10 Questions for Claude Olson
- By Edward Clifford
I am often mistaken for a tiny biting inset. No one cares to know my taxonomic name. The term "midge" will suffice. Any little two-winged fly can be a midge. There are highland midges and phantom midges, midges with affectionate nicknames like "punkies" and "no-see-ums."
—from "13 Considerations of the Holy Bug," Volume 63, Issue 4 (Winter 2022)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
As a kid with a big imagination and a very short attention span, I would think up stories all the time but rarely write them down. So my earliest memory of a story I could commit to paper was an elaborate spin on an assignment for my 10th grade English class. Every time we were given a new list of vocabulary words, our teacher asked us to write a paragraph showing that we could use them in proper context. The paragraphs did not have to connect to one another and yet I decided this was the perfect excuse to construct a serialized story.
I still had not developed the ability to take one idea and stick with it so each month, my story took on a new, disconcerting permutation. In just the first chapter, a six-year-old girl’s father dies in a terrorist attack and, from there, she processes her grief over the course of a decade, becomes infatuated with another woman, and falls into a torrid and toxic love affair. Somehow, I was able to shoehorn the vocabulary words into each new installment so my English teacher, likely bewildered and possibly concerned for my mental well-being, gave me an A every time.
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
I was lucky enough to work with the Mass Review’s own Franny Choi during my last semester of college. She taught the first and only creative writing course I ever took at Smith and it was through her guidance that I learned how to workshop a piece and incorporate the feedback of my peers.
This piece actually started life as we began the creative nonfiction unit of this course. I was greatly influenced by the readings Franny had selected. I adored “A Street Full of Splendid Strangers” by Leslie Jamison for the way it intertwined factual information with personal narrative and I found inspiration in the title and structure of “Nine Considerations of Black People in Space” by Hanif Abdurraqib. I also drew structural and stylistic inspiration from two books recommended to me by a writer friend, Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offil and Bluets by Maggie Nelson.
What other professions have you worked in?
I am less than a year out of college so I would not consider myself a professional anything just yet. I’ve tried my hand at a wide variety of jobs, mostly within the field of education. I’ve been a summer school teacher, a private writing tutor, a behavioral therapist, and a virtual literacy coach. Whether teaching children how to multiply two-digit numbers or say their own name, each of these experiences has helped me practice breaking down complex topics into explainable terms. It also helps that working a lot of odd jobs leads to a wealth of anecdotes and writing material.
What did you want to be when you were young?
Anything but a teacher, ironically enough. I couldn’t imagine being stuck in school for the rest of my life. I would often get bored in class and let my mind wander, dreaming up imaginary worlds and doodling little characters. I envisioned a life as a fashion designer, or perhaps an actor, maybe a journalist if I learned how to stick to a deadline. What I really wanted was to be an artist and a writer for the rest of my life in whatever form that took.
What inspired you to write this piece?
At first, I want to say that it was as simple as fulfilling a class assignment. If not for Franny Choi’s email, reminding me that I needed to submit a piece to be workshopped and that the deadline was fast approaching, I may have never found the motivation to write this essay.
However, that is not the same as inspiration. What came to my mind as I wrote that night, in a fervor familiar to any chronic procrastinator, was a painful memory from a few weeks prior. A man in a CVS, a total stranger, had said to me that he had never seen a midget in real life before. “Only in porno,” he added.
I was infuriated by how much power this stranger held over me. With only a few words, he rendered me a brainless sex object and I could do nothing to fight back. So, as I wrote that evening, I poured my anger into this nascent essay. I thought about the 15 students who would be reading it and I decided to drop them into my discomfort. I did not want them to pity me, just simply understand my perspective. As I finished the first draft, I realized this was all an exercise in self-empowerment and righteous indignation.
Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
Growing up, the world felt incredibly small. I had a very isolated childhood, spending long summer vacations alone. Stories became my means of escape. I’d wander around the backyard, imagining falling in love on a desert island, or riding a wild horse into the Western sunset, or even just exploring a shopping mall in the dead of night. I developed an intense curiosity for the world beyond my suburban neighborhood and, even after I left, these made-up places still came with me. I would not write like my life depends on it if not for those long summers. In a way, I’m grateful I was able to build an imagination strong enough to act as a survival tool.
Do you have any rituals or traditions that you do in order to write?
I almost always start with pen and paper. I love to make sprawling mind maps, scribbling down every idea that pops into my head and finding a way to connect it to everything else I’ve come up with. After that, I dive into a research rabbit hole, finding historical facts, etymologies, and other Wikipedia tidbits that become more branches on my mind map. Finally, I open a Google Doc and start trying to pull coherent sentences out of my tangled mess of ideas. That is the hardest (and most rewarding) part.
If you could work in another art form, what would it be?
I hugely admire the patience and attention to detail it takes to create comics and animation. If I had the artistic talent, I would love to write and illustrate my own graphic memoir.
What are you working on currently?
I’m gathering ideas for an essay about my bowed legs and how, when I was a teenager, I almost underwent surgery to “correct” them. I want to write about the beauty of physical deformities and disabled bodies.
What are you reading right now?
I have been chipping away at The Book of Delights by Ross Gay. It is not a long book but I have been reading it slowly, taking in every lovely delight one at a time. Ross Gay uses wonderful lyrical prose and his gratitude for the little joys in the world is infectious.
CLAUDE OLSON is a writer, activist, artist, and educator from Rochester, New York. Her work is informed by her experience living with achondroplasia, a form of dwarfism, and by her queer identity. She graduated from Smith College in 2022 with a BA in education & child study. At Smith, she published the story “A Guide to Swedish Death Cleaning” in the campus literary magazine Emulate and authored the zine Organizing Is for Everyone: A Guide for the Emerging Activist. She currently resides in Washington, DC and works for the PEN/Faulkner Foundation as a member of the Education Programs team.
