A photo of Matt Bell. Description: He is white, with short salt-and-pepper hair. He's wearing a plaid button-up.

Coffee & Craft: Free Revision Lecture by Matt Bell

On Saturday, April 22nd at 10:30 AM AZ time, Matt Bell will lead a revision workshop “Refuse to Be Done,” named after his own book on revising novels. The workshop will take place in room LC369 inside the Language & Communication building located on Scottsdale Community College’s campus. Participants will learn Bell’s own process for breaking down revision into manageable steps and meet other aspiring writers of all skill levels.

Bell’s award-winning writing has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, American Short Fiction, and other publications. His novel In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods was a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award and an Indies Choice Adult Book of the Year Honor Recipient, and was selected as the winner of the Paula Anderson Book Award. Both In the House and Scrapper were selected by the Library of Michigan as Michigan Notable Books.

Coffee & Craft is a new, recurring series of Saturday morning creative writing workshops at Scottsdale Community College. The first was on poetry and led by Scottsdale poet laureate Lois Roma-Deeley. The workshop is free and open to the public. Seating is first come, first serve, and subject to limited capacity. Learn more about Matt Bell at his website. A map of Scottsdale Community College’s campus can be found here. A map of the Language & Communication building itself can be found here.

Tucker Leighty-Phillips’ Maybe This is What I Deserve: An Interview

Tucker Leighty-Phillips’ Maybe This is What I Deserve: An Interview


Congratulations to Arizona State University alum Tucker Leighty-Phillips for his upcoming flash fiction chapbook Maybe This is What I Deserve, published by Split/Lip Press. It won the 2022 Split/Lip Chapbook Contest, selected by Isle McElroy. Leighty-Phillips explores themes of childhood innocence, parenthood, and existentialism rooted in everyday life. His collected stories demonstrate compelling prose and unrelenting authenticity delivered with concision.

Each story in Maybe This is What I Deserve is funny or melancholic, sometimes a little bit of both, as seen in the story “Togethering.” Leighty-Phillips’ precise diction layers atmosphere in his succinct tales that gets richer through rereads. Other stories showcase his ability to play with structure and white space, such as in “Another Story” and “The Rumpelstiltskin Understudies,” which makes this collection perfect for readers who want to read something familiar yet refreshing.

With prose that constantly surprises and pleases, Maybe This Is What I Deserve is the kind of flash collection that will make you rethink how you see the world. Beneath the arresting imagery of sweaty mashes of bills and noses flowing like gratitude is the heartbeat of an author equally invested in language as character. These stories shock, they entertain, and they stick in your mind.

Isle McElroy, author of The Atmospherians and People Collide

Tucker Leighty-Phillips is a writer from Southeastern Kentucky. He is the author of Maybe This Is What I Deserve (Split/Lip Press, 2023), and his work has been featured in Adroit Journal, The Offing, Passages North, and elsewhere. Find him on Twitter at @thenurtureboy and on his website.

I love Tucker Leighty-Phillips’s wild imagination, his privileging of the emotions of childhood, his ability to find the magic that’s ever-present in the messiness of community. In Maybe This Is What I Deserve, Leighty-Phillips delivers us a surrealism suffused with joy and generosity and wit, grounded in sincere love for Kentucky and for the irrepressible potential of its people.

Matt Bell, author of Appleseed

Maybe This is What I Deserve releases June 20th, 2023. You can pre-order it here.

We had the pleasure of interviewing Tucker Leighty-Phillips about his book and writing process. This interview was conducted over email by our Blog Editor, Antonio Folcarelli.

Antonio Folcarelli: Many of the stories in Maybe This is What I Deserve speak to childhood and parenthood. What inspired you to write from these perspectives?

Tucker Leighty-Phillips: I grew up in a primarily single-parent household, and a lot of my childhood experience was filtered through that. Having one parent meant our household only had one income, and one person to raise myself and my sisters. It was a tremendous task, and my mom really worked hard to ensure we were safe, fed, and happy. I think a lot of these stories are a means of processing what that was like for me, now that I’m older and can differentiate my childhood from other people’s childhoods, and these stories are also a space to explore what that experience must have been like for her. When you’re a kid, especially one in a low-income household, you don’t realize all the structural factors working against you, or the systems meant to help that aren’t helpful. I wanted to try to revisit some of those situations from a new point-of-view, particularly that of the parent. 

AF: One quote the collection opens with is by film director, producer, and screenwriter Wong Kar-Wai:
“One’s memories aren’t what actually happened—they’re very subjective. You can always make it much better.” Why did you choose this quote?

TLP: Many of the stories in here are autobiographical, at least partially, even in some small way, and I think many of these stories invoke memories for me. I liked having a reminder to myself that each story, and each memory embedded within the story, is an attempted reconstruction of whatever my experience was. Sometimes I’ve benefited from hindsight, and sometimes that hindsight has frustrated or upset me. I wanted this collection to be a space of thoughtful nostalgia–not one that simply yearns for another time, but interrogates it. 

AF: What challenges did you face in layering humor, intimacy, and poignancy in flash fiction? How do you keep emotional depth concise?

TLP: Great question! I’ve always kind of grappled with this. I want to be serious, but not melodramatic. I want to be playful, but not flippant. It’s a game of fine margins in that way. I am trying to navigate how much humor will help accurately portray the heart of the thing I’m writing about. Sometimes, a punchline helps alleviate some of the tension of whatever I’m exploring in a story, and gives me a sense of positive emotional reflection. Sometimes, it doesn’t, and feels like it takes away. That’s why stories like “Groceries” or “Toddy’s Got Lice Again” are in there–they are stories about feelings that I really want to be earnest about, and felt that humor took away from that earnestness. I don’t always get that emotional tenor right, but it’s always being tweaked.

AF: What works or authors do you turn to for inspiration?

TLP: I think it depends on the day, my mood, and what project I’m working on. For MTIWID, my primary inspirations were people like Deb Olin Unferth, Lucy Corin, Ana María Shua, Meredith Alling, Ross Gay, Zachary Schomburg, and Louis Sachar. But I also have a lot of non-literary influences that always shine through in my work. The Adventures of Pete & Pete is a big one–it was a television show that really made the mundane aspects of rural/suburban life feel really expansive and fantastical. I also really love cartoons and the narrative logic that exists within them–Looney Tunes, Scooby Doo, Courage the Cowardly Dog. I always try to let my writing create its own internal logic, and I do my best to let it guide me. 

AF: The story “Stages of Grief” was co-written with Rachel Reeher. How did collaboration affect your writing process?

TLP: Every single collaborative project is different, depending on the partnership, the process, the medium–so each one kind of shifts my perspective on how collaborative work is done. Rachel and I are a couple, so there’s a lot of trust already instilled between one another. I had an idea, but wasn’t sure how to go about it, and she helped bring a lot of the idea into tangible language. Technically, there’s one other collaborative project in the collection–”The Rumpelstiltskin Understudies (play)” uses a drawing made by my then-eleven year old sister. I didn’t tell her what I was working on or how it fit into the narrative, but she trusted me and made something that really expanded the story. 

AF: What projects are you working on now?

TLP: I’m a little scattered, but I will mention the thing that is the furthest along–especially since it relates to the prior question. I’m currently working on a collaborative anthology, where each writer contributed a fiction piece based on a prompt, but didn’t know what anyone else was working on, and ultimately created a vast, innovative, sometimes contradictory worldbuilding project. The title is still TBD but it’s in the final editing stages now! 

A photo of Matt Bell. Description: He is white, with short salt-and-pepper hair. He's wearing a plaid button-up.

ASU Worldbuilding Initiative Workshop with Matt Bell: Imagining New Ways of Making Community


On Monday, March 27, at 4:00 PM AZ time, Matt Bell will be leading a worldbuilding workshop that examines “democracy, consensus, and communal problem solving” in imagined worlds. These workshops invite audience members to “engage in worldbuilding… inventing new ways of imagining and interacting with the world around us.”

The ASU Worldbuilding Initiative is hosted by the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics.

Matt Bell is the author of numerous books, the two most recent being Appleseed (a New York Times notable book) and Refuse to Be Done, a craft guide on writing, rewriting, and revision. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Tin House, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, Orion, and elsewhere. Originally from Michigan, he now teaches creative writing at Arizona State University. Read more about him on his website.

This event will take place online. It’s free and open to the public, although it does require registration. Go here to learn more.

A photo of Matt Bell. Description: He is white, with short salt-and-pepper hair. He's wearing a plaid button-up.

An Interview with Matt Bell


Matt Bell is the author of numerous books, the two most recent being Appleseed (a New York Times notable book) and Refuse to Be Done, a craft guide on writing, rewriting, and revision. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Tin House, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, Orion, and elsewhere. Originally from Michigan, he now teaches creative writing at Arizona State University. Read more about him on his website.

In this post, we feature an interview with Matt Bell conducted by Bailey Wood, Superstition Review’s nonfiction editor for Issue 30. Please note that the transcript has been edited for clarity.


Bailey Wood: Hi, Matt. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. You are a creative writing professor here at ASU. You have published books including Appleseed, Scrapper, In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, and most recently your craft book Refuse to Be Done. What motivated you to write a book on the craft of writing?

Matt Bell: I started working on Refuse to Be Done as a lecture. It was my traveling show for a long time. You know, you’d occasionally get asked to give craft talks at conferences or other universities. So I was giving this talk on revision, and it really came out of my own trying to learn how to revise—especially longer form fiction. Initially, it was this loose group of revision tips that I would talk about when asked to give those talks. And over time, it became a more novel-focused talk and became those three drafts that Refuse to Be Done breaks the process into.

At some point, maybe four or five years ago, I gave the talk at the University of Alabama. A professor there, Heidi Staples, came up to me afterwards, and said, “You know that talk’s a book, right?”

And I was like, “No, I did not. But maybe I’ll write it.”

And so I was lucky to have Heidi Staples’ push to get me to put it into book form.

BW: That’s awesome—I know you mention that in your book as well. What did your writing process look like for Refuse to Be Done, and how was it different from writing a fiction novel?

MB: Maybe the big difference was that I don’t really outline when I’m writing novels in advance, and I think with Refuse to Be Done I had a little better idea of how I wanted to go through it.

People are always asking about technology for writing—or using Word or Scribner, different things like that. And I’ve never written fiction in anything but Word, but I actually wrote Refuse to Be Done in Scribner. That worked really well for me. It saved the outline, and it’s arranged in a different way—it’s the only thing I’ve written in that. It was sort of a different process.

And then, weirdly, the revision process for this book and revision was also the process outlined in the book. So I did a lot of the things that the book said to do with fiction as I was working on the non-fiction version of it. There’s something kind of crazy about doing your tenth draft of a book on how to revise a book in three drafts, right? But it was useful in that way.

So, in some ways pretty similar. Of course, I had first readers who I thought of as play-testers. I had some friends who were revising books who read the book while they were working on it. Seeing what was useful to them and what wasn’t was really great to par down some of what was in it.

BW: So something you’ve mentioned already is that you have this three-draft approach. And within those three draft sections, there’s exercises that the readers can go through depending on what stage of writing they’re in. How did you decide which exercise to include for each chapter?

MB: It’s a little bit of a kitchen sink book: here’s a lot of what I knew to do. I felt, when I got done with it, that I’m going to have to develop some new ideas. A lot of it is what I do and what’s useful to me. I think some things could go in different drafts. The kind of stuff you’re doing in the first draft—you’re still doing some of it in a third draft. But I was really trying to think about what’s most useful to put it together: the three drafts having that focus on generator revision, and then narrator revision, and then polishing revision. Just thinking about what most naturally fits in each place.

And then also thinking about what carries forwards. Like I said, a lot of the first draft stuff, you really do it again in draft two. Presenting that kind of material first obviously means that you already know it when you start thinking about draft two. So a little bit of just thinking through the process.

There’s also a combination from my own teaching of novel writing. I’ve been teaching novel writing workshops at ASU and other places for ten years. You get a sense, especially that first draft work, of what people need in that phase or what kind of advice is most useful. So a combination of my own experience as a writer and what I see in my students and friends, and what kind of thinking is most useful at what stage in the process.

BW: I think something that you mentioned, too, is that there’s parts of each section that you maybe can apply to different drafts or work through that. It provides different exercises as you’re going through the phases, which is really awesome for readers.

In an interview with Hannah Gerson from The Millions, you mention how your novel gives a concrete series of steps to take, not the nebulous “keep making it better until it’s finished.” Keeping that in mind, how did you know that the works you’ve produced and published so far had reached a point where no more revision could be made and were completely finished?

MB: That’s a great question! It’s funny because I feel like the premise of the book is “refuse to be done,” and the question everyone wants to know is, “but, really, when are you done?” It feels appropriate.

For me, the process that’s in Refuse to Be Done is really everything I do before I show it to someone. I think when I get to the end of that process—which can be a couple years for a book—I usually feel pretty good about it. I at least feel like I’ve done everything I know how to do, which is a different way of being done. It’s the point that’s the farthest I can take it on my own. At this point, of course, I’ve written enough books that I’m used to going through my agent, my editor, my outside readers, but I really go into that process feeling like I’ve done everything. There really is a tightening that happens in that third draft phase that if you haven’t gone through the whole process by yourself at this scale, there’s this moment where everything is getting right-sized and you can feel the language is suddenly like “this is sort of what books on the shelf sound like” instead of first draft language. You do feel that completeness come in.

There’s always a place where I’ve over-edited it a little bit, where I’m now starting to make it a little worse or I’m subbing out words for the same word. On any given day, I might make this choice or that choice, but both choices are fine. I get into a place like that, where I’m no longer making productive change. And that’s a really good time for outside readers. I just went through with an outside reader on the book I’m finishing right now, and it was the time I needed someone else to light up other possibilities for me. I had done everything I could see. And she, of course, imm found me more stuff to work on. So, done and then not done, but that’s also part of the process. It’s not really-really done until it’s on the shelf.

BW: As a follow up to that question, is there any sort of intuition towards getting into that third draft, where you feel like “this is pretty close, and I could be done soon”? Does that happen at all?

MB: I think so. I think—especially having read enough of other people’s manuscripts and knowing where they go into the publishing process and things like that—there’s always this point a month from when I’m done with a novel where I could stop. I could probably send it to my agent here, and he would enjoy it, as much as he probably will in a month. But that last month of work is also a place where I’m going to forsake that last round of editing with someone else. That willingness to go a little past the point of acceptability or past the point of good, trying to get to great. A lot of great work gets done in that. It could be done with an agent or an editor, but I would rather take it a little farther myself if I can.

But I always feel that point, where I’m itchy to send it out to somebody—I’m ready to go. I know if I sit with it a little longer, I’ll get the rust out of it. Late in the process for me, I work really long hours. Normally, I write two hours a day or something, but late in the process, I’ll try to write eight, ten, twelve, so I can hold the whole book in my head. It lets me remember more of it. It’s really hard to get back in that state. It costs so much time. There is a tendency when I’m in it to get everything out of it because you never want to do this again. That’s the phase where I’m a writer in a movie: I’m an insane person who can’t talk to anyone, I’m dressing weird, and I haven’t eaten right. You don’t want to have to go back to that place, so it’s best to get what you can out of it while you’re there.

BW: I completely understand that. Something that is frequently mentioned in creative writing courses is an encouragement for students to read and write what they’re passionate about. What kind of books do you look for when you read? Are there any writers you’ve read recently that have inspired your work?

MB: I read really widely; I like things in a lot of different genres. I’m always reading different stuff. I think most of what you read—even if you don’t like it—it’s influential because of the way you don’t like it. So everything helps you hone your case, your interests, your aesthetics. That feels really great.

There are people I go back to all the time that are really important to me. Writers like Denis Johnson, Ursula LeGuin, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthary, Toni Morrison, and Anne Carson. Some of those people are always on my mind, and there’s always nearby. My desk is always full of things that are important to me or inspiring. I think my childhood The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe is in my desk. It makes me happy to have it around, thinking about these books you love and care about.

Who I’ve read recently that I really liked… I just read a book called The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson. It’s a political fantasy novel that I just thought was speculator. It felt like a model for how to write a certain kind of book that was really thinking about politics and colonialism and utopia and things like that. It was a great story. You kind of felt like “oh, this how you write a really smart book that’s also a great adventure.” I’m always happy to find something like that—the real keys to the kingdom.

Not every book you’re going to take apart as you read it. A lot of books just get read. Every once in a while, you read something where you’re like, “Well, I’m going to keep thinking about this. I’m going to study how this is done.” Which I think it’s one of the pleasures of being a writer.

BW: Absolutely. One final question for you today. How has your experience as a teacher help shape your writing?

