A Conversation with Featured Author Matthew F. Amati

Pears Before Crowds and Wordfoggery

Two-timing, er, two-time Weird Lit Mag published author, Matthew F. Amati, sits down with Senior Editor Dina Dwyer for a conversation about voice, writing habits, and what it means to be an eternally angry smartass. Be sure to check out his latest story in our Spring 2025 Issue (link below).

DD: Hi Matt. We chuckled when we saw who wrote "Bad Winter Screw-Can Blues" after we decided to accept it. I had a feeling it was you after I’d spent time solving the fun puzzle of your piece we published in our first ever issue, "To Rundle the Parlous Hoon." You have such a distinct voice, which is a part of writing I tried to unpack when I was a teacher. It’s not easy to put into words, but you know it when you see it, right? George Saunders talked about how he used to write in a Hemingway style before realizing his own voice was unique and much loved. What was your journey into your own voice like? Or was it always there, perplexing and delighting your high school English teachers?

MA: It's funny you mention my high school English teachers, because the first story I ever placed in a magazine was in my high school literary magazine, a yearly periodical called (if you can silence your heaving stomach) Shades of Light. The voice in that piece, which I suppose is equal parts mimicry of James Thurber, uh, and maybe "Son of Svengoolie" was something I hit on late at night after trying, as a high-school-age writer does, thirty or forty insufferably cute or pseudo-Wagnerian or confessionally burbly modes of expression. I recently looked back on that story, and it's pretty much the same kind of thing I habitually write now, at the age of 103—I call it "German expressionism filtered through a mouthful of saltines." Anyway, my teachers who ran the magazine were not delighted. Perplexed, maybe. But the student editors liked it all right; they were Goths, so that's when I learned those folks are Friend.

DD: I would have been delighted by any student of mine who was already reading Thurber. Because developing a distinct voice is so difficult for beginner writers (or those lost along the way), I’d like to talk about how you did it. When writing, do you hear the words in your head before you start, or do they just come out as you’re in it? And how would you advise someone on keeping the voice consistent throughout a piece?

MA: Well, my whole family were Thurber fanatics, I had an unusual upbringing. Still have never read Updike, so that gives you an idea. Now that you bring it up, I'm wondering if "voice" is the last refuge of the writer without much to say. Hard to tell. I think beginning writers—you can always tell, as you could tell with my writing when I got my first 200 or so stories swiftly chucked back at me with force—beginning writers use too many words. They overwrite, the sentences fall into "ibbity bibbity ah and amen" cadence, there are lots of commas, circumlocutive modes of expression HOLY FUCK I AM DOING IT NOW! Well, anyway. At some point, a writer gets sick of reading his or her own awful soup. Then I think they get efficient, get from Point A to Point B faster. Then the "voice" comes through and all they had to do was get out of the damn way. George Saunders is great at least partly because his prose is so simple and clear, and his weird-ass ideas can shine right through.

DD: Agreed. I had kind of a weird upbringing as well. My dad used to sit at the dinner table and read H.L. Mencken aloud to Mom and I. I think when I was little a lot of it went over my head, but as a teen it was hilarious. We at Weird Lit Mag think your work would be really interesting to hear and see live. Do you ever perform any of your work? What would be your ideal platform or venue?

MA: I had you figured for a "folks read Mencken at the table" childhood! I can relate. No, I've never done readings. I'm an unimpressive presence, it would be like watching your mailman sing, or a chartered accountant relating toaster repair instructions.

DD: Well, maybe my mailman moonlights as an opera singer. You just never know. So, how long you been playing that banjo?

MA: Oh that—a while, with middlin' results. Back to reading aloud, though, was it Flaubert who went and shouted his novels into the woods? I wonder what passing hikers might have thought. "Fran, there's a stout little Frenchman by that hollyhock who really seems to dislike the bourgeoisie!"

