound books.Consider taking a glance if you’ve got a moment or an interest in learning about Magritte or fish guts or Cerberus or gender thank youuuu. 

Why are the peaches in the river and how are they about divorce? Gonna have to find out.

Also consider reblogging to support an independent writer and press in one fell swoop, thanks so much!

A poem I recently had published by Zetetic Record.

in a bite of lamplight, he stands up to say I love you. he says it slow so he can feel it in his mouth, rolling like a marble with no glass to put its body in. no one is there to take it, but it is still true. It is snow falling, looking for concrete. 

              - c. essington

Is there one particular experience that you draw on in your writing?

There’s no one singular experience, no. It’s usually a mash of a lot of things and they vary a lot depending on what I’m trying to say. Like a potato, a mashed potato of feelings and thoughts. With butter. I write potatoes, end transcript. 

Please feel free to send in any more college/ kenyon/ writing/ publishing questions! I have a lot of time today.

from here, the metal of the sink trips the bright of the afternoon into one blot of silver  just thick enough  to get dim on.

from here, sleep is below us like a manta ray is below the water. we feel wings, slick and cousined to a shark, slip across our eyes. we fall in and out of ourselves, hands very close to not touching. 

from here, I’ve caught the picture of your eyes closed across the pillow, brain still shadowed, leg twitching  on the rim of a dream. I woke up before you to find the world soft, to find a privacy, the bed dented lightly with the girl of it. 

        - c. essington