Symbols, Portals and Dreamscapes: How Surrealism Helped Me Write A Second Book by Conyer Clayton
I told myself that because nothing I wrote was real, touring this book would be easy. My arm has never been chewed off by an eel. I've never failed to save my family as they drowned in a car. It will be easy to read these poems. They represent an emotional truth, I told myself, not a literal one. And that is true. But I soon realized it was much more complicated than that.
My second book of poetry, But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves, is a book of mostly prose poetry (with a healthy smattering of visual poetry thrown in) that approaches my experience with complex post-traumatic stress disorder through a surrealist lens. It deals with sexual assault, grief, domestic violence, substance abuse, and illness — deep fear, questioned memories, gaping loss. I came to this mode through the inspiration of my own dreamscapes, waking at night and voice memoing into my phone, half asleep, or scribbling images and loose narratives from my dreams down in the notepad I kept on my nightstand.
I truly believe our subconscious works to tell us something through our dreams if we are willing to listen. If so, my subconscious needed to step further into the past, the reenactment of parallel traumas and losses, the construction of worlds where the same emotional vulnerabilities were held without the true stories being necessary, as a way of working through them. My dreams provided a safe venue for this processing, which I could then let play out further on the page. The surrealist mode opened doorways for me, gesturing to gateways and portals, handing me symbols, delivering me a way to tell some of the stories I needed to tell, but for a variety of reasons, could not. The drafting and editing process is generally an empowering and freeing experience for me. Since I let myself sink into this, since I finished this book, these dreams have stopped.
Which is why I have been so taken aback that reading from this book has often been the opposite. Sometimes, it has been really hard. I've had to completely renegotiate my own boundaries around readings and rethink my standard, relied upon way of performance. I've had to reapproach my willingness to have public interactions with many of these poems for the sake of my mental health, based on my wellness that very day, that very hour, that very moment.
I generally time my readings meticulously (surprising no one who knows me well). But at the end of the handful of readings I mapped out strictly for this book, I ended up feeling, at best, mildly out of body, and always depleted. I realized it wasn't healthy to expect myself to consistently read this material like that. As I approached a small book tour last November, I paced around my apartment, finding myself in tears at the prospect. I couldn't do that to myself eight times in a month, certainly not several nights in a row. How would I possibly keep it together? I was in a bit of a crisis in the weeks leading up to the tour as I tried to find a solution. But this dilemma also confused me — it's not like my work has ever veered away from heavy topics. Why was this book so different?
Part of me wondered — did I publish too soon? Were these poems too raw, not ready? Was I not ready? I am pretty strict with myself about what I publish versus what stays private. I have standards of objectivity, privacy, distance — thresholds that need to be met, and while these are sometimes in small states of flux over the years, they remain at a pretty constant baseline. Certain stories simply don't have a place in my own publishing practice. It would do more harm than good. I don't think that is what has happened with these pieces. They were thoroughly edited, polished, vetted, and I felt objective about them in the publishing process. They don't feel raw. It is more that, because of their nature, they feel beyond me in a way my first book didn't.
And perhaps that's just it. Out in the world now, they feel animate in a place outside of my own dreamscapes. More true somehow. Less mine, and in that way, they affect me more. They have their own pain and hope. My emotional truths exist in that world too — the very beginnings of the universe(s) in But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves. are my own CPTSD, but then, it moved beyond me. CPTSD manifests differently for different people, but for me, it manifests in a range of symptoms that vary in intensity depending on my current life stressors, heath, and acute situations. Some examples include physical symptoms (such as exacerbations of my migraines and my vocal disorder, muscle tension dysphonia), nightmares (hello, book!), hypervigilance, difficulty controlling certain intense emotions, difficulty trusting myself and others, and dissociation, to name a few. So, at times when my CPTSD is already fragile coming into a reading, when I am not at my sturdiest, entering a watery world I built on the foundations of my own dreams (and then inviting others into it) can be extremely unmooring.
So how do I handle this, practically speaking? My strategy, lately, has been to mark a handful of the poems that feel the least fraught to me on the day of the reading, and allow myself completely free reign to choose when I arrive on the scene. Maybe I won't even read from those ten or so I've pre-screened. I've really allowed myself to tune into the moment and trust myself to choose what's right, right then. And it works. I've left the readings I approach this way feeling fine. I suppose what I am really doing is adding the same freedom and empowerment I loved about the drafting process back into my performances. Not resisting the randomness of the waves, they'll come as they will. I'll let myself dive underneath before they break to ensure I come back up.
Writing about intense topics requires constant personal renegotiation of my own boundaries and close listening to the cues within my own body around writing and performance. I don’t always hear myself right away. And the messages that surface often surprise me. But I owe it to myself to adapt and find strategies to both support my health and give this book that I am immensely proud of the promotion it deserves. Sometimes it feels difficult to do both. But I'll keep checking in. Maybe my dreams will start to tell me something new tonight. Maybe my body will. But I won’t hear either unless I stop to listen.
Conyer Clayton is an award-winning writer, editor, musician, and arts educator born in Kentucky now living on unceded Algonquin Anishinaabe land (Ottawa). Her multi-genre work often explores grief, disability, the climate crisis, and gendered violence through a surrealist lens. She is the author of But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves. (A Feed Dog Book by Anvil Press, 2022), We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite (Guernica Editions, 2020, Winner of the Ottawa Book Award), and many chapbooks, most recently, holy disorder of being (Gap Riot Press, 2022) written collaboratively with VII, a poetry collective of which she is a member. She works as the Nonfiction Editor for untethered magazine, a Poetry Editor for Augur, and Social Media Coordinator for Canthius.
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