ArtSake

This is one in a series of extremely brief interviews with participants in the Commonwealth Reading Series.

Suzanne Matson, the next writer to brave the Q&A shrink ray, reads on Thursday, January 8 at Grub Street in Boston, at 7 PM.

Accomplished as both a novelist and a poet, Suzanne has a uniquely thorough perspective on the writing craft - and, it turns out, on the sport of paintball.

MCC: What are you working on these days?

Suzanne: An historical novel about a family of immigrant, socialist Finns against a backdrop of WWI politics. But it also has a great love story.

MCC: What writer do you most admire but write nothing like?

Suzanne: I really like reading novels of epic sweep–Tolstoy, Dos Passos, and the like. I wish I could do Epic Sweep, but I end up getting engrossed in closely focused character fiction–although my last novel, The Tree-Sitter, and my current project, The Liberty Committee, are very interested in social and political contexts.

MCC: What’s the most embarrassing sentence/line of poetry you’ve ever written?

Suzanne: Most of them end up in my cyber trash bin, so I can’t remember, but as an undergraduate, I had the honor of having W. S. Merwin poke fun at the first line of a poem I had written: “Winter walks the china sky.” He really didn’t like that line.

MCC: Who wins the poets vs. prose writers paintball war?

Suzanne: My sons, who play paintball, are sure the prose writers would cream the poets. They seem to think poets are too dreamy to get a bead on a target. As someone who writes in both genres, I’m not so sure they’re right: Poets are very attuned, as Ezra Pound once said, to the “pith and gist” of things. That might translate into sharp-shooting talent. Although novelists, used to thinking in plots, might best the poets in battle strategy.

Suzanne joins Kim Adrian, Ben Berman, Xujun Eberlein, and JD Scrimgeour for a reading on Thursday, January 8, 2009, 7 PM at Grub Street, 160 Boylston Street, Boston MA. Read about all of the events in the Commonwealth Reading Series.

Suzanne Matson is the author of three novels, most recently, The Tree-Sitter, and two books of poetry. A professor of English and creative writing at Boston College, she lives in Newton with her husband and three sons. Her full list of works is at www.suzannematson.com.

Read all of the nano-interviews.

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