Excited by: David Foster Wallace, Jefferey Eugenides, Gene Wilder, Sloane Crosley, Harold Brodkey, Susan Orlean, Tim and Eric, smart television writing and the art of sitcom, Bea Arthur, all things Cleese (Python, Fawlty Towers), Joan Didion, mentor Blanche Boyd and the host of brilliant professors and teachers I will always sing about, Jonathan Swift, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Tyler Moore, Sam Mendes, pop anthropology, good apologies, workings of the body, performance, Jonathan Ames, Dorothy Parker, Woody Allen, Hunter Thompson, Ephron, Fitzgerald, Nabokov, Hitchcock, hat, shoe, FOOD, HOME, SLKFlSS;dfk
I get impossibly mean when I play board games.
I used to do an okay Jimmy Stewart when I dreamt of working as an impressionist but well, I discovered the trickiness of a, a, a little girl taking that on the road, and also lassoing the moon is much harder than it would seem.
My family raises up storytellers like state fair competition chicken.
I once heard about a friend’s brother who joined the army, went off to war somewhere, and was sidelined to a desk job after sustaining a pretty rough injury. As it turns out, he tore his ACL while dancing to a Sheryl Crowe song on a table on his off night. I went nuts for that.
“Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, your story will get pneumonia.” – Vonnegut
I have the incongruous combination of a head like a pan of Jiffypop and a mouth like a cement mixer. Everything fires off faster than I can scrape it out.
I wrote a column for McSweeney’s in high school and am college-ing in Connecticut.
I got a bloody nose while writing this and then sneezed and now my computer is a crime scene.
I shy away from mentors anymore. Once I had one—he stood tall and shaggy-haired handsome and thought that I, like him, should be a writer. I was a voracious reader of anything that could keep me from making eye contact with strangers on public transportation or in the study area of the Cathedral of Learning. He reminded me of my stepfather at home in Philadelphia, perhaps my first mentor, who had taught me about The Replacements, Tom Waits, The Movie After Hours. I missed my stepfather when I went away to school. He wrote me hand-written letters about his recent sculpture, or about how he inadvertently killed his old cat while giving him a flea bath and how he rolled him up in the bathmat and buried him in the glass-speckled back yard.
I would visit my mentor for office hours and wear jeans with huge rips in theknees even though it was below freezing outside and I hoped that he would notice. I told him that I had tried to read that Pynchon novel that sat on his shelf—three times I tried—and I still couldn’t get through the first third of it, but I had been younger all those three times, so maybe I’d give it another shot now. He admitted to me that he couldn’t get through that one either, but he smiled that smart, corn cob-teeth grin of his and I knew that he was lying. He was far too smart for that to be the truth. That’s why he was my mentor. That’s why I was becoming a pretty good writer. That’s why when he asked me what grade I thought I deserved and I said B-, he smiled that smile again and wrote down: A.
What are you reading now? He would always ask me that and that would always excite me. One time I held up a soft cover book that looked like it had been found in a muddy puddle and it did because that is where it had been found. That’s where I found it, just there in a puddle on my way to art class. Breaking it Down, by Lydia Davis. I really love it so far, I told him, which made sense, he said, since I was so obsessed with Amy Hempel, and I adored the stories of Vonnegut, Salinger, and Paley, too. And don’t forget Jamaica Kincaid, I said. How could I, he said?
I was always quoting Jamaica Kincaid in the epigraphs of my essays I wrote for him.
These were books no one taught me in school. Thanks school! These were books I happened upon in puddles and in the dirty sheets my uncle Jimmy left ruffled when he took off somewhere else after crashing with us for a while or what my mother brought home from art school or what I stole, because the only thing I ever allowed myself to steal was a book; a book employing brevity that could easily slide into my thrift store trench coat.
My stepfather left my mother, me, my family, before I returned home from college, just a few days before—perhaps only a moment before. I was supposed to have a parting lunch with my mentor before I moved back home, but I left town pretty damn fast because my mother had not dealt with my stepfather leaving with much of her sanity intact and I was needed there to care for her. She would someday become my hero, but this was not the day. These were not those days. Sometimes at night I’d flip through my stepfather’s still-there record collection and want to play them, but he wasn’t there to tell me which song to start with and what to relate it to (the Pixies? My new adoring loves?) and anyway I think he did manage to take the turntable with him on that first frenetic escape. I didn’t know him in that same first sort-of mentor way ever again. I went to the Death to the Pixies tour at a skate rink in Maryland all on my own and I got a set list because one of the roadies was my old peeping-tom neighbor named, no lie, Tommy. I was doing it on my own now.
It was a good five years until I got back to Pittsburgh and was able to make a lunch meeting with my old mentor. He was into Tai Chi by then, spending half of his year in Korea. My stepfather? I heard he was obsessed with Japan, left my mother for a Japanese printmaker, who knows? My mentor was kind, but different, like your friend who discovers Yoga for the first time and always sits up straight. We had lunch at his home. These are wraps, he told me. Very popular in Korea. They are like sandwiches, but they are wraps.
