|
|
||||
| archive . about . books . readings . writing . projects . workshops | |||||
| Category:SelfPromo . Browse other Categories | |
||||
PowerPoint Off: Matt Briggs and Doug Nufer
November 11, 2008
An audio visual duel to the death between a hippie and a business man.
On November 18th, 2008 at 7:30 PM at the Jewel Box Theater in Belltown (free of charge), Matt Briggs and Doug Nufer will present their “roadmap” for the future of the community writing organization Richard Hugo House. Neither is affiliated with the organization. And neither are you. Present your own vision of the future at powerpointoff.blogspot.com or come to the party to heckle, cheer, and consider: is a community writing center a halfway house or school? (PDF Poster | FaceBook Event)
The Jewel Box Theater on 2322 2nd Ave. Seattle, WA 98121; 206.441-5823.X2; Jewelbox@seanet.com
Seattle Magazine - The New Weird
September 20, 2008
Brangien Davis
It's great to see the slippery of sense of realism that seems part and parcel with local lit attempts at naturalism. In a longer article, Davis could have mentioned that most local lit attempts to bill itself as "realistic" but end up coming out likeH. L. Davis' 1936 novel Honey in the Horn, Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion, Geek Love by Kathryn Dunn, or more recently Tom Spanbauer's Now Is the Hour. Davis's article reminded me of an article Clark Humprey wrote in 1998 for The Stranger.
Davis also wrote: Seattleite Briggs is no stranger to the new weird, and this story (first published in Seattle magazine, October 2007), is among many of a similar ilk in his new collection, The End Is the Beginning. Briggs says he's been influenced by folk tales, where "weird things happen that wouldn't make any sense in life...but they make sense in the story."
Final State Press has just released my new collection of stories
August 10, 2008
Final State Press has just released my new book, The End is the Beginning, a collection of stories I've been writing since 1998. This is the first book I've published with Final State, but they plan on releasing a novel next year, The Double E, and hopefully more books after that. I wrote many of the stories for reading series and events around the Pacific Northwest, including the Brontesaurus, a day long celebration of the Brontes at Richard Hugo House, a writing resource center in Seattle, back when Rebecca Brown was the Writer in Residence there. Although it was, one of the first I wrote in this collection; it wasn't published until last year in The Clackamas Literary Review. Most of the stories are about the end of the world, death destruction, and other light subjects. I wrote one story, called "Caffeinism" after I suffered a serious reaction to an overdose of caffeine. I wrote another about the day I was activated for the first Gulf War. And another is about the end of reading. Stories have been in mags such as Seattle Magazine, First Intensity, The Raven Chronicles, and The Wandering Hermit Review, and Web sites such as The Mississippi Review (Web), Smokelong, Slouch, Semantikon, and The Steel City Review.
You can purchase the book at Amazon, Powells, or Lulu.com (where you can get it either as paper or PDF). If you are interested in reviewing the book, email me at matt(dot)briggs(at)gmail.com.
Black Sabbath's Master of Reality and Shoot the Buffalo
July 2, 2008
Laura Pearson posted lists of reading suggestions for summer, Preserving Our Independents: Summer Reading List, from the likes of David Lasky (Comix drawer in Seattle), Jonathan Messinger (featherproof books in Chicago), and Mairead Case (Proximity magazine in Chicago). Mairead Case had a list that had both a 33 1/3 book about Black Sabbath's Master of Reality as well my novel, Shoot the Buffalo. I had never listened to any Black Sabbath, really, until this last winter and as of June 14th, according to my iTunes, I've listened to the 5:17 minutes of "Children of the Grave" 54 times ... starting there to the end of the album skipping over the changing-it-up tune "Solitude" 32 times. I'm not sure what these metrics reveal, except I keep listening to Master of Reality. The heavy metal is supposed to do bad things to a person's brain. I should read the book, I guess.
My Books in Google Books
June 17, 2008
Three of my books are available through Google Books, Misplaced Alice, The Remains of River Names, and my book to be released soon by Final State Press, The End is the Beginning. The entire contents of each books is searchable. Large portions of books published by Final State Press are available. The Remains of River Names, offered through Black Heron Press, has a much more limited preview. It is weird to see keywords called out: Charlotte Bronte, Branwell, grunions, red velvet cake, Tony the Tiger, caffeine, dump truck, soft boy, lifeboat, peach fuzz, greenbelt, Lake Union, Seattle, skinhead, scullery maid, animal ears, black helicopters, Puget Sound, Crown Hill Cemetery
Story in SmokeLong Quarterly
March 20, 2008
A new story of mine, "Trestle," appears in SmokeLong No. 20, guest edited by Claudia Smith, along with stories by Aaron Burch, David Barringer, Sue Powers, Gail Siegel, and others. There is also an interview where I say some things.
Note about Shoot the Buffalo at Present Tense / past imperfect
January 14, 2008
Shoot the Buffalo, Matt Briggs' latest novel, is my kind of fiction. A coming of age story set in the dark woods of the Pacific Northwest, it features some of the saddest, yet most oddly compelling characters I've read in a long while. [Full entry at Present Tense.]
Fluid/Exchange Blog Best Books Read in 2007
January 1, 2008
This photo is from Abby in Portland at Abbytriesagain or Flickr. Steve Hall at Fluid/Exchange has listed my book Shoot the Buffalo in the best books he read this year. He also listed other books such as William Allegrezza and Ray Bianchi''s The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century. Thanks!
Regrets
December 27, 2007
Rebecca Brown regrets the limited shelf space of brick and mortar bookstores. Stacey Levine regrets that vast swaths of a nation that can't appreciate something as fine and subtle as a classic novel. Frances McCue regrets not finishing a stack of fan letters to writers she likes. Ryan Boudinot regrets not telling a certain person to go fuck herself. In comparison, my regrets, are regretfully, confessional and petty.Soon it will be a new year and I can relegate 2007 to the musty bins of nostalgia. I will wonder about photographs taken this year, "and when was that?"
Tawny Grammer on The Moss Gatherers
November 18, 2007
A set of impressions on my book of stories, The Moss Gatherers, at Tawny Grammer: Like ghosts, these characters and their homes exist in the present while defining themselves through the past, their promise and possibility behind them even as they live on. Like them, the American West is a region first defined by an idyllic future envisioned in a decades-old past, which might make the presence of ghosts -- literal or figurative -- both the most potent of fears and an inevitable consequence of living in the past and the present at once.
Matt Briggs - Semantikon November 2007 Feature Posted
November 4, 2007
Semantikon.com has a feature of some of my current and upcoming work on their Web site for November. Semantikon is an arts community created and maintained by an international collective of artists, educators, and technology professionals. In addition to ongoing monthly content including visual artist, literary types, a library of 130+ public domain works (free so poor college students can afford to drink), it also has a television station called cell logic.
My work features an excerpt from a new novel, The Strong Man: Confessions of a Bacon Smuggler, to be published in the fall of 2008 by Final State Press. Semantikon also has excepts from The End is the Beginning, a collection of stories to be published by Final State this spring along with a re-issue in paper, ebook, and iphone format of my other books (The Remains of River Names, Misplaced Alice, The Moss Gatherers, and Shoot the Buffalo.) The books will be released in similar formats, with less typos, and other modest improvements. Semantikon also includes the full version of an essay I wrote a couple of months ago, "Pacific Highway South: Best American Strip City," MP3s of my reading three short short stories, and a broadside.
Story in October's Seattle Magazine
September 30, 2007
The current month's issue has a long, pretty comprehensive overview of the current population of writers in Seattle. It includes big-glossy photos and short profiles of local "big name" such as Ivan Doig, Tom Robbins, J.A. Jance, Sherman Alexie, and Ann Rule. It even includes a handful of poems by Molly Tenenbaum, an essay by Kary Wayson, and my story, "A Ribbit-Powered Float." Unfortunately even a long, pretty comprehensive article leaves things out. There is scant coverage of "experimental writing," performance writers, or zines. In contrast, The Seattle Weekly had an article profiling about a dozen writers working "in all quarters and genres.". But all in all, Seattle Magazine's article is packed with info. It is happily boosterish to have a map like this. Ryan Boudinot, I discovered, has done well enough with a short story collection (The Littlest Hitler) published by a small press (Counterpoint) to leave his day job as a DVD editor at Amazon. That such things are still possible, is amazing.
Roethke Readings - Friday 8/3 and Saturday 8/4
July 29, 2007
I will be reading with Rebecca Hoogs, John Olson, Vis-á-vis Society (Rachel Kessler and Sierra Nelson), music by Ken Benshoof and The Half Brothers. Our reading will be emceed by Brangien Davis of Swivel and Brendan Kiley of The Stranger. It'll be at 9:30 on both nights at ACT and I think costs something.
The ACT Web site promises the event will be a cabaret referencing the DaDa Cabaret Voltaire. Although most people I think associate the Cabaret Voltaire with Surrealism -- which has in turn been emptied of its political and revolutionary content and come to mean basically a literary excuse to act wild and crazy. Roethke as a source for a Surrealist party sounds good to me. I wrote a story called "The Penile Colony" about a young girl from the country who goes to the U of W and meets Roethke.
I don't think the event would meet with Roethke's approval. Roethke thought that poets should be as important to the civic life of a city as business men. He felt they should be recognized as people of importance -- at least according to his biography -- and I suppose this has become the case with poets that hold academic positions. There is a certain civic importance Jeff Bezos and Heather McHugh. Roethke was also not particularly fond of music (oddly, considering his amazing rhythm.) Nor did his work really contain any of the influences of DaDa or Surrealism. From what I gather he wrote steadily, with much effort, with a calculating perfectionism that would make the effusive, spontaneous, and slapdash efforts of the Surrealists seem like play (which would be fine by them). DaDa wasn't even this. DaDa was a fart. It was a protest against the professionalism and logic of businessmen and politicians whose polices resulted in the slaughter of Verdun. To reference the Cafe Voltaire and Roethke seems like an odd juxtaposition, unless you consider that Roethke was mad and that the Surrealists held a special kind of reverence for insanity.
But are the mad responsible for this symptoms? Roethke's poetry wasn't a symptom of bipolar disorder. If they were, the halfway houses of the nation would be awash in National Book Awards.
This weird veneration of sickness showed up last year when Syd Barrett died. The schizophrenic founder of Pink Floyd who suffered a longish, LSD-kindled break down in the late sixties was dredged up. That era of the band was a vastly different thing that the depressing prog-rock band. But in the myth of the poet or artist as madman there is a kind of conflation of madness and talent. Syd Barrett made music when he was well. When he got sick, he stopped.
I've begun to find the simulated madness of surrealists unsettling in the way people now find blackface unsettling. On one hand, it provides a kind of mask that gives a writer permission to simulate another state. But on the other hand it confers an illusion that the mad are somehow not human -- they are something else. So to me surrealisms as a bag of tricks and as an atmospheric parlor dressing. Good. It's fun. Surrealism as access to INSANITY! Well, not so good.
In point of fact, much of the surrealism is a result of very lucid, very simple techniques. It is founded on a lot of Frued's ideas of the subconscious -- but generating random text and images, freewriting, and substitution are a library of pretty innocuous techniques.
Roethke in fact didn't write using these techniques. He did share the surrealist’s approval of nonsense rhythms and Mother Goose. When he was well he wrote poetry. when he was sick he didn't. When he was recovering or when he was manic -- he wrote poetry. He was lucky to have held a position as a professor in the mid-20th century when people were willing to cut him some slack. He did have trouble in his early professional life due to his break downs. At the University of Washington, he found an administration that allowed for him to operate when he was operational and let him take time off when he needed to take time off. Toward the end of his life, a Washington State representative looking to cut funding at the University of Washington tried to portray the University of lax by harboring lunatics like Roethke. In a move that would be even more startling today then in the early 1960s, the University showed that Roethke had taken off no more time due to illness than any other professor. In fact, the majority of his leave during his tenure had been related to various grants and prizes. The letter proved in fact that the lunatic Roethke was far from crazy and far closer to the sober, reputable businessman that he aspired to be -- and certainly a far cry from a Surrealist-approved poet such as Arthur Rimbaud or novelist such as Leonora Carrington. Unlike the disreputable and eccentric surrealist poets, Roethke belongs to the mainstream of mid-20th century lit -- Stephen Spender, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath. They weren't strangers to madness, either.
Theodore Roethke at ACT, a Video Ad for the August Readings
July 14, 2007
I'm going to be reading something about Theodore Roethke in relation to David Wagoner's play "First Class." In August ACT will mount the play. After the play there will be an hour or so of cabaret performances with poetry, wine, and music.
Seattle Public Library - Notes on Misplaced Alice
July 5, 2007
From Nick:
I put a hold on a copy of Misplaced Alice and it was transfered from the central library to the capitol hill library where I picked it up. I haven't read it yet but leafing through it I found some stuff written in pencil in what looks like a girl's handwriting (loopy cursive). I'm gonna tell you what it says:
"???" above the title of Deneth.
"Like it but don't feel fully satisfied" after Ida's Breakfast.
a smiley face after Where I'm Not.
"good" after Soul Saver.
"paragraph 1 sucks, loved the rest. clever! suspenseful" after Three Cats.
"was (word "was" underlined) interested but ending is totally anti-climactic" after The Wedding Party.
"not sure about letters, like in other story. great charac." after XEROX Boxes
a smiley face and an exclamation mark after False Teeth.
"ok" after Misplaced Alice.
"??" after Upstairs Crow.
"kind of entertaining / humorous, but also really hokey" after Help Wanted.
"wtf?? cracked out..." after Does I Owning?
"hm good, decent @ least, I wish there were a little more ending" after On the Radio.
Thanks, Nick.
Shoot the Buffalo, Steal This Book
June 19, 2007
Last week, Clear Cut Press let me know that the second printing of Shoot the Buffalo will be back from the printer at the end of July.
Not only is the first time (and I hope not last time) any of my books has had a second printing, but it is the first time this has happened:
Dude, I've been reading your novel, which I think is DYNAMITE -- I could go on and on about that. But it's funny... I stole the book from the library at a senior living apartment building on this big Christian compound. A radio station Spirit 106 or whatever comes out of that place, and another station too. I was doing temp work there a couple of weeks ago. On my lunch break I was looking around in their little library room thing and I saw your book. I'd been meaning to read it since I'd read the ad for it in the flap of C. Ambrosio's Orphans. It was so weird to find it there. They have all the employees pray together every Thursday morning, it's a pretty conservative place. The day I stole the book I quit the job. Anyway, I was just thinking, maybe you donated the book to that library because you have family that lives there or something. If that's the case sorry, let me know and I'll mail the book back, I'm almost done with it.
