Posted on

Sing to Me

My dad said the Christian bands didn’t know when to end a song. I agreed. God seemed to go on forever.

I wasn’t necessarily raised Christian. We were more of holiday Christians—going to church on Christmas Eve and Easter. We always disregarded denomination and just went to the church that was closest to our house. I think one might have been Baptist. Or perhaps Methodist. I wore a white dress for these occasions, not to look pure, but because it was the only dress I owned.

Though by the time I was fifteen I had accumulated a ton of long skirts in my wardrobe, because I wanted to be a witch. Or, “practice Wicca,” as I thought was the better term. It didn’t sound as hippie woo-woo. I wore the skirts, because I thought Wiccans wore long skirts that magically swept along the ground as they danced and twirled around in their scared circles. I wanted that, too.

I tried listening to what I thought was Wiccan music—chant and Gaelic music and what not, but like the Christian songs, I also thought they went on for too long. So I claimed my favorite singer at the time as my goddess—Natalie Merchant. She seemed spiritual enough to me. And her songs were really short.

I remember being naked in my room at night, playing her songs and twirling around in a circle with the wand I made—a stick with a small fauz-crystal strapped to the end of it with purple yarn. Purple not because its magical meaning is psychic ability, but because purple was the only color of yarn I had. I don’t know what I was trying to invoke with the wand and the nakedness and the turning around in circles, but perhaps I was after some feeling inside of me about being connected to the earth.

Because Wicca to me was more about the earth, poetry, and candles than gods and spells of any sorts. Bide these Wiccan laws ye must with perfect love and perfect trust. I still remember the opening lines to the Wiccan Rede. I never learned the Lord’s prayer.

What turned me away from Christianity was a sermon one Sunday about how all of this New Age stuff was ruining God’s word. This was during my two month stint when I was in eighth grad and trying out Christianity. But during this time I also lived near a forest and a creek and wondered about what the magical life had to say to me. After that sermon I went home and made my wand and never went back to church. I didn’t like how “God’s word” sounded more important than the earth. Plus, lighting a candle seemed a much more efficient spiritual practice to me than listening to Christian rock music.

 

Chelsey Clammer received her MA in Women’s Studies from Loyola University Chicago. She has been published in THIS, The Rumpus, Atticus Review, Sleet and Make/shift among many others. She received the Nonfiction Editor’s Pick Award 2012 from both Revolution House and Cobalt for her essays “BodyHome” and “I Have Been Thinking About,” respectively. She is currently finishing up a collection of essays about finding the concept of home in the body. You can read more of her writing at: www.chelseyclammer.wordpress.com.

Posted on

Get a Whiff of That

My manager at work was fired for “insubordination” awhile ago, and so the owner’s sister stepped up to be the manager. She’s a nice enough gal from Texas, someone who has never been in the restaurant industry, but is here at our bar/restaurant to try and make some good changes. After the previous manager was fired, the next day I was called up into the new manager’s office.

“Honey, I need to talk to you.” 

“Yeah, sure.” I figured she was going to give some explanation for the sudden firing, for the fact that things are going to change around here, that I was now going to have a list of, like, actual things to do. 

I entered into her office prepared for these “team-spirit” and “work smarter not harder” words. But instead, once the office door closed behind me she said she needed to talk with me about my hygiene.

“Honey, we got an email from a customer who said one of the waitresses smelt bad. Well, he said that he couldn’t tell if it was the chili or the waitress, but something didn’t smell nice.”

“Uh-huh,” was all I could say.

“And he said it was the waitress with the dreadlocks, so we know it was you.”

“Well I wear deodorant. And I shower,” I said while raising each arms up into the air, sniffing my armpits one by one.

“Oh honey,” Texas gal continued, “I’m sure it was just one of them hot days when y’all were workin’ harder than a horse. I just had to mention it to you, because we got this here email.”

She didn’t look embarrassed, but almost proud that she got to do this duty as a manager, tell other employees about what they needed to improve on. 

“Okay, well, I’ll keep putting the deodorant on.”

“Okay, honey. And thanks for working so hard.”

Truth time: I don’t wear deodorant. Never have. My armpits feel weird with the slick gel or sticky powder smashed into them. Plus, I don’t shave my armpits, and hate the feeling of all of that natural hair assaulted with some unnatural smell-neutralizing element. But even with this lack of deodorant, I still don’t think I smell. And I’ve never had any complaints, though I guess I can’t say that now.

I would like to think it was the chili that did, in fact smell, that the bean and dead-cow combination is what filtered into that snobby customer’s nose. I do not smell rank, though I think our chili does. But maybe that is just my vegetarian snobbery seeping out of me.

When I got home and told my husband of what Texas gal said to me, he said, “But you smell like beautiful sunshine rainbows.”

So there.

 

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 for her essays “BodyHome” and “I Have Been Thinking About,” respectively. She is currently finishing up a collection of essays about finding the concept of home in the body. You can read more of her writing at: www.chelseyclammer.wordpress.com.

 

 

 

Posted on

Fly with It

The first book I ever wrote was called The Fly that Would Not Die. I was eight years old when I composed it. The story was about, well, a fly that would not die. Fly swatter, bare hand, snapped towel, anything the narrator could use to try and hit the fly dead. But it just wouldn’t die. I wrote this story based off of a real life experience of trying to kill a fly. Like the theme of the story, the endeavor of trying to kill the fly was unsuccessful. There was even a black Crayoned picture in the book of a fly with huge wings buzzing throughout a room to accompany the text. I stapled it all together and presented it to my mother. She said it was the best story she had ever read. With this great acclaim to fuel me, I decided right then to become a writer. 

There have been many failed attempts at this career. The first was a “novel” I wrote at the age of twenty about a drunk lesbian in college. I was a drunk lesbian in college when I wrote it. Next up was forty pages of an unfinished novel about an older woman who broke the heart of a younger woman. I wrote it when an older woman broke my heart. This is all to say I’m not good at writing fiction. 

The woman who broke my heart had kicked me out of her life because she thought I was a lazy little woman. She thought this because I had quit my summer job in between college semesters in order to write for a few weeks before I had to start up classes again. I lost my relationship with her because I wanted to write. A horrible forty pages of material came out of that. But at least I stuck to my intentions, spent my spare time trying to pursue a writing career, no matter how atrocious the writing.

Like most writers, I have more unfinished projects than full-fleshed finished ones. And while I do have a book of essays out at a godawful amount publishers right now (publishers who are taking a godawful amount of time getting back to me), I cannot count on anything to happen with it in order to make money. And so I wait tables twelve hours a week at a tiny-ass bar/restaurant in nowhere Colorado—a town where I have retreated to in order to write more—to get money, to fuel my need for coffee and cigarettes while I write.

My mother does not like the fact that I smoke, though she still supports my writing career. She has at times given me money to live off of, a house in which to live, and a car to drive so I could concentrate on writing instead of having to have, like, an “actual” career.

A few months ago I was having a hard time concentrating on writing, because there was a fly infestation in my house. Little black buzzing annoyances that would not die. I wrote an essay about the flies, wrote about how they were encroaching on my writing space and consuming my brain, making me have nightmares about flies attacking my body, and about how the fly swatter broke after too many attempts to try and kill the little suckers that would not die. I submitted the essay to a journal. It will be published next month. The irony of this is not lost on me.

And so I find myself returning to my roots, randomly writing about flies, and still trying to claim a space in this world as a writer, as someone who takes life experiences and transforms them into words.

 

 

Chelsey Clammer received her MA in Women’s Studies from Loyola University Chicago. She has been published in THIS, The Rumpus, Atticus Review, Sleet and Make/shift among many others. She received the Nonfiction Editor’s Pick Award 2012 from both Revolution House and Cobalt for her essays “BodyHome” and “I Have Been Thinking About,” respectively. She is currently finishing up a collection of essays about finding the concept of home in the body. You can read more of her writing at: www.chelseyclammer.wordpress.com.