Probably because they are wrapped, I said.
Yes, he said, and smiled that smile, but the sardonic was gone.
We then had tea on the sofa that had no back to lean on. He showed me the special tea-pot and tea thingy and cup thingy and I thought of my stepfather, obsessed with Japanese culture, or so I heard.
Tea in Korea is very ceremonious, he said.
Tea anywhere, I thought. Ask me what I am reading. He danged the pot, or donged it. Ask me something.
I would have told him, Two Cities, Jon Edgar Wideman. Two cities. Philadelphia, Pittsburgh. Breathtaking.
Dong! Ask me a question!
I ached to leave. I’ve outgrown you. I’ve lost you both, two cities. No more mentors. I’ll stick with my staples, my personal classics. I’ll reread them all again and again while I head off to quiet residencies that inspire me (Michener Center, Yaddo, Jentel, VCCA), and find homes for my stories in innovative presses, and a nurturing home for my collection of stories, Walk Back From Monkey School, Press 53.
Kate Hill Cantrill’s writing has appeared in a variety of literary publications, including, StoryQuarterly, The Believer, Salt Hill, Mississippi Review, Quick Fiction, Blackbird, Wigleaf, and others. Her story collection,Walk Back From Monkey School, was published by Press 53 in 2012. She runs the Rabbit Tales Reading and Performance Series in Brooklyn, and is completing a novel.
Small town. Texas. Cows. And a random Liberal Arts University in the middle of all those endless pastures.
Southwestern University. Georgetown, Texas. You have never heard of it. Barely 1000 students and, to my delight, 750 of them are female.
Move-in day. My mom and dad load up the huge trunk of my dad’s black Pontiac and we drive the 12.8 miles from their house to my dorm room, taking country roads the whole way. I will come home every weekend to do laundry.
Huge parking lot filled with too many cars. Young daughters and their parents and their desktop computers and boxes of clothes and posters and memorabilia from back home.
Into my dorm room and my roommate Jessica is already there with her parents as they, too, help her move in. We live in a nice dorm, one that is one of the newer buildings on this campus that dates back to 1840. White halls white walls white floors white girls. They will all join a sorority and they will all wear white on Mondays. I won’t. I will try to join a fraternity just to say a woman infiltrated a frat. The notion will be voted down. I will never join a fraternity or a sorority, and I will be very happy about that.
But this is two years before that and I’m in my first dorm room introducing myself to Jessica. The school paired us up together. She’s a swimmer. I’m a runner. We both chose the same yoga class to take for our first semester. I am meeting Jessica for the first time, though during the summer the school gave us each other’s contact information, and so we have talked online before. I already told her I’m gay. She’s already said that’s awesome and I’m cool with that.
In the next year I will come to some of Jessica’s swim meets. Her toned legs and strong shoulders propelling her through the chlorinated water. In one year she will break three school records.
We decide to turn our beds into bunk beds so we can have more floor space and more desk space. Jessica wants the top. I want the bottom. Already we are perfect roommates.
Even when later on that year Jessica and her boyfriend Austin will spend most nights in our all-female dorm (no men past ten!) and I will crawl out of bed a few different mornings and step on a condom wrapper on the floor, we still get along. Jessica will not like the woman who was my first girlfriend, but she will like my best friend Sabrina. And Sabrina will ogle Jessica’s thick brown hair and perfectly shaped nose and become hooked on her infectious laugh, but we will not hit on Jessica because she is my roommate. Though we will pop her pot-smoking cherry later on that year. And I will get a picture of it.
My parents help me unload my things. And then they leave. No long hugs goodbye. I only live 12.8 miles away. I will see them soon.
They leave and I explore the dorm. So many women, half of whom I peg as dykes because they dress like hippies, and the only hippies I have ever known have all been dykes.
I will find out in a few weeks that I am wrong most of the time, that my gaydar is garbled here.
After I am all moved in, after I have roamed the halls just saying high, I call my best friend Sabrina and she comes over to see my dorm. She only lives 9.3 miles away.
What I do my first night of being a college student: get high and go to a playground with Sabrina. I do the money bars. She goes down the slide. We sit in two swings and stare up at the sky, watch the stars as our feet swing up to meet them.
Chelsey Clammer received her MA in Women’s Studies from Loyola University Chicago. She has been published in THIS, The Rumpus, Atticus Review, Sleet, The Coachella Review and Make/shift among many others. She received the Nonfiction Editor’s Pick Award 2012 from both Revolution House and Cobalt, as well as a Pushcart Prize nomination. Clammer is a weekly columnist for The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, as well as the assistant nonfiction editor for both Eckleburg and The Dying Goose. She is currently finishing up a collection of essays about finding the concept of home in the body, as well as a memoir about sexuality and mental illness. You can read more of her writing at: www.chelseyclammer.com.
