These Are Our Demands by Matthew Pitt
Twelve narratives ranging in aesthetic from tidy realism to a slanted, fabulist bent concerned with the contours of where our culture is headed. Through subversive satire, this collection explores ways in which consignment to the margins opens up a kind of wilderness beyond the borders of polite society.
Broken (in the Best Possible Way)
by Jenny Lawson
Both poignant and laugh-out-loud, Jenny Lawson details her experience with severe depression as she explores the beauty as well as the hardships of mental illness and the joy that can still be found along the way.
Finlay Donovan Is Killing It
by Elle Cosimano
An entertaining, lighthearted read, perfect for summer vacation. Finlay Donovan, a struggling novelist and newly single mom, is overheard discussing her new novel’s plot and is mistaken for a contract killer. When she accidentally accepts an offer to “take care of” a problem husband, she becomes tangled into a web of murder, deception, and hilarious mishaps.
Glen E.Ellman
Matthew Pitt
5 questions: Matthew Pitt
Tell us a little bit about yourself. While I grew up in St. Louis, I’ve resided in nine states and District of Columbia. This plays a significant role in my writing partly due to a fascination with nuanced regional distinctions and the surprising links between a Biloxi, Mississippi, resident with one in Brooklyn. Since 2012 we’ve been in Fort Worth, where I write and teach creative writing at TCU and am director of English undergraduate studies. But my greatest title, job, and joy is Father of Daughters.
What do you appreciate about the short stories as a writer and a reader? The form often examines humans in flux, at a crossroads or breaking point that may or may not be of their making. Short stories are keyholes that peer at characters who are displaced, made a rash choice, are witnessing stasis shatter, or who face, in other words, significant pressure. To examine that pressure playing out on the page reminds me of our frailties, our hopes, our potential, our evolution. The words must count and be critical to match the moments being described.
How does teaching inform your writing? If I’ve published or finished revising a new work, I might offer students a craft snapshot about how I navigated a thorny element or exciting challenge. Maybe they can apply that approach to their projects. It’s also a way to emphasize how each new artistic work presents its own set of peculiar problems and possibilities, and writers owe it to their work to not shy away from those. On the flip side, discussing craft matters or developing new prompts for my classes often sets me on new artistic adventures. Seeing my students strive amplifies my own artistic energy. Both roles (teaching and writing) bring about their stresses and doubts, but both, at their best, replenish one another too.
What have you read recently that you would recommend and why? Spring doesn’t leave time to read outside of what I assign, but I can recommend Randall Kenan, a brilliant writer who invented a North Carolina town, Tim’s Creek, populating and drawing from it over decades to investigate race, sensuality, spirituality, and Southern cuisine, published a superb collection just before passing late last summer, If I Had Two Wings. Secondly, Joan Silber’s Secrets of Happiness. Each Joan Silber title is a feast and feat. She covers wide swaths of time so elegantly and swiftly, you feel keyed into the arc of characters’ lives within a few pages, thanks to voice-driven insights so precise, you gasp.
What is next on the horizon for you? I recently completed a novel and novella that couldn’t be more different in tone, approach, and time it took to draft and revise — but both were stories I had to put to page. Now that they’re grown, I’m working to get both out in the world. My next story collection is entering adolescence, and another novel is taking baby steps. It’s a pleasure parenting several narrative children at once in their varied stages of development.