Seattle PI on Take the Cake
November 10, 2006
"Take the Cake: Celebrating the Stranger Genius Awards" was the Henry Gallery's idea, and credit goes to it and the curators it hired for pulling it off: Sara Krajewski in visual art, Lane Czaplinski for theater, Matthew Stadler for literature, Peter Lucas for film and Eric Fredericksen for organizations.
Highlights include (who'd have guessed?) all the writers. -- Regina Hackett, Seattle PI (Full Article)
Article in The Snoqualmie Valley Record
October 15, 2006
Residents of North Bend will receive a literary treat Oct. 17 when
Snoqualmie Valley native Matt Briggs reads his latest novel "Shoot the
Buffalo" at the North Bend library at 7 p.m. Like all his novels, the story takes place in Snoqualmie Valley.
[For the full article by Penny Stickney in the Snoqualmie Valley Record]
Frances Johnson & Shoot the Buffalo finalists for Washington State Book Award
September 22, 2006
The winner for fiction was: "A Sudden Country" by Karen Fisher, of Lopez Island (Random House). The Finalists were: 'The Testing of Luther Albright" by MacKenzie Bezos, of Bellevue (Fourth Estate), "Shoot the Buffalo" by Matt Briggs, of Des Moines, Wash. (Clear Cut Press), "Frances Johnson" by Stacey Levine, of Portland, Ore. (Portland?) (Clear Cut Press), "My Jim" by Nancy Rawles, of Seattle (Crown), and "Citizen Vince" by Jess Walter, of Spokane (Regan Books).
The Seattle Times on The American Book Award
August 18, 2006
Two Seattle-area authors are among the winners of the 2006 American Book Award: MacKenzie Bezos for her debut novel, "The Testing of Luther Albright" (HarperPerennial), and Matt Briggs for his first novel, "Shoot the Buffalo" (Clear Cut Press). The awards, given by the Before Columbus Foundation, are in their 26th year and aim "to provide recognition for outstanding literary achievement from the entire spectrum of America's diverse literary community."
Complete article on The Seattle Times Web site
Seattle PI on American Book Award
August 10, 2006
THREE AREA DEBUT NOVELISTS EARN NATIONAL AWARDS
John Marshall: Three Puget Sound area writers -- Karen Fisher,
MacKenzie Bezos and Matt Briggs -- have received national awards for their
debut novels. -- August 10th, 2006
Shoot the Buffalo wins the American Book Award
July 18, 2006
I found out yesterday from Matthew Stadler, editor of Clear Cut Press, who called me while I was busy drawing a business process flow chart in a building near the Renton S curves that Shoot the Buffalo was selected as a winner of the twenty-seventh annual American Book Awards for 2006.
The prize is awarded by the Before Columbus Foundation.
The Before Columbus Foundation will present the awards at a ceremony and reception in late September. The American Book Awards, established in 1978, recognize outstanding literary achievement by contemporary American authors, without restriction to race, sex, ethnic background, or genre. The purpose of the awards is to acknowledge the excellence and multicultural diversity of American writing. For a list of past winners.
More on the Award
Three Area Debut Novelists Earn Natonal Awards
Three Puget Sound area writers -- Karen Fisher, MacKenzie Bezos and Matt Briggs -- have received national awards for their debut novels. -- John Marshall, August 10, 2006
A note on about the prize at the Stranger's Blog.
Here is a PDF [1.5 mb] of last year's brochure.
American Book Award Winners 2006
MacKenzie Bezos
The Testing of Luther Albright (Fourth Estate)
Matt Briggs
Shoot the Buffalo (Clear Cut Press)
David Diaz
The White Tortilla: Reflections of a Second-Generation Mexican-American (BookSurge)
Darryl Dickson-Carr
The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction
(Columbia University Press)
Thomas J. Ferraro
Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America (New York University Press)
Tim Z. Hernandez
Skin Tax (Heyday Books)
Josh Kun
Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (University of California Press)
P. Lewis
Nate (Back House Books)
Peter Metcalfe
Gumboot Determination: The Story of the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium
(SEARHC Foundation)
Kevin J. Mullen
The Toughest Gang in Town: Police Stories from Old San Francisco (Noir Publications)
Doris Seale and Beverly Slapin, editors
A Broken Flute: The Native Experience in Books for Children (AltaMira Press/Oyate)
Matthew Shenoda
Somewhere Else (Coffee House Press)
Carlton T. Spiller
Scalding Heart (Nuyorican Press)
Editor’s Award:
Chris Hamilton-Emery, Salt Publishing Ltd.