DD: I’m not too sure about the woods, but he did have a designated “shouting room.” What a weirdo. Would have loved to have taken him out for a drink or two. But I’m not letting you off the hook that easy w/r/t music. Does your mind, like, dissolve into the music when you’re playing it, or do you get new ideas flowing into you? I’m not a musician myself, so I get a bit jealous when I see all kinds of weather patterns flow over the faces of musicians when they play. How does it work? Do you just become the banjo?

MA: Ha, I wish! It would be fun to become a banjo. But I'm not much of a musician, I'm a writer who knows a few chords. But it is the case that musicians around here, many of whom know much more about music than I, are not good with the words. So I get to do some songwriting, which is fun, although the chords I pick often turn out to be the wrong ones. Filmmakers, too—I've contributed scripts to some local projects. It's fun to get out of the short story cell, and make someone else's creative efforts perhaps odder than they otherwise might have been.

DD: You’re terribly prolific. Over fifty publications, multiple weird books, and now you’re involved with screenwriting short films. What kind of writing schedule do you maintain? Do you ever tell your friends to piss off; you’re busy writing?

MA: I do tell them to piss off—heyyy, I could use writing as an excuse, couldn't I? File that away! I follow no schedule, really. The secret is that if you put a keyboard in front of me, I will dick around. I also do, um, less exciting writing for work and I usually finish that by mid-morning, so I'll fiddle around with stories. I don't actually write that much in terms of quantity. I do, however, send stuff out for publication regularly and relentlessly. I keep track of all my stories on Duotrope, and when I get a rejection, I find another magazine right away. Also, I tend to write the beginning of a story, or even just a title, and add to it diffidently for a long time, coming back to it. "Bad Winter" was just the first couple of paragraphs for, oh hell, maybe two years.

DD: Yeah, but something kept calling you back to it. And we’re glad you finished it and sent it to us. It’s really something. I read your haunting and bittersweet "About Her Bones So Bleak And Bare" in Flash Fiction Online and I felt like it belongs in the same world as “Bad Winter.” How did you conceive this story that we just published? The spare language and style make for a deceptively complex tale about a father and his children. I kept imagining condensing it into lyrics and getting Tom Waits to growl it.

MA: Oh wow, so, let me back up. You write yourself, say, a 1400-word story, right? Well, I do. I like to be short. Anyway, one of two things happens. You either say to yourself "this stinks" and delete it, or you say "this stinks buuuut … maybe it doesn't" and you file it away. And you find it later, and realize holy cats, I was onto something here. Either way, it has to have the magic smoke in it, right? Sometimes you have no idea where the smoke came from. That's often the case with me. But with “Bad Winter,” shit, that smoke is from the source. I grew up in a bleak-ish rural setting. There were three dads on my street—mine, the steamfitter dad across the street, and the Sicilian roofer dad back behind our place. All of them always out in the yard banging on an engine block or yelling at a tractor or digging post holes. (Sometime soon, look for a whole story on the subject of post holes). That story's a mashup of dads-talk and dad attitudes and the godawful fucked up kids that came out of there (my dad was by far the best of the bunch, and us kids got off easy compared to the poor neighbors!)

DD: I feel you on that. My dad was always out in the yard too, still is, actually. Not too much yelling though, just that quiet, simmering stoic Midwestern mien. Which reminds me: Internet sleuthing has led me to see you’re either currently in or have spent considerable time in Wisconsin. I spent my first two decades around there (Iowa) and the stark seasons, lush countryside, oppressive weather and distinct kind of people are never far from my own writing. How much of an influence does the Midwest have on yours?

MA: There's different Midwests. I moved to Wisconsin as an adult. I like it. It's pretty. My natal Midwest was flat and bleak and corn-studded—rural Illinois. Good place to bury bodies and then to have to beat them off with your shovel when they wouldn't stay proper dead. Nothing to stop the wind. You could drive and drive and drive and see the same fields in the same state of stubble or sprouting or full-blooming feedcorn, or stubble again. When I was seven, we took a vacation to the mountains of New Hampshire. I thought it was fucking paradise. Could not believe other places were actually pleasant to be in!

