Author: Claire Polders

Yes! The Whale has arrived—and I’m in love! ♥♥♥

This is us in front of our home, and you can receive the Whale in your home, too, anywhere in the world.

I hope you will all send us pictures when that happens!

Intro: “Paris-based novelist Claire Polders discusses how watery places—from Iceland to Greece to the shores of her native Holland—have inspired her work.”

Megan Harlan interviewed me for Carsickness Journal. February 2018.

“There wasn’t really one place that most captivated me. It was the concept of mobility, of flowing, of changing horizons, that made me fall in love with traveling. I’m not bound to one spot and not bound to one opinion. I can change my mind as easily as I can change my perspective, and the two often go hand in hand.”

Photo: Iceland, 2008

Read the rest of the interview here.

Be it hope, happiness, healthcare, or a heart, I wish 2018 will bring everyone what they need most in life.

My main dream for the new year is for more and more girls to understand the patriarchal society they are born in, and grow up to be wise, free, responsible, and powerful women. And for my writing to encourage their consciousness and their goals.

Very honored to have received three Pushcart Prize nominations this year! One from TriQuarterly for my story “The Men on the Fence,” one from Paul Crenshaw for the same story, and one from matchbook for my story “Woman of the Century.”

I was also nominated twice for The Best Small Fictions, by Connotation Press for “The Anxious One” and by matchbook for “Woman of the Century“.

Earlier this year Connotation Press nominated “Speaking of Ovid” for The Best of the Net.

I’m deeply grateful to the editors for selecting and championing my work!

Recently published:

• The short short “Dawn” (finalist in the Fineline Competition) in Mid-American Review
• The flash fiction “The Hardest Thing” (finalist in the flash fiction competition) in Iron Horse
• The short essay “The Gravity of Air” in The Forge
• The flash fiction “One-Way Family” in (b)OINK

As I’m finishing my novel and have already started a new one, I haven’t written much short fiction this year, but I can announce one piece forthcoming in 2018:

• “The Brazilian Lover” in: Fiction International

Last bit of news: Three previously published short shorts (“Woman of the Week”, “Back to Back”, and “Dimensions”) will be published in the AROHO’s Waves Anthology, A Confluence of Women’s Voices, 2018

Happy to announce I have two essays published this season. A longer one, “Beach Bodies,” on Syrian refugees and the Greek islands as a holiday destination, in Room Magazine (available for order here). A shorter one, “Possible Reactions,” on living and writing in dark times, in The Pinch (available for order here).

More flash fictions on the net have appeared in Whiskey Paper (“Classic Woman“), matchbook (“Woman of the Century“),  Blue Fifth Review (“Atmospheric Betrayal“), and Flash Frontier (“Seven Causes of my Mother’s Bicycle Accident“).

Thank you, dear editors, for giving my words such beautiful homes, and thank you, dear readers, for your time.

In a far, far togetherness, in a bed beneath a slanted roof, Daniel and I once made up a story about a French girl and a whale. Not too long ago, we decided to write it down so we could share it with the world. And the result will be readable as a beautifully illustrated children’s book (10+) in summer 2018!!!

From Publisher’s Marketplace: “Claire Polders and screenwriter Daniel Presley’s debut A WHALE IN PARIS is a hopeful and heroic story about a girl who befriends a whale that appears in the Seine during the Nazi occupation of Paris.”

The picture above is a painting by Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson.