Matthew Hand: Neither Tidy Nor Meant To Be

Matthew Hand grew up around the Southeast. He writes stories about people under pressure—moral, spiritual, familial, sometimes all at once. The characters are often trying to make sense of something bigger than them: grief, memory, belief, God, or the silence that follows when none of those things show up the way they expect. But he doesn’t write to explain. He writes to document what happens when there’s no clear rescue and no one left to blame. The stories aren’t tidy. They aren't meant to be.

Tell us a bit about your most recent work.

I just finished a story called Disqualified. It’s a horror narrative that starts like a typical cabin slasher, but the protagonist knows the rules — she knows she’s supposed to die — and goes anyway. It’s really about choice and consequence, turning the genre’s moral code into something theological and personal.

What are the themes and subjects you tend to revisit in your work?

I think most of my work tends to revolve around people confronting their own grief - personal, familial, institutional. That sounds dark and depressing, but I think my approach is cleansing: here’s a mess, let’s organize it.

"Cherry Hill" is the Story of the Day on Scriggler!

My story, "Cherry Hill," is the story of the day on Scriggler today! 

This was also my first published story way back when and the first story I won an award for, in a competition judged by awesome author and poet Judith Ortiz Cofer!

Looking back on it, even though this story isn't a by-the-numbers pulp, I can see the pulp influences on my style. What do you think?

https://scriggler.com/DetailPost/Story/55655

Call for Submissions: Anthology: The Old Weird South

The American South is a haunted place — full of ghost stories, native legends, persistent devils & angels, souls sold at the crossroads, and moon-eyed maidens living in the Okefenokee. The South’s best writers — Faulkner, O’Connor, McCullers — all keep this sense of the otherworldly in their fiction.

In this spirit, Q & W Publishers is looking for submissions for an anthology of short fiction and non-fiction that explores the fantastic, eerie, and bizarre side of the American South.

What To Submit

Submit fiction and non-fiction pieces between 1,000 and 4,000 words. Pieces should be grounded in the American South (any time period, pre-historic to modern; rural or urban) and should include elements of the fantastic/supernatural that come from Southern history, tradition, or folklore. Generic vampire and werewolf stories aren’t appropriate. While violence, gore, and eroticism may be part of your submission, they should not be the primary focus — let’s keep it more PG-13 than R-rated. Submissions must be previously unpublished.

Payment

Payment is $50 per accepted piece. Q & W Publishers will acquire the first publication rights for the piece; all other rights remain with the author. Authors with accepted pieces will also receive one free copy of the published anthology. The anthology may appear in electronic and printed form.

How to Submit

Please submit your piece to anthology@qwpublishers.com. Send a brief introduction and your piece in the body of the e-mail. Include “Anthology” and the title of the piece in the subject line of your e-mail.


Timeline

Submissions will be accepted until March 1st, 2012. Inclusion decisions will be made by April 1st, 2012.

For more info: http://www.qwpublishers.com/anthology-the-old-weird-south/

The Writer Will Take Your Questions Now (#3) -- Environment & Upbringing

How has your environment/upbringing colored your writing? -- Andrea Judy

Having grown up in Georgia all my life here in the South, I've met all kinds of characters (and caricatures). I'm sure they've all somehow funneled into my choice of protagonists and antagonists somehow throughout my writing career.

I also have to credit (on the upbringing side) my Mom for helping to instill in me a strong sense of accomplishment and confidence. She lived up to that cliched parent who believes in her child to the point of encouraging me to be whatever I wanted to be and letting me know I could accomplish it. I'm sure a writer may not have been her first choice, but she was always encouraging me at each step, even before I knew I wanted to be a writer.

On that note, it was actually my wife, Lisa, who encouraged me to pursue writing when she saw that it was my dream. She believed in me, and in spite of the feast or famine nature of a writer's finances, she still does.

Growing up in the South definitely influenced my early choices of reading and my early writing as well.

I’m definitely drawn to a sort of Southern type in my characters. I know that and have to fight it sometimes, but at other times I just run with it and try to make it work for me. I’m very partial to Southern fiction and in college I devoured the works of Flannery O’Conner, Eudora Welty and William Faulkner. There was something almost but not quite magical realism about their writing and I like to think I take a bit of that into everything I create, whether comics or prose, from sci-fi to fantasy to pulp action.