DD: Aside from all of your creative endeavors—writing, music, and screenwriting/film—you also are an associate editor at the weird and delightful magazine Space Squid. What are you personally looking for in a story submission there?

MA: Poor Space Squid! Dave [Editor in Chief], if you're reading this, I promise I will be better! I am the laziest, worst associate editor. I was supposed to put an issue together for beginning of February this year. Haven't started. And that slush pile—Dave finds so many gems in there. I don't know how he does it. I only find the dross, alas. It's been better lately. I've been skipping ahead (don't tell) and looking for the fun titles. If a story has a boring title, then I start out hating it and am hard to persuade. I mean, I know it's petty, but if you title your story "A New Day" or "Earth Is Dying" it doesn't promise that the rest of the piece will be any fun. So, for me the title is the first test. Sometimes it's enough by itself!

DD: Good to know! I’m not big on titles but understand their importance. Especially with really short pieces where they carry a lot of weight.

Your stories have a wonderful playfulness to them. Sometimes they have a dark flavor, while others are silly and loose. In my own writing, I try to capture that energy but it’s quite rare. When you sit down (or someone gives you a keyboard), how do you maintain that feeling? Is it a special kind of chair? An elixir? I’ve not been able to crack the code and am hoping you can help. Please, I need this.

MA: I'm glad that comes across! It's a quality that's abundant in what I like to read, to a fault maybe. I like PG Wodehouse and Donald Barthelme and Dorothy Parker and the aforementioned Saunders and Thurber, and Stevie Smith (she's England's greatest poet and I will fight any haters). So, I guess I just have a head full of that stuff—but I think also that I've learned to see that quality in stuff that isn't reputed to have it. Samuel Beckett makes me laugh out loud, for example. So does King Lear. And the Book of Ecclesiastes. Also, it maybe helps to be eternally an angry smartass? I haven't thought about it this way until just now, but, yeah, looking for irony, playfulness, wordfoggery, even in places it's not supposed to be, it's a fun habit.

DD: Well, it comes out indeed. I was going to ask you about your influences but you just answered that. As we wrap up, do you have any questions for me or the WLM crew? I’ll do my level best to answer.

MA: YES! First of all, why hasn't there been a Weird Lit Magazine until recently? I have been looking for just such a publication for a long time. You can imagine, there aren't a lot of markets out there for the stuff you and I like. I've felt like I'm throwing pears (not pearls, pears) before crowds of purveyors of the Carefully Observed Character Study, and the Iowa School, and the Make The Socially Useful Message Bleedin' Obvious. And then you lot come along! What inspired you to do Weird Lit? How do you manage the backbreaking labor, and pleeeease tell me you plan on doing it for years to come.

DD: At the last AWP I went around talking to editors and they were fed up to their eyeballs of trauma narratives and lack of actual narrative beyond the message-ing. The carefully observed character study has its place but it ain’t with us, unless it’s weird, of course. As for labor management, it’s just four of us for now, but we’re looking at pulling in a sucker I mean an intern to help out. Finally, regarding the dearth of weird magazines: I think our mag’s conception was a big “see a need and fill it” kind of thing, and September (our Editor in Chief) is the one driving that truck. We all hopped on when she came to the truck stop and we plan on riding this fucker as long as there’s road to cover.

MA: Dina, it's been a fantastic and enlightening chat. Thank you so much for the insightful questions.

DD: Thank you so much for doing this, Matt. I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with me.

Matthew F. Amati arose from primordial slime, damp with Creation’s generative humors, eyeless as the lamprey, ravenous as the barramundi, inscrutable as the Giant Squid. He lives in a quiet suburb and plays the banjo. His fiction has appeared in more than fifty print and online publications including Flash Fiction Online, Daily Science Fiction, Cosmic Roots & Eldritch Shores, and others. You can find his diffidently-updated website here: www.mattamati.com. He also composed all of the collages on this page.