Lifetime Achievement Award:
Jay Wright
Review of Shoot the Buffalo in The School Library Journal
May 8, 2006
When his parents and uncle leave nine-year-old Aldous Bohm and his two siblings alone in the woods, he panics. Instead of staying within the warm security of their cabin, he drags his siblings into the cold, rainy woods to search for the adults.
The children pass out from exposure, and while Aldous and his brother survive, their sister dies. What follows is the heart-wrenching aftermath of responsibility and recovery. The parents, who live in a marijuana-induced fog, take no responsibility for their daughter's death. Aldous takes the blame and searches for answers everywhere: at school, in the Boy Scouts, at church. Telling the story through the eyes of a child is ambitious, but Briggs handles it delicately by displaying a unique balance between naïveté and wisdom. When Aldous reaches his 18th birthday, he commits the ultimate rejection of his parents' lifestyle: he enlists in the army. During training in Texas, he enters into his first relationship with a woman and begins to deal with his past. The chapters flip back and forth between Aldous the boy and Aldous the young man, with his childhood echoing his later life in complex and moving ways. The novel functions partly as a reflective critique of the counterculture lifestyle, but also as a hopeful coming-of-age story. Teens will relate to the protagonist as he takes those first steps into adulthood. Beautifully told and filled with characters of real depth and struggle, the story shouldn't be missed. -- Matthew L. Moffett
What Are You Working On - Too Beatuiful
February 6, 2006
San Francisco writer Mark Pritchard (Too Beautiful and Other Stories) who writes the blog Too Beautiful is running a series of interviews with writers about their current, yet-to-be published projects.
He's talked to:
- Sara Miles
- Stephen Elliott
- Stacey Levine
- Eric Rofes
- and others, including me.
Shoot the Buffalo in The Bellingham Herald
February 2, 2006
Novel explores family tragedy
Matt Briggs reads from his debut novel about a young boy whose parents lead an alternative lifestyle in the woods near Snoqualmie, where a string of tragedies leave a devastating affect on his life view.
Read the full article by Margaret Bikman.
I read with Stacey Levine (Frances Johnson) at Village Books 7:30 p.m on Feb 2nd. (1200 11th St. 671-2626). Matthew Stadler, the editor of Clear Cut Press, kept us company on the drive north, bought tapas, and introduced us to the fine people of Fairhaven, Washington.
Compost
January 14, 2006
Take a look, a careful look, at the picture on I found on post "Book compost" at a blog called OnePotMeal. This is demoralizing on several fronts. Perhaps my book is an example of a high quality additive mentioned in his post? Or it could also be in dire need of an infusion of outstanding literature.
There is the equally disturbing aspect that I am scouring the Web so thoroughly that I actually uncovered this image.
A more positive note was uncovered on Bill Allegrezza's blog.
Otherwise Shoot the Buffalo has failed to penetrate the so called blogosphere aside from my own unending efforts here.
A while back, The New York Times ran an article about authors as googlebators.
Almost every author I know with a new book does it - the embarrassing, nearly irresistible, ritualistic dip into Internet-assisted narcissism.
-- "What Are the Blogs Saying About Me?" by Pamela Paul
I am, thankfully, not alone in my furtive efforts.
Interview by Kevin Sampsell on the Powells Blog
December 21, 2005
I talked with Kevin Sampsell, the curator of the small press shelf at Powells in Portland and author of A Common Pornography & Beatiful Blemish. His interview appears on the Powells Blog.
Article in the Seattle PI
November 18, 2005
Small publisher's quality is exemplified by 2 Seattle novelists
Clear Cut's most recent releases are two fine novels by Seattle authors -- "Shoot the Buffalo" by Matt Briggs and "Frances Johnson" by Stacey Levine.
Read the article by John Marshall
Review in Sunday's The Oregonian
November 6, 2005
Every once in a while a novel comes along that is truly remarkable. "Shoot the Buffalo" by Seattle's Matt Briggs is one of those.
[Read the Review by Katie Schneider.]
Portland Mercury Review of Shoot the Buffalo
November 4, 2005
The latest offering from Clear Cut Press (aside from being adorably pocket-sized as usual) is a well-crafted work of fiction by Seattle-based writer Matt Briggs. [Review by Evan James]
Review of Shoot the Buffalo in The Seattle Times
October 23, 2005
Nisi Shawl writes: "Shoot the Buffalo" is a small, perfect book about large, messy things. ... Laying out his larger themes without trickiness or pretension, Briggs pins them in place using vivid particularities.
Read the rest of the review on The Seattle Times web site.
Theater Schmeater opens a 'Trapdoor' to surreal slumber
October 22, 2005
What does Seattle dream of? Well, our waking dreams may consist
of things like having a monorail or a nightlife that extends
beyond 1 a.m., but in our slumber, we're an anxious bunch. Read
on the rest of the article in The Seattle PI.
