Circadian

by Chelsey Clammer

Overview

Winner of the 2015 Red Hen Press Nonfiction Award, Circadian is a collection of essays that weaves together personal account with cultural narrative, only to unravel them and explore the brilliant and destructive cycles of who we are. Using poetic language and lyric structures, Clammer dives into her stories of trauma, mental illnesses, and a wide spectrum of relationships in order to understand experience through different of frameworks of thought. Whether it’s turning to mathematics to try to solve the problem of an alcoholic father, the history of naming to look at sexism, weather to re-consider trauma, or even grammar as a way to question identity, these “facts” move beyond metaphor, and become new ways to narrate our cyclical ways of being.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597095709
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	10/03/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	176
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Chelsey Clammer is the author of BodyHome. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Essay Daily, McSweeney’s, The Water-Stone Review and Black Warrior Review, among many others. She is the Essays Editor for The Nervous Breakdown, a reader for Creative Nonfiction magazine, Editorial Coordinator of World of DQ, and Founding Editor of Inside/Out Editing Services. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the Rainier Writing Workshop and an MA in Women’s Studies from Loyola University Chicago. She lives in Austin, TX.

Read an Excerpt

From Circadian

Long-term: I will never escape these memories. Him, in his bathroom on the other side of my bedroom wall, howling through his pain. My ceiling and walls are covered in glow-in-the-dark stars, coaxing me to momentarily believe I am somewhere other than here. Somewhere safe, special, celestial. And then he yawps again, and I’m ripped from that feeling. I will never forget this moment.

Our brain is physically altered by the experiences we have. As we continue to live, different pathways to our histories continue to be trampled on, packed down, creating a permanent trail on which we can pace around our pasts. When we recall our memories, we re-fire the same neural pathways to get to the origins of the sense of that memory. How the smell of Diet Sprite will fizz into my nose and bring back memories of the empty cans he used to fill with vodka, the plan to be sneaky unsuccessful. And how his brain had its own path. How his hand kept returning to the bottle. A mindless motion. The circumstance of many disorders clustered inside him.

And his rituals to stop the cluster headache pain terrified me. His pacing, his shouting. Oxygen tanks tugged around by a middle-aged man. So much pain I never wanted to witness.

But I witnessed it from the very beginning.

Editorial Reviews

07/10/2017
Clammer (BodyHome), a contributor to McSweeney’s and the Rumpus, engages with trauma, letting go, and the pleasures of writing in this collection of 12 lyric essays. She is a compassionate and self-reflective narrator, weaving the personal into experiments with form. In “Outline for Change,” she includes mathematical formulas and a diagrammed sentence in recounting her father’s descent into alcoholism and chronic pain from cyclically recurring headaches. Throughout the collection, Clammer moves between the serious and the playful, confessing how her father’s struggles and how being a victim of sexual violence affected her, but also reveling in the joys of language. In “I Could Title This Wavering,” she tells us: “I know I’m really into verbs and nouns right now. Which is to say writing. Pen to page then fingers to keys, QWERTYing.” She analyzes oppression through the lexicon in “Mother Tongue,” an essay on how phrases such as “wife beater” and “Indian giver” denote inequality. For “Trigger Happy,” Clammer interviews Lacy M. Johnson, a writer and survivor of sexual violence, to arrive at the conclusion, “Push harder to think critically about your discomfort.” Each essay builds on the one before, demonstrating the author’s evolution as a writer and survivor. Clammer has successfully bridged genres here while exploring difficult subjects. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Clammer (BodyHome), a contributor to McSweeney’s and the Rumpus, engages with trauma, letting go, and the pleasures of writing in this collection of 12 lyric essays. She is a compassionate and self-reflective narrator, weaving the personal into experiments with form. . . . Each essay builds on the one before, demonstrating the author’s evolution as a writer and survivor. Clammer has successfully bridged genres here while exploring difficult subjects.”—Publishers Weekly

"In her second collection, Clammer (BodyHome, 2015) once again stretches the boundaries of the form, pushing against 'the tenuous fences between poetry and fiction and nonfiction and humor and critical writing and academic writing and blogging and every other genre that has existed, ever, in order to discover how to discuss our lives.' The essays are notable for their inventive language; many take the form of prose poems or verbal collages; one is constructed of bullet-pointed sentences; another, like a class syllabus. . . . An affecting memoir emerges from a dozen circuitous, digressive essays."—Kirkus Reviews

“I have never read an interrogation of language, gender politics, or aftermath quite like Clammer's passionately searing Circadian. Though evocative of writers from Anne Carson to Kate Zambreno, Clammer’s urgency and electricity here create a flash of lightning all her own.”—Gina Frangello, author of A Life of Men and Every Kind of Wanting

“In these beautifully written essays, Clammer considers the intricate, confounding, and powerful connections between story and body, narrative and physical form. She examines the subject of trauma through a series of innovative frames, casting a fearless and curious gaze on her material and bringing new insights to life.”—Marya Hornbacher, New York Times bestselling author of Wasted (Pulitzer Prize finalist)

Essay Featured in Women on Writing

Essay Featured in Entropy Magazine: https://entropymag.org/collectively-speaking/

From the Publisher

2017-07-24
Unconventional essays offer intimate glimpses into a writer's heart and mind.In her second collection, Clammer (BodyHome, 2015) once again stretches the boundaries of the form, pushing against "the tenuous fences between poetry and fiction and nonfiction and humor and critical writing and academic writing and blogging and every other genre that has existed, ever, in order to discover how to discuss our lives." The essays are notable for their inventive language; many take the form of prose poems or verbal collages; one is constructed of bullet-pointed sentences; another, like a class syllabus. As the title suggests, the essays circle around several recurring themes: Clammer's relationship with her father, an "outstanding alcoholic" and "the catalyst," she writes, "for every problem in my life"; her various health problems, including PTSD, an eating disorder, bipolar disorder, and alcoholism; suicide (she made two attempts); and the writing life. The title essay focuses on a particular circadian image: her father, pacing in circles as he tried to get relief from the "throbbing, clobbering" cluster headaches that blighted his life, the aftereffect of a head injury. Sometimes he howled with pain; he self-medicated with alcohol, and he tried to kill himself. After he died, Clammer was left with traumatic memories of his suffering: "there was no healing. No desire for sobriety. No want for life. The only thing present was his continuous hurt." Suicide recurs in several pieces, especially one essay about her work in a mental hospital for homeless adolescents with addiction and mental health issues. "I was just a woman with a sober heart, with a steady and medicated brain, with a belief in each youth's sobriety," she writes. She felt attached to one girl, who eventually died—accidentally, though she often threatened to kill herself—and Clammer struggles to understand the depression, vulnerability, and fear that led to the young woman's death. An affecting memoir emerges from a dozen circuitous, digressive essays.

Kirkus Reviews