Ethan Seavey is a writer and a student at New York University, studying both memoir and fiction writing. He grew up just outside the city of Chicago. As a child he read constantly, but when he was handed a smartphone, he lost that love for many years. In recent years, he has been making strides to push the phone away and expand his perspective. He has been writing for most of his twenty years. His short stories and poems often focus on his perspective as a gay man who was raised steeped in Catholicism, and they have been published in literary journals in both Illinois and New York. Now, he’s working on his most ambitious project yet: a novel which was dubbed “Queer Gothic” by one of its earliest editors. He likes that phrase quite a lot. Email: eps362 [at] nyu.edu
by Ethan Seavey I’ve heard owls are signs of a big shift in your life; I also know that I only really look for owls during those times. Exercise for me is short lived or long lived, short lived to match my attention or long lived to accommodate my frequent breaks for walking, exploring, writing,…
by Ethan Seavey I heard: Why don’t you stop moving around so much? Why do you always bounce your leg/twirl your hair/sit with your legs folded under you/tap your fingers/tap your pen/touch your mustache/hold water in your mouth? Settle down! Why do you play soccer better when you’re rubbing your thumb and forefinger? Why do…
by Ethan Seavey I like the typewriter. A gift from a friend. A manual 1963 Smith Corona Silent Super in sandalwood carrying case with keys I understand (letters and the space bar) and even keys I will never understand (SET and CLR). Yes it is the Super Silent but no it is not silent and…
by Ethan Seavey Exile is on my mind and there’s a large full moon above my head I cannot see through the clouds. I am part of a family of three exiles who are doing it again, recovering after exile, and working hard to stay together. Our shared communities have dropped us for the third…
by Ethan Seavey On the bus my mind just keeps running And I’d love for it to slow down. It does when I’m writing because the thoughts can’t happen four times a second. They go as fast as my fingers do, and my fingers are clunky on this little glass screen, they have to go…
by Ethan Seavey September 7, 2021 (roughly 11,000 years ago) A sad young novelist named Ethan Seavey wrote this sad scene in which the love interest is brutally honest and is revealed to be less loving of Peter the person and more loving of Peter the artist. At the end of a three month long workshop,…
by Ethan Seavey “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.” —Jean-Jacques Rousseau (some guy who wound up as the father of French philosophy) How much you can divide this sentence into similarly incorrect phrases? [Man is born free and everywhere he is.] “Everywhere” is incorrect because the idea of a man is…
by Ethan Seavey This is your sign to acknowledge that it is pride month and that pride comes from decades of unvalued work by Black and Latinx queer people and that pride month would not exist without their strength and that you should watch the film Paris is Burning because you’ve lived 23 years as…
by Ethan Seavey On the night that I first told someone else that I was gay, the world was held together with a single phrase which was echoed from speaker to listener and back again. My friend and I were both queer but I was the first one saying it. So for us, it was…
by Ethan Seavey In the growing sector of the contemporary art world which focuses on environmental issues, participants in the art (artists, critics, and the general audience) disagree on the intention of each work of art: does it merit only aesthetic praise, or is it a successful work of climate activism? In my brief internship…
by Ethan Seavey The extant Kin of the Colonizer are paralyzed but that doesn’t stop them from running their mouths. They yap and yell and are filled with angst and guilt. Their rage fuels something, but that rage is only easy to find when they are pinned up against that Last True American Colonialist. Otherwise…
by Ethan Seavey A metal bucket with a snowman on it; a plastic faux-neon Christmas tree; a letter from Alexandra; an unsent letter to Alexandra; a small statuette of a world traveler missing his little plastic map; a snow globe showcasing a large white skull, with black sand floating around it. When I was much…
by Ethan Seavey “Sometimes, before I take a piss, I spit into the toilet as a sacrifice to a false idol.” The priest nods. He’s heard this one before. He was somewhere else before. Now he’s a resident of the confessional inside the attic of the home inside my head. “I’m gravely concerned about coyotes,…
by Ethan Seavey It’s halfway through the month of December and New York is filled with pine boughs and small yellow bells and horse-drawn carriages and scarves. We are seated on the edge of the fountain in Washington Square Park, though this time of year the water has been shut off. A group of five…
by Ethan Seavey There was a period in my life when I believed that all humans came from one man. This included his wife Eve. After that followed a period when I believed nothing and I thought that was enough. I never negated the information that I loved as a child. In Catholic school they’ll teach…
by Ethan Seavey My grandmother’s bird of choice is the rooster. She was raised in rural Kentucky and now lives in rural Wisconsin. She collects all sorts of roosters (and, by extension, some hens): wall art, printed dish towels, ceramic statues as small as a pinky and as large as a lamp, coin bowls and…
by Ethan Seavey If you look at my profiles online, they are catered to appear normal, if dated. I haven’t posted very much over the past few years, and those that I have posted have been relatively mundane, which mark the relatively mundane moments of my life. They’re honest and small, like a photo of…
by Ethan Seavey My last night in the house on Euclid Avenue will go one of two ways: A. When I climb through a window in my bedroom (which will no longer be my bedroom tomorrow) and onto the flat roof outside in order to smoke the very last bowl of cannabis in my home…
by Ethan Seavey The Welcome Center museum isn’t exceptionally well-known. I often hear variations of the same phrase: “Oh, I’ve been coming to Breckenridge for years and never knew there was a museum back here!” It does get a lot of foot traffic, though, because (as its name implies) it is in the back of…
by Ethan Seavey Breckenridge, Colorado: a village in the Rocky Mountains which is now known for its popular ski resort. Before 1859, it was a valley with a lush Blue River running through the crease by the foothills of the Ten Mile Range. In 1859, gold was first mined in Breckenridge. After 1859, over 5,000 white…