KGB Bar with Kate Benson and David Levinson
October 9, 2005
This from The New York Sun: Fire and ice took center stage Sunday at KGB Bar. Matt Briggs, author of "Shoot the Buffalo" (Clear Cut Press), read a fictional scene about hypothermia, while David Levinson, author of "Most of Us Are Here Against Our Will" (Gardners Books), read a story about a woman who ritually burns her deceased son's belongings as part of her grieving process. Kate Benson, author of "Two Harbors" (Harvest Books), also read. Her literary agent was spotted in the audience.
Also attending were Tao Lin and Nick Antosca, who are contributors to the first issue of Opium magazine, a biannual literary journal launched in late August. The magazine already existed online, but this is its first venture into print. Todd Zuniga, the magazine's founder and editor in chief, was also in the audience. The Knickerbocker asked him if it was easier to publish online than in print. "118 percent easier," he said.
The magazine's Web site advises, "[W]e do not, despite our title, encourage drugs and their use." Mr. Zuniga described how he came up with the name of the magazine. He was an associate editor at Official PlayStation Magazine when Van Burnham, author of a book on the history of video games, asked him on an escalator, "How long have you been at OPM?" Mr. Zuniga kept repeating the sound of the letters " OPM
-- Oct 13, 2005, Gary Shapiro
Review in Seattle Magazine
September 28, 2005
The pages fly by as Briggs, a superb craftsman, expertly jumps back and forth in time, juxtaposing Bohm’s perceptions and experiences at 9 with events at age 18. -- Sheila Mickool
Christopher Frizzelle on the Shoot the Buffalo Launch in The Stranger
September 22, 2005
Clear Cut Press editor Matthew Stadler called Shoot the Buffalo "the kind of book that you can disappear into for a long period of time" at the publication party, and in one scene Briggs read, three characters disappear into the scenery and only two of them survive. There is a long section about hypothermia. There are clay hills, lush marijuana plants, and "millions of moths like pieces of paper." The landscape is muddy and fatal, but the writing is good-natured.
[More]
PodCast of Shoot the Buffalo Book Release Performance
September 20, 2005
On Sunday September 18th, Matthew Stadler the editor of Clear Cut Press, introduced Shoot the Buffalo. Neil Bacon played some fiddle tunes. And I read an adaption (to keep it around an hour) from the first three chapters. You can listen to the streaming audio (internet radio).
Here is the link to the file:
http://www.oseao.com/shows/gallery/m3u/091805_mattbriggs.m3u
or
to access as a podcast.
You can find other audio of spoken word performances including readings by Gregory Hischak, Willie Smith, Sarah Mangold, and talks by Charles Mudede in the same online gallery hosted by Oseao.
Publishers Weekly Review of Shoot the Buffalo
September 16, 2005
Briggs offers an earnest, muscular indictment of the
dropout counterculture.
Interview in Punk Planet
August 17, 2005
Anne Elizabeth Moore interviewed me recently via e-mail. The result appears in the current issue of Punk Planet (PP69). You can read the review online here, or purchase a copy here.
Punk Planet 69: Inteview Outtake
July 12, 2005
Book Reviews Outtakes: Seattle's Certified Genius Matt Briggs by Anne Elizabeth Moore excerpted from PP69
Seattle-based certified genius Matt Brigg’s recent collection of short stories, The Moss Gatherers (StringTown Press), relates tales of families in the Pacific Northwest gone somehow wrong. It’s charming, beguiling, and slightly disturbing—not totally unlike the genius writer himself.
You're a writer-in-Residence at the Hugo House, Seattle's one-and-only center for reading and writing. As far as writers go, are you a "made" dude?
I sometimes think about this, that writers get “made” like the mafia. I would like to believe that there is some order behind the actual production of literary work. I would like to believe there is a society who confers at a spaghetti house, reads manuscripts, and then has an aspiring writer go out and whack someone. A dead poet bleeds to death in his clean, but perhaps not well-laundered, sheets. The aspiring writer gets access and need aspire no longer. She has access to the magazines, to the awards, and most importantly the readers, those desperately rare and coveted people writers keep hearing rumors about: people who read books. I mean, yeah, I’m made in so far as I’ve done these things. I’ve whacked a few poets. But I’ve found whacking poets doesn’t lead anywhere. My proposals still get rejected by the Arts Commissions. My manuscripts still come back from literary magazines with rejection slips. Editors still say, “nice but no thanks,” to my books.
The primary financial advantage I have from writing is the amount of money I lose doing it. I have to have a day job so I can have money to lose.
