Interview with Dad and Writer Extraordinaire, Storey Clayton
Storey Clayton’s manuscript, tentatively named Forty Weeks in 2020: A Future Father Faces his Fears, explores parenthood in the setting of a devastating global pandemic.
CNF editor Kasey Renee Shaw sat down with Storey for another installment of littledeathlit’s “Emerging? We’ve Always Been Here” Interview Series. They discussed the manuscript (which Storey hopes to shop around in the coming months, so listen up, agents!), writing processes, parenthood and pandemics.
Below is an excerpt of Storey’s essay “Week Eighteen,” recently published in Blue Earth Review’s 25th issue. You can find and purchase the issue here.
Today, I didn’t do much.
As you’ve grown this week from the size of a large onion to that of a sweet potato, this feels like a notable observation. As an only child who grew up in the age before cell phones, boredom and solitude have been my lifetime companions. No matter who I was living with or how many responsibilities I accumulated, I always allocated quiet hours for contemplation: staying up overnight with books and video games and attempts at writing, long wandering walks in the nearest woods, imagining invented worlds in the back office or my backyard. You are coming for this time. Each minute, every day, you are creeping closer to these idle hours, these resetting ruminations. I can feel you stalking in the shadows of the trailside woods, sense you peering through the cracked closet door at two am. “Feed me,” you whisper. “Play with me. Pay attention. Nothing else matters.”
I don’t want to run away. I’m excited to see you, to meet you in the flesh. But I have a gentle retort: “Not yet.”
Kasey Renee Shaw: This is the third interview I’ve done for littledeathlit’s “Emerging? We’ve Always Been Here” Writer Series, and I’ve got to say, this is the most excited I’ve been thus far — probably because you’re a classmate, a friend, and probably one of the most dedicated writers I’ve ever met.
For those who don’t know Storey, know this: he is sort of prolific when it comes to generating ideas, maintaining a writing schedule, and creating content.
Storey: how do you maintain this dedication during your regular life, in your new fatherhood role, and during a pandemic?
Storey Clayton: Thanks for the opportunity, Kasey, I’m really excited as well! I will say that before my child was born, the isolation of the pandemic era was actually quite good for my productivity. I have always felt that a little boredom is necessary for creativity, especially in the contemporary age of high-quality distractions. So being unable to see people and running out of things to do led me to spend more time writing.
Fatherhood, on the other hand, has been just the opposite! My wife and I have basically had a full-time job raising Graham in the weeks since he was born and I went almost two full months without writing anything. Which was very disorienting, but will hopefully serve as a good reset. Generally, writing is just how I process my life and how I think about the world and its events, so some sort of generation comes fairly naturally to me. And being without that can be disorienting. I’m looking forward to balancing fatherhood with writing, but still sorting that out.
KRS: What kind of writer would you consider yourself? How has that identity changed over the years? In your “writing” life, what’s been the most transformative experiences or lessons that you’ve learned?
SC: I wanted so desperately to be a fiction writer for so long. Acknowledging that I belong, primarily, in creative nonfiction felt like a big moment of maturing and making peace with myself. I was drafting and thinking up increasingly epic novels for years after college while also blogging regularly. And a lot of close friends didn’t care much for the fiction, but kept saying how much they loved the blog posts and did I ever think of being an essayist?
I can’t quite place why nonfiction always felt less-than to me, but writing my manuscript about Uber driving in New Orleans helped me bridge the gap between the writing I wanted to do creatively and letting go of fiction as a focus. And that writing is what got me into the MFA for CNF and I haven’t regretted the switch once, though I still dabble in fiction. I think in everything I’ve ever written, the big constant is trying to be an emotionally resonant writer. I’m most interested in how and why people feel what they do and, over time, I’ve found that creative nonfiction is actually a sharper place to focus on emotions.
KRS: Speaking of emotional resonance: your current work in progress, as I understand it, is dedicated to your son. Can you explain more about what you’re working on? How did the idea come to you? How does starting the “drafting” process for a book work for you?
SC: I always start with an idea, often a big idea, and then start whittling it down to manageable shape and size in my head over time in the pre-writing process. I think if you lose sight of your excitement about the main big idea, you’ll never make it through a book-length work, even as a draft. For me, that vision and big-picture idea keeps me going, even if the finished product ultimately deviates from it.
So I started with this notion of documenting my wife’s pregnancy by writing to my unborn child. I grew up on stories my father told about “when daddy was a little boy,” so I wanted to include some tales of my childhood. But mostly I wanted it to be a really vivid picture of what it was like to be waiting for my child to be born, what I was thinking and feeling and hoping, who I was before the birth, and who I hoped to be after.
Of course, we found out my wife was pregnant a couple weeks into the pandemic, when 2020 was just taking shape as the year it became, so that has really altered the trajectory of the work. Fear emerged as a major theme, stemming from both my own anxiety and the year itself. So I’m hoping the work will ultimately chronicle both the micro-perspective of maintaining hope and the macro-perspective of this year of upheaval and loss swirling all around us. Hence the working title: Forty Weeks in 2020: A Future Father Faces his Fears. And the idea was basically a chapter (essay) a week, in keeping with the Forty Weeks concept, which actually helped keep me on schedule in the drafting.
I still have a couple weeks I have to go back and write, but I always at least took notes on what was happening and what I felt was most relevant to the moment. I want the book to feel as “live” as possible, so the reader can be over my shoulder as 2020 and the pregnancy are both growing and changing.
KRS: Graham will read this book someday. Like, woah. That’s the coolest thing ever to me. Was this in your mind while you were writing, the thought that your child will eventually read this work? Did that affect your writing, your ideas, your purpose for writing? Was this a paralyzing or fruitful motivation? I’d assume it’d be a little of both.
SC: I was hyper-conscious of this throughout the writing process. I didn’t want the “writing to my future child” motif to just be a conceit, but rather a real aspect of the book. In one chapter, I spend time thinking about what age he’ll be reading this in the future and try to imagine his world in the 2030s and how the summer of 2020 feels to him in retrospect, comparing it to my thoughts on 1979. This was mostly a fruitful motivation, because I love the idea of him reading it and of him knowing who I was before he arrived. It also helped keep the writing straightforward, because I had a clear audience (of one) in mind.
At the same time, that audience is a literal unknown — even though he’s here now, I don’t know what kind of reader he will be. So it can be intimidating trying to forecast who he’s going to be. But that’s the whole challenge of parenting!
KRS: So what’s next for you? What’s next for this book? I know there’s a level of control assumed with this question but, y’know, I’m curious.
SC: I’m graduating from the MFA program this spring, and then our family will be moving somewhere and I’ll be starting a new job! We’re currently scouting possible places and workplaces — I will likely end up either back in the nonprofit world or in some sort of academic support role, perhaps in a university research office like where I’ve done my Assistantship here at WVU. We’ve moved a lot, so we’re looking for a city to put down some tentative roots, maybe to see Graham through elementary school at least.
As far as the book, I’m going to be pitching and querying as soon as my final thesis version is printed! So if you’re an agent or a press who wants to learn more, please reach out! You can email me at storey@bluepyramid.org or find me on Twitter @StoreyClayton.
Storey Clayton is an MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at West Virginia University. He’s worked as a youth counselor, debate coach, strategic analyst, development director, rideshare driver, and poker player. His nonfiction has appeared in more than twenty literary journals, including Pleiades, Lunch Ticket, Mud Season Review, Typehouse Literary Magazine, and Blue Earth Review. Learn more at storeyclayton.com