MB: I think it’s shaped it a lot. Even in reading widely. I think when I first started teaching, I always taught pretty diverse syllabi and had lots of different kinds of writers on the course reading list. I realized at some point that a lot of my examples, just off the top of my head, would come from what I liked—but which is not always connected to students. I realized that I wanted to read really widely so I had an idea of what students were doing, even if it wasn’t a genre that was my preference.

For instance, I had not read a lot of YA, but we have a lot of students who are writing YA. So I read some, so I know what people are up to. It’s not a drudgery to do that; I just find all this good stuff in genres I had not read much in. And that ends up being really exciting, so that’s a big part of it.

Maybe the other half is that, in having to explain how to do some of the stuff, you of course learn how to do it better yourself. The things that were really easy for me—or that are intuitive for me—were, when I first started teaching, very hard to teach. The two hardest things to teach are the things you’re best at and the things you’re worst at. The good stuff, you’re like, “Well, I don’t really know how I do this, I just do it,” and that’s frustrating for students. And the stuff you’re bad you, you shy away from because you’re not good at it. So teaching has been a reason to deepen my craft and be a better teacher that way. Refuse to Be Done would not have been written if I wasn’t a teacher. I just wouldn’t have the material in that format, and I wouldn’t be able to talk about what I do. I’m just lucky.

As you know, from being in the class that you’re in—both at the undergrad level and at the MFA—every year, a new cohort of smart, interesting, talented people to talk writing with comes through. And that’s a pretty neat gift to have in your life. This constantly renewing source of good writers, so I think that’s a really lucky thing that I get to experience at ASU.

BW: I definitely think that there’s something at play with that, too—you get to work with writers of all experiences. You get to work with the process of different students, too.

Well, that was all my questions for you. Thank you so much for you time.

A photo of Jonathan Franzen.

TomorrowTalks with Jonathon Franzen: Crossroads


Join ASU’s TomorrowTalks with Jonathan Franzen Wednesday, October 5th at 6pm AZ time. TomorrowTalks is a student-engagement initiative meant to put students in conversation with authors who explain how they use their writing to address society’s most pressing issues. It’s led by the Division of Humanities at ASU and hosted by ASU’s Department of English in partnership with Macmillan Publishers.

This event takes place over Zoom and is free, although registration is required. Franzen will be discussing his book Crossroads, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. His book is set in December of 1971, and it examines a Midwestern family in the midst of a moral crisis. With careful attention to each of the family members, he interweaves their perspectives into a tale of suspense and complexity.

Thank God for Jonathan Franzen . . . With its dazzling style and tireless attention to the machinations of a single family, Crossroads is distinctly Franzen-esque, but it represents a marked evolution . . . It’s an electrifying examination of the irreducible complexities of an ethical life. With his ever-parsing style and his relentless calculation of the fractals of consciousness, Franzen makes a good claim to being the 21st century’s Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Ron Charles, The Washington Post

Jonathan Franzen has written six novels. He has won a variety of awards: the National Book Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Award, the Heartland Prize, and others. Visit his website to read more about him.

To learn more about TomorrowTalks and register for the event, go here.

Desert Nights, Rising Stars Virtual Writers Conference

Early registration extended through to February!

Join the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing in their annual Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writing Conference! Here is their message about the event:

“The past year has been difficult, to say the least. As a center, we want to make it as easy and accessible as possible for you to be creative while continuing to stay healthy and safe. And thanks to the generosity of the Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust, it’s our pleasure to announce that we’re extending the early registration rate for this year’s Desert Nights, Rising Stars Virtual Writers Conference through February.”

” The Desert Nights, Rising Stars Virtual Writers Conference is February 18 – 20, 2021 on Zoom. Advance your craft, meet other writers, and produce new work with your choice of over 60 sessions in fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, memoir, fantasy, romance, science fiction, screenwriting, publishing, and more. Writers of all experience levels and backgrounds are welcome. Advanced workshops and pitch sessions with agents and editors are available, too. This year’s keynotes are Linda Hogan and Beverly Jenkins. Other faculty include Mahogany L. Browne, Matt Bell, Alan Dean Foster, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Cynthia Pelayo, Evan Winter, and Erika T. Wurth. Early registration is only $225. Meet our faculty, view the schedule, and learn more today here.

If the conference still feels like it’s beyond your reach or you just don’t feel like it’s the right time for you, we’ve got additional discounts for senior citizens, students, veterans, ASU affiliates, and anyone experiencing a financial hardship, plus free keynