Poetry Cure: The Size of a Bird by Clementine Morrigan

An Interview with Clementine

All Lit Up: Tell us about your collection. Clementine Morrigan: The Size of a Bird is a book about desire and trauma. It’s a book about the art of cultivating desire from a space of femininity and insisting on its importance, despite the reality of misogyny and a culture of sexual violence. It’s a book about bike rides and summertime and fucking, skateboarding, break ups, and rape. These poems works to hold the complexity of navigating sexuality under rape culture, the pleasures and joys, as well as the terrors and pains. Ultimately, The Size of a Bird is a love letter to the practice of staying alive and stretching ourselves toward the lives we desire, and deserve.ALU: Do you have any steadfast writing rituals?CM: Work dates with other queers are indispensable, just like quietly keeping each other company while we each do our own work. I also have a practice with a friend of mine where we try to send each other a poem every day. Anything that keeps me writing and showing up to my work in a consistent way is important. ALU: What’s the best piece of advice anyone has given you about writing, or life?CM: I don’t remember where I heard this. It was a long time ago, but it stayed with me. Basically, the idea is that filmmakers let the film roll. They don’t stop filming to edit. They film now, edit later. With writing we can let our editor brains get in the way of writing. This can freeze us up. But writing and editing are two different processes. Your editor brain is important and will come in handy when the time is right. But when you are writing, don’t try to edit. Let the words flow.ALU: What, outside of other books/writers, inspires your writing?CM: I consider my writing to be a practice of trauma magic. My writing comes out of a lineage of zinesters and poets who use writing to grapple with the intensity of pain and find paths toward healing. My writing is deeply invested in creating worlds without sexual violence. I am inspired by resilience and the will to live, by incredible acts of resistance to violence. I am inspired by octopuses who will cross land for freedom and all of us who are trying to create a different world.

The Poem

First Dates–From The Size of a Bird by Clementine Morrigan (Inanna Publications, 2017)

Clementine Morrigan is a writer, artist, educator, and working witch. Their first book, Rupture, was published in 2012. Her second collection of poetry, The Size of a Bird, was released from Inanna Publications in 2017. Their creative writing has appeared in the literary journals Prose & Lore and Soliloquies, and her scholarly writing has appeared in the academic journals Somatechnics, The Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, and Knots. They have also written for Guts Magazine. She is the creator of two short films, Resurrection (2013) and City Witch (2016) as well as being a prolific zinester with a current project titled Fucking Magic. Their creative, artistic, and scholarly works consider trauma, madness, addiction, sobriety, gender, sexuality, desire, magic, re-enchantment, environment, and more-than-human worlds. Additionally, she facilitates workshops and guest lectures on a number of topics, as well as providing professional tarot reading services for individuals and events. They are a white settler of Irish, Scottish, and English ancestry living on Anishinabek, Haudenosaunee, and Wendat land. She is a practitioner of trauma magic.

During the month of April, you can buy The Size of a Bird as well as any of our featured Poetry Cure books for 15% off (+ get a free notebook to jot down your moments of reflection).Keep up with us all month on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook with the hashtag #ALUpoetrycure.