I wake up at five in the morning to write before I go to work at my day job. And then after, I go to Richard Hugo House, a writer’s resource center in Seattle, where I meet with other writers in Seattle. Writers call up Hugo House with all kinds of writerly problems and I talk to them. There was a man with writer’s block who was working on a cover letter. He’d written almost nine hundred different versions of a three hundred word letter. I spent some time working with a woman with health problems who was working on the memoir of her utility dog. Sadly, the utility dog died just as she began to revise the first draft of her manuscript. These are the people who visit me at Hugo House. I enjoy talking to other writers like this because in most cases they are quiet people working on something in secret. They need to talk privately to someone else about their secret work. But all of this is happening outside of any trajectory of success in the traditional sense. The best in most cases that could happen for them, for me too, is that our books could get into print.
Publication can be pretty simple. Just put your work on top of a photocopy machine. It can get more complicated finding a business that somehow remains solvent publishing books, and even more problematic to find one that thinks that they can continue in their solvency by publishing your book.
How important is place to The Moss Gatherers—both your location and the location in which the stories are set?
I was just in a disagreement with a poet over something I said about this place, Seattle and the Pacific Coast. I said this was a “No Place,” in the way that Utopia means, “No Place.” Place is important to me, but not in the way that would be important to someone like Thomas Hardy or Wallace Stegner. I am more sympathetic to Richard Hugo who grew up in Pigeon Hill at the edge of White Center, a working class neighborhood South of Seattle that edges one of the most polluted rivers in Washington State, the Duwamish. This river starts as the Green River. The Green River Killer’s first bodies were found not far upriver from Hugo’s childhood fishing spots.
I guess to me that this place is real in so far as air and trees and stuff like that are real, but that place becomes interesting to me when I begin to think about how people take possession of it and make it into something else. What is perhaps interesting about Seattle is that it is a malleable place. Hugo describes his method of taking possession in his little book about poetry called “The Triggering Town.” Right now there is a billionaire, Paul Allen, who is busy taking possession of the city. Before him the city was the neglected holding of another rich man, Sam Israel. A city like Baltimore or London cannot really be shaped by a single person. But Seattle continues to transform at the whim of just about anyone who thinks about it. Paul Allen thinks of the city. It changes. When he loses interest, someone else will have some thoughts. In terms of a fiction writer, this is very handy because the city can be whatever is required of it.
Family and alienation also play strong roles in the stories in The Moss Gatherers.
Both of my parents’ families immigrated to Seattle from other places in the United States. My grandparents left behind proscribed social settings for what was really the Wild West and they came here not because they wanted to come to Washington State, but because they had been kicked out of their families. They were running away and ended up here because to run any further would mean getting on a boat for Asia. So my own parents grew up separated from any sense of family tradition. My mother grew up in a poorly built shack (my grandfather’s handiwork) in the second-growth forest above Renton. My grandfather worked as a machinist at Boeing, but the place he built didn’t have hot or cold running water. My grandmother was from Kentucky, but it wasn’t like she’d grown up in an outhouse. She’d grown up with hot and cold running water and electricity. My grandfather moved to the Pacific Coast and it was if she’d stepped back two generations into the Ozarks. My father, too, grew up removed from his family in the East. His father would cycle between carpentry, binges, and prison. One winter my grandfather was in jail, my grandmother fed her kids potatoes that had fallen from the back of railcars.
My own parents, given the chance, became even more systemic in severing any sense of the past. When I was four years old, they moved from Seattle to an acre of land occupied by an overgrown farm in the Cascade foothills near Snoqualmie, a tiny logging town. My family spent most of the 1970s in a halfhearted back-to-the-land experiment. Of course the only useful thing we were able to grow was marijuana, and that happened in an old root cellar underground with the aid of florescent lights. My brother and were I were raised as atheists. My parents would answer as carefully as they could any question we asked them. This environment became a kind of hermetically sealed paradise and really was pretty perfect through the ‘70s, aside from my father’s biker friends, the PCP-fueled rages of my uncle, and the fact that we couldn’t help but regard anyone outside of my immediate family as other-worldly and potentially dangerous (since the foundation of this paradise was a controlled substance.)
For a long time I thought that there weren’t very many people who had grown up like this. In a college class in the early ‘90s, a classmate said about one of my stories, “but people don’t live like this.” But I’ve since found that a lot of people did live and are still living like this. Maybe we all live these self-defined little island anyway? Everyone is freakish in some way.
You won a Stranger "genius" award in 2003. What did it do for your writing career to be able to put "genius" right there on your CV?
The first difficulty of this award, which I was pleased to receive despite the fact that it would be far more cool to shrug it off and point out the negative things about the paper that sponsored it, The Stranger (it’s sustained sexism being one thing) was how to handle that word. In the mid-1990s, The Stranger was pretty good and published some writers who I admire, such as Charles D’Ambrosio, Rebecca Brown, and Stacey Levine. I’ve noticed that other people who they received this thing have managed to call it “A Stranger Genius Award,” using the indefinite article to diffuse things a bit, and then allowing genius to modify award, thereby absorbing some of the oil emitted by the word. This seems much safer to me. The word “genius” is caustic. It implies, to me, that my work might be a symptom of a distressing illness rather than the product of labor. But the award came with enough money that I had to resolve these issues because I wanted the money. This begs the issue if I can be bought, I guess. Sadly, like most things, I’m for sale.
