On Describing What My Book Is About
I have always struggled to talk about my own writing. When people ask me what my book is about, I mumble something about short stories in rural settings, relationships, struggles with faith, connection, doubt. I fear, each time I speak, that I am engaged in a process of reduction—that I am deflating my work and handing the listener a little popped balloon in the shape of an empty concept. I learned early on that the best stories, or the ones I liked the most anyway, build their power through a cumulative effect, through layer after layer of atmosphere and character development that, as a whole, create an effect in the reader that really shouldn’t be described by words, in the same way a walk in the forest will enter into the body’s receptive system in a sequence of ragged breaths, snapped twigs, light slanting through trees, birds calling in the brush, so that, when you reemerge, you have been through something. This makes my stories often difficult to describe, at least for me. I don’t always have a straightforward plot leading to a crisis, or when I do, I’m less interested in the crisis, and more interested in the ripple effects of that crisis. In how it has touched the deep pool inside of a person. I tend to write from interior places, feel most comfortable deep in a character’s psyche. I often have to keep reminding myself that my characters should go and do things and not roll around in their thoughts for the whole story. You’re probably getting the idea that the stories in this collection, First Aid for Choking Victims, are boring. I hope not. Each character is afflicted by some big intense thing. A loss of faith. Grief. Struggles in a relationship, and they spend the story trying to work their way out or through. My focus in writing the book was to go deep into the affliction. To watch the characters squirm. Then see them move through their pain or anxiety. To keep them as close company as possible—to move through it with them. I’m not sure what you’ll get when you come out the other side of these stories, other than an experience of, I hope, deep immersion. The stories in this collection tend to be long. There are only eight stories and the book is over 300 pages. I hope you’ll take a chance and move through them. I hope you’ll draw the blinds and block out the world and sit inside them for a while. I hope you’ll let them work their way through your sensory system until you come back out and the world of the book lives inside of you, a series of impressions, character quakes, long spans of longing. I hope that when people ask you about the book, you’ll have nothing to say.
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Matthew reading from his book at Hot Plate Brewery in Pittsfield, MA!