SAS Speaker Spotlight: Matthew Clark Davison

SAS Speaker Spotlight Interview:

Matthew Clark Davison

Fiction and memoir writer Matthew Clark Davison has been teaching creative writing for more than 25 years, starting as a grad student at San Francisco State University in 1999 and later at LYRIC, a community center for queer youth. In 2007, Matthew opened a third venue for writers, called The Lab which aimed to combine MFA-level rigor with the openness of community-based gatherings. He still teaches those workshops, often with writer Alice LaPlante, co-founder of The Lab Creative Writing, and co-author of a book partially inspired by Matthew’s ongoing workshop. It’s called The Lab: Experiments in Writing Across Genre (W.W.Norton). Here, we’ve asked Matthew some questions about this useful and inspiring book.

If you want to keep up with Matthew, his new workshops, readings, and events, join his mailing list here.

In our interview, Matthew talks about he came to be a writer in church basements and at protests. He also told us, just before this interview went out, that Saints & Sinners and the Tennessee Williams Festival, of all of writers’ gatherings he’s attended, feel as warm, electric, urgent, and inviting as those first discoveries.

Norah Clifford: How did the original idea for this book come about and how did the extended metaphor at the heart of the book grow into the practice readers are encouraged to embrace?

Matthew Clark Davison: Before "The Lab" was a book, it was a class called The Douglass Street Lab, started in a friend's living room in San Francisco. I had the usual twin needs of someone who makes something new: passion and necessity. After teaching in the university environment for a few years, I wanted to get back to my roots. Passion, and how that passion defines you as a person, things I learned as a Queer activist and in community-based, non-institutionalized places of learning, where what worries and excites and terrifies and turns you on is vital fodder for what you create. And the necessity: the well-paying food-service job I'd worked for my first decade of teaching at SFSU had ended, and I suddenly needed to supplement the shit-pay of a college lecturer to stay in the Bay Area.

I called it The Lab because I wanted it to be a place where people came to experiment. Most workshops at the time were places where you brought in already-written work to be critiqued. I wanted something generative instead, so that people left each session with newly-written words on the page while writing alongside others who were also generating new work.

Before going full-time at SFSU, I’d spent years doing two half-time jobs, the other involved running professional development for teaching artists of all genres at a non-profit where we had the budget for one monthly meeting to help support each other in developing curriculum and lesson plans. So dancers, musicians, and literary artists had to work together and often the most exciting lesson plans came from an artist excited by an idea or technique used by someone working in a different genre. For example, a writer who learned something from a dancer (or vice versa).

My co-author, Alice LaPlante, had been my colleague at SFSU and later at Stanford, and had started her own academic writing school in Mallorca.

Knowing I'd be in Europe visiting my in-laws, she invited me to guest-teach in her home class. It went so well that we planned a weeklong intensive workshop together. Then Covid cancelled it.

Around that same time, Jill Bialosky, our editor at Norton, approached Alice about writing a follow-up to her book The Making of the Story, one that would encourage cross-genre and hybrid work instead of staying within a single genre's rules. Alice suggested to Jill that she co-author it with me, and when Jill offered us a contract based on our proposal, The Lab: Experiments in Writing Across Genre was born!

As for the central metaphor, in our introduction, we talk about how the word “novel,” (not the type of story, but in scientific terms), means “new, not resembling something formerly known or used.”

So in the book, we bring the essence of generative, community-based writing present both in Alice’s Mallorca writing school and The Douglass Street Lab, and ask readers to experiment the way scientists do: borrow a technique from a published work, use it as the original writer did, then modify it until it no longer resembles the source.

Before experimentation, we start with imagination. To realize an idea about something undiscovered and new, scientists study and borrow techniques, then use rigorous imitation and iteration to get there. Writers can do the same, and it's how this became the book's central organizing concept. Great writing starts with obsession, not craft, and only becomes yours once you've broken from the model in service of what you can't stop thinking about.

NC: How did you find the process of co-writing The Lab and working with fellow author Alice LaPlante?

MCD: Ideal. Writing is solitary compared to most other art forms. As a very young person, I played flute and saxophone and loved the challenge of working on my individual part and seeing how it all changed when brought to the band. Alice, too, has musical roots and I believe we achieved what an artistic collaboration is meant to: each of our sounds comes through and, combined, a third thing is born that might even be more dynamic than the individual. In talking about writing, I tend to be a bit more conceptual and see pedagogical connections where others don’t. In the workshop or classroom, body language and live participation help me understand when my concepts aren’t landing or participants are confused. In a craft book like The Lab, it all needs to be on the page. Alice understands this necessity in a way I didn’t when we started. She not only makes concepts clear, but she communicates her ideas in a manner that assumes her reader is smart. I could go on and on. I’m a long-time admirer of both Alice’s fiction and writing about the craft of writing. I used her craft of fiction book The Making of the Story in my classrooms for years, so it was a dream come true to work with her on The Lab.

NC: The Lab cites many other writers using quotes and examples. What was the research process like for this project and how did you select the references that ended up in the final version?

MCD: First I’ll tell you an anecdote, then I’ll answer your question. About twenty years ago, I taught an MFA course at SFSU called Uses of Personal Experience for the first of many times. Each week we examined exceptional work that, in some way, incorporated autobiography. At the end of the 15 week semester, the students were asked by the university to fill out a teacher evaluation. Two of the comments I received: I didn’t know I was signing up for gay and lesbian studies course; and, I felt the readings leaned heavily into feminist and world lit more than regular contemporary fiction. I took this as a compliment, not a criticism; encouragement to be even more conscious of choices like those I’d been already making on gut instinct.