What role do you feel your politics make in your decision to publish independently?
Pragmatically, I have little choice but to publish independently. When I first published a book this way, I didn’t realize that carried with it some implications. I didn’t realize that there were things I was supposed to do if I was a serious, aspiring fiction writer. Now that’s all shot. I wanted to publish my stories because it was driving me crazy that they were just sitting in a pile on my desk.
In some circles an independently produced book does not count. I know a handful of writers who have made the choice not to publish at all. They are biding their time until a commercial or academic press with the appropriate pedigree decides to pick up their work. In the mean time, they are writing. Their finished manuscripts pile up. The years roll on. They are secret writers just waiting. These are serious practitioners who will not speak until they are asked to speak up. I appreciate people who write the odd memoir of their pet or uncle or whatever. They are writers, but it seems a little different to me when you have a person who is an artist, who has trained in whatever manner they find useful and has studied what they do, and who is absolutely amazing but no one will publish them. And then for this writer to just sit on their manuscripts seems kind of absurd to me. It is really censorship, but because it is censorship of the marketplace, because there are already too many books published every year (so the argument goes), no one really calls it by the right name.
But once published a book, I found the entire process to be really excellent. I enjoy filling out invoices when they are for my book. I like knowing what the glitches are in getting the book printed. At the same time, I have been lucky in that I’ve been able to publish with work with presses run by good people such as Black Heron, StringTown, and Clear Cut. These presses exist because there were people who had manuscripts that they wanted to get out into the world. They are all people who love books and read widely. Business with them has been about getting books out into the world.
It is puzzling to me that so many things conspire against an author who just wants to put a story they’ve worked on for three or four years into the hands of a reader. I begin to wonder if there isn’t some conspiracy against this act taking place. If you weren’t allowed to stand in a public place and speak, you’d wonder who didn’t want you to make noise? And what did they want you to keep quiet about? If you think there isn’t a suppression of people freely creating their own books, visit some university campus and talk to the creative writing guy they have their about the book you just published at your local Kinkos. Ask him if he’d like to buy a copy. I think that might tell you a few things about the things that conspire to keep everyone silent.
The Moss Gatherers Trashed by The Stranger
June 30, 2005
As with his first two books, the stories in The Moss Gatherers are set in the Northwest, but this time the Northwest is full of secret meaning and Briggs's descriptions of trees and rivers and rocks read like paeans to trees and rivers and rocks. In Briggs's first two books, almost all of the scenery was bleak, which set him apart from nearly everyone else who's written well about this region. But there's beauty throughout The Moss Gatherers, of the phoned-in and television-ready variety: granite mountains, Douglas firs, rustling corn stalks, the Burke Museum coffee shop. [Read the entire review.]
Review in The Statesmen Journal
June 14, 2005
June 5, 2005, -- Here are a dozen short stories from a Seattle writer. Briggs has a view of life that is bizarre and rather charming.
His stories are dark and hugely illuminating. His prose is richly simple, filled with surprises and details. In the title story, the first in the book, we find this: "[Her brother] Jaq was on the Pacific Coast, in Oregon. The name itself conjured to his sister in Grenoble a place beyond a place, some place too far to even think about."
These are stories with ideas and genuine life. Briggs sticks his neck out on every page, and the reader is more than glad to stay with him. This is bold, new fiction from a real talent.
-- Dan Hayes
Shoot the Buffalo Sent to Printer
May 21, 2005
My upcoming book from Clear Cut Press, Shoot the Buffalo, has been finished and sent off to the printer. It will be out for What the Heck Fest in mid-July, and at booksellers in September. Here is a PDF of the jacket if you are interested in such things. I've posted the first chapter as well.
Review in Sunday's Seattle Times
May 15, 2005
A review of my new book The Moss Gatheres by Nisi Shawl in today's Seattle Times.
"Dodging the picturesque, postcard version of our region, the Northwest Briggs brings to his readers is at once stark and lush. From the venomous family secrets exposed in "Dry Farming," to the backwaters of memory slowly surging through "Snoqualmie," Seattle author Briggs gets to the emotional core of his characters by showing us how in tune they are with the landscapes actually surrounding them, rather than those we idealize."
The Moss Gatherers
April 24, 2005
My new collection of short stories is now available on-line from Powell's or Amazon.com ...
6 Booklets
October 8, 2003
These booklets are Adobe Acrobat [download free reader] versions of xeroxed booklets available at Consolidated Works on October 10, 2003.
1. Ida's Breakfast a story from Misplaced Alice
2. Walking Houses excerpt from Shoot the Buffalo a novel
3. Seattle is a Vortex an essay
4. Help Wanted a story from Misplaced Alice
5. My Name's Roy an excerpt from The Remains of River Names
6. The Age of Uniforms an essay
