interview

Shya Scanlon has started a little series of interviews on Facebook. Reprinted with his permission, here it is:

Facebook Tiny Interview Series: Matthew Simmons

Shya Scanlon: Are you ready, Matthew?

Matthew Simmons: Sure thing.

Shya Scanlon: You are the author of A Jello Horse—a novella out from Publishing Genius--a contributor at HTMLGIANT, The Man Who Couldn't Blog, and you've been an editor for Hobart and before that, for Monkeybicycle. You're basically a big fat writing scenester. Tell me a little about your own publishing project: Happy Cobra Books.

Matthew Simmons: When I decided to put together a bunch of really short things I'd written in a cover and call it a chapbook—Creation Stories—I figured I needed a to give myself a publishing name. I never really intended to do anything else with it, but sort of ended up approaching a couple of other writers and being approached by a couple of other writers, and next thing I knew, I had a website and a couple of stories to turn into chapbooks and ebooks and some obligation to do so.

In my defense, everyone else seemed to be doing it at the time. And it felt like I needed yet another distraction to keep me from my own writing and editing.

Shya Scanlon: Did it work? How long can you go without writing before you start to feel like a bad person?

Matthew Simmons: Pretty long, actually. After I finished my MFA program I went months without being able to write a word. In the time since, I've edited and written a little, but not as much as I'd like. All the other things I do make me feel connected to writing, though, and I sometimes wonder if it's a bad thing. Sure, I haven't finished that novel, but I posted a short, craft-oriented observation on HTML Giant a couple of days ago, so I'm still engaged in the work in one respect, right? I'm still preparing some material for a Hugo House class, right? I'm still doing it, aren't I?

Maybe not. I mean, aren't there enough venues for writing-related work to be done that I could distract myself with them for the rest of my life and never write another piece of fiction? I like my blog, and I like interviewing people/editing interviews for Hobart, and I like HTML Giant, but what if they are killing my novel?

Shya Scanlon: I know what you mean. There are many places to scratch right around the perimeter of the itch itself—so close, in fact, that the relief almost feels the same.

In both your book A Jello Horse, and your unpublished collection Happy Rock, you seem to pursue a kind of realism charged with the fantastic—sometimes overtly, as when a narrator's mother is a series of exploding clay Golems, and sometimes more subtly, as in the House of Telephones scene at the end of Jello. Do you think life itself is magical, or do you just wish it were?

Matthew Simmons: Neither, really. The real world is difficult and unpleasant and occasionally very beautiful, and I'm okay with it staying that way—and this is lucky because it is not going to bend to my desires. I want the world on the page to be whatever it wants to be—which is to say whatever my creative impulse wants it to be—and this is lucky because I am in complete control of that world.

Shya Scanlon: Are you really? What are the writers who most influenced you as a young reader, and/or a young writer.

Matthew Simmons: Yeah, I think I am. I suppose that I like to write things that other people want to read, and because of that, I have traded a measure of my artistic independence, and made a kind of non-aggression pact with an audience, but I could break that pact at any time. I could write something that is totally unfriendly, completely unreadable, and alienate readers if want to. I suppose one might argue that without readers there is no writing—that my fiction occurs in the shared space between me and the reader, but I could be my own reader, right? I could produce something just for me, and defiantly decide that it is good and done well even if no one else agrees with me.

It took me a little while to become a reader. As a teenager, though, Douglas Adams led me to William Burroughs and Kurt Vonnegut and I've never forgotten what it was like reading them. Vonnegut I can still read, too. Burroughs not as much. But the liveliness of his imagination and the power of his language still influence me, I think. Burroughs is maybe a little too bleak for me now. Vonnegut is dark, but his narrators seem resigned to and above the absurdity of life. He's comforting in that way.

A few years ago, when I was just starting to write seriously, just starting to send my writing out to places that published stories, just started to toy with finding readers for what I was writing, I read Meet Me in the Moon Room by Ray Vukcevich. Up to that point, I was tentative about surrealist/fabulist elements in my stories. Ray's book was full of them, and also full of stories that I connected to emotionally. Stories that made me happy and sad. After reading that book, I said, "well, all bets are off," and just wrote what I wanted.

Shya Scanlon: Respond to this observation: It seems to me many writers of our emerging generation see a conflict between "serious" writing and "emotional" writing. Do you think young writers avoid melodrama to a fault?

Matthew Simmons: They avoid it to their detriment, I think. Melodrama, sentimentality, even cliche. It seems like we run from it, preferring instead an arch tone. But I think we will, as we get older, return to it. I think eventually sentimentality and melodrama reveal their benefits to writers over time. A line from a story by Steve Almond: "It takes years to become as soft-hearted and hopeful as I am."

Shya Scanlon: This feels like a good note to end our Tiny Interview on, Matthew. Thank you so much for playing along. If anyone would like to ask Matthew any questions, please use this space to do so.

Matthew Simmons: We ended on my endorsement of melodrama, cliche, and sentimentality!

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I read in Portland with the lovely and talented Daniel Bailey on Sunday. Here is a recap.

Mike Daily was there, and he made videos of the reading.





I need a haircut. And to exercise more.

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My brother's tumblr blog is still going strong.