Alice and I each took on the complete first draft of 5 of the 10 chapters in the book and then we switched back and forth many times. The person who did the first draft also came up with the first set of excerpts and quotes. The second person added. With the back and forth we shuffled, looking for what would most effectively enable the reader of our book to write more deeply or closer to their ideal. Like twenty years ago with the selections for my MFA class, the examples I chose in my five chapters all had one thing in common: excellence. I wanted originality in form and content. Alice, too.

Our tastes aren't always the same, but we each have an exacting eye for work that may inspire students. When reading the excerpts in her five first-draft chapters, the ratio of already-read/discovered was about 50/50 and vice versa. Not once did Alice or I come across a piece one suggested that the other wanted to cut. But there’s a limit to what can be contained in a book.

It’s heartbreaking to cut great examples. Most often we did so because we used so many examples our editor (or our permissions budget) made us choose fewer. Especially heartbreaking were the former student examples that had to be cut. Some of the writers we reference in the book are extremely well known, but as many or more are not yet as well known. Several are yet to be published.

We’re proud of the fact that our bibliography contains as much variation as it does. Variation is glorious. Our authors and their styles have life experiences and points of view that illuminate and portray so many literary styles as well as communities and generations.

NC: There are separate chapters for distinct genres, but you also urge your readers to explore beyond their intended or chosen genre. What value do you find in experimenting with other genres and how does it service readers at different writing levels and stages?

MCD: DiVinci said, “To develop a complete mind: Study the science of art; Study the art of science. Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.”

Picasso: “The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.”

Alice and I believe that the strategies writers use to make their audience feel and think are genre-fluid. It’s often a question of proportion. A poet whose work seems plotless isn’t refusing the strategy of the fiction writer who engages it; they instead understand that refraining from the use of the strategy gets them closer. Same with the fiction writer who refrains from line breaks or rhymes. Each writer can employ the strategy of the other, and by experimenting with the strategies frequently used outside one’s chosen genre, two good things happen: a writer breaks open and gets closer to her goals by trying then incorporating the strategy–or–she gets closer to her goals by trying then refusing the strategy and in so doing discovers what, apart from the strategy, she needs.

NC: The “Write Now” sections span throughout the book, from the “creative woolgathering” through experimentation with different genres and into revision. Can you speak more about the importance of this interactive feature of the book?

MCD: One of my mantras is “Great writing doesn’t start with craft, it starts with obsession.” Another has become: “Do first explain later.”

I’m fascinated by brain science. I don’t claim to be any kind of expert, but decades of observation in the classroom shows that the subconscious gives us the stuff of good art: what’s most odd, queer, stirring, mysterious, strange. Getting something from this part of our brains down on paper first, even if you have no idea why or where it’s leading you or even if it has anything to do with a project you have in mind is ten times more powerful than spending an hour listening to a teacher explain a concept you should try at home.

We might ask you to make two lists, one of your character’s (or narrator’s or speaker’s) fears and another of their desires. We might then do a second or third deepening. An example could be,”Find the lie in the list.” And then “Write a letter to your desire list from your fear.”

With all that on the page, we can use it as the original material to experiment with and shape using craft strategies. Say, of a topic like characterization.

The writer can compare what she has on the page to the examples we choose and see if those characterization strategies fit, or make the piece stronger, more compelling. If they don’t, we encourage the writer to modify, change, ignore and try something else.

NC: The Lab is instructional while also encouraging its reader to take risks, to shape the described exercises to themselves, to adopt the practices into their own creative process. Ideally, what do you hope your readers take away from this book and how does the book fit into a writer’s toolkit for future use?

MCD: My first writing mentors were the late greats Janice Mirikitani and June Jordon, who took me (and what I felt and had to say) seriously. This was in the early 90s in San Francisco, where I lived after escaping an inhospitable place. There I was, a lost feminine gay boy dropout and runaway in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco. I didn’t grow up reading, but during the worst of the AIDS years, I attended ACT UP and QUEER NATION meetings and rallies, and heard about and started reading Queer activists and artists.

Already in me was an overwhelming abundance of imagination and obsessions and fears and desires and I thought maybe the container of the novel or memoir could hold some of it.

By then, two of my closest friends had died, at age 30, of AIDS. I thought I was, at 20 years old, next. There was so much urgency and passion in me but zero skill, technique, craft, strategy. Jan and June recognized this in me, and made me curious about how more academic-seeming study could actually help hone my joy and passion and grief. The strategies didn’t always fit my goals or my projects, but thinking about and trying those strategies helped every single time.

Prior to meeting these mentors, school and church had always been a place where there were adults or experts who had the answers and children and students who didn’t. These new mentors didn’t claim to have any definitive answers. They were thrilled when we said something they hadn’t thought of, and even said, aloud, “here and in art there are no rules.” So there was constant encouragement to take what they taught not as dictates but as choices, choices you could pass on, break, mold, and make it your own. If I can pass the ethos of those classes forward to someone who needs them as much as I did, I’d be thrilled.

Matthew's novel, Doubting Thomas, follows a gay fourth-grade teacher at a private school in Portland who loses his job after two separate investigations clear him of a parent's accusation. Laws like Florida's "Don't Say Gay" statute and its current copycat bills keep this scenario alive: out queer people can be targeted and lose everything, even after being proven innocent. The novel was named one of Esquire's must-read books by queer authors, championed by writers Justin Torres, T Kira Madden, Ann Packer, and Michael Cunningham, and it's available wherever books are sold. You can also read an excerpt from his memoir in progress here.

Thank you Matthew for speaking with us!

Newsletter Editor, Norah Clifford | info@tennesseewilliams.net

Saints & Sinners LGBTQ+ Literary Festival is a program of the

The Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

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