WRITER & EDITOR
Conyer Clayton is a writer and editor from Kentucky currently living in Ottawa, whose award-winning, multi-genre work often explores grief, disability, and gender-based violence through a surrealist lens. They are the author two full-length poetry collections: But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves. (Winner of The Archibald Lampman Award, and Finalist for the Pat Lowther, Raymond Souster, and ReLit Awards, A Feed Dog Book, Anvil Press) and We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite (Winner of the 2021 Ottawa Book Award, Guernica Editions). They are a Senior Editor at Augur Society and a member of VII (an Ottawa-based poetry collective).
Conyer's latest chapbook, Kneeling in Our Name, is out with Gap Riot Press, and will be a part of their forthcoming 2026 full-length collection of poetry with Buckrider Books (Wolsak and Wynn).
They are currently working on a novel with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
Their fiction, poetry, and nonfiction has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry 2023, The Ex-Puritan, This Magazine, Room Magazine, filling station, Canthius, Arc Poetry Magazine, Plenitude, CV2, The Capilano Review, and others.
Photo by Curtis Perry
But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves.
(A Feed Dog Book, Anvil Press, 2022)
Purchase through Anvil Press or your favourite local bookseller
Winner of the Archibald Lampman Award
Longlisted for the League of Canadian Poets Pat Lowther Memorial Award
Longlisted for the League of Canadian Poets Raymond Souster Award
Shortlisted for the ReLit Award for Poetry
The narrator of But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves. weaves through aquatic landscapes—water parks, beast-filled lakes, vast oceans—reverting to childhood and back, foreshadowing the inevitable with a calm born of accepting the absurd. Conyer Clayton's poems, explore how we question the validity of our own memories, especially those of abuse and assault, and the way we forget—or obsess over forgetting—memories of those who’ve died. These poems validate dreams and all internal experience as authentic … even when we don’t know it.
"But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves. is a powerful testimony of survivorship. ... these poems overflow with raw emotion and wash away expectations."
—Meaghan Flokstra, The Ampersand Review
"... [an] exemplary collection of surreal prose poems."
—Elena Bentley, Arc Poetry Magazine
"... But this isn’t a grim book, partly because the scenarios often feature weird, funny details ... but also because the speaker in these nightmarish situations actively seeks a way out."
—Barb Casey, The Toronto Star
"The surrealist dreamscape of Conyer Clayton’s latest collection provides one of the most honest and visceral depictions of living and slowly healing from CPTSD that I have ever read ... a testament to intentional and persistent survival.”
—Emma Rhodes, The Ex-Puritan
