Tag: reading

Bonus Friday Five: Q&A with ‘Night Watch’ author Mathew Goldberg

‘I’m not someone who gets hit with flashes of inspiration, but someone who sits down and works, facing the screen for a set amount of time even if nothing comes from the session.’

Last night, Mathew Goldberg celebrated the release of his award-winning debut collection of short stories, Night Watch, with a release party at Two Friends Bookstore + Cafe in Bentonville, Arkansas. I hope it’s the first of many occasions for Mathew to celebrate this accomplishment. With his book hot off the presses, I wanted to deviate from my usual Friday Five routine to squeeze in a bonus question-and-answer session with this talented writer while this collection is brand new.

Mathew is an associate teaching professor of English at my former employer, Missouri University of Science and Technology, and he was kind enough to send me a galley proof of the book. I can tell you that it’s brilliant and well worth the read. It’s no surprise the collection won the 2025 Spokane Prize for Short Fiction from Willow Springs Books, the publisher of Night Watch.

At Missouri S&T, Mathew teaches creative writing, composition, American literature, and detective fiction. To readers familiar with S&T’s focus on STEM education, Mathew’s duties may sound a bit fish-out-of-water, but his background — he holds a biomedical and electrical engineering degree from Duke as well as an MFA from Arkansas — gives him unusual insights into many of the students in his courses. (There are, of course, English and humanities students at S&T, and no doubt they too are keen to learn from this talented writer and academic.)

Many of the stories in Night Watch first found purchase in magazines like The Atlantic and Shenandoah. His fiction also has earned Pushcart Prize nods and semifinalist spots in contests like the Iron Horse Literary Review Book Prize.

Read on to learn more about Mathew’s perspective on the writing craft, teaching at a STEM-focused university, and advice to his fellow writers. And once you’re done reading, make plans to pick up a copy of Night Watch as soon as you can. (For readers from the St. Louis area, you might want to make plans to catch Mathew’s reading and book signing next month at Left Bank Books in St. Louis. Can’t make it in person? No worries. Left Bank plans to stream the presentation over its YouTube channel.)

Continue reading “Bonus Friday Five: Q&A with ‘Night Watch’ author Mathew Goldberg”

Tom Robbins and the flexibility to endure

When I got the news yesterday that novelist Tom Robbins died last weekend (at age 92; how could he have been that old?), my memory swooped like the long-extinct Kauaʻi ʻōʻō back, back, back to 1981 or ’82 or so, when I first encountered Robbins’ writings in the form of his novel Still Life With Woodpecker.

A journalism student at the time and steeped in the dreary, staid, humorless learnings of newswriting, I read Still Life as a guilty pleasure. (I’m grateful to my girlfriend at the time who lent me her copy of this book, the perfect antidote to my gloomy, humorless J-school student outlook.) The way Robbins played with the language — even when he was over the top with it, which was often — enthralled me, and for a long time, throughout my college years and beyond, I tried on his writing style to see how it would fit.

Continue reading “Tom Robbins and the flexibility to endure”