He had a heart I wish I had.
—Robert
Creeley
I guess I placed two white
orchid flowers between
these pages but I forget
when. They didn’t exist
until today when they
crumbled onto my lap.
“Failing to find a line by Robert Creeley in a book by Frank Stanford” does not appear in the lake-shaped excuse (Buckrider Books, 2026).
Conyer Clayton [photo credit: Joanna Eldredge Morrissey] is a queer writer and editor from Louisville, a dual US-Canadian citizen living between Ottawa and Kentucky. They are the author of But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves. (Winner of the Archibald Lampman Award), We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite (Winner of the Ottawa Book Award), and many chapbooks. Conyer’s novel-in-progress has been supported by a MacDowell Fellowship, a McCormack Writing Centre Scholarship, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and The City of Ottawa. the lake-shaped excuse (Buckrider Books, Wolsak and Wynn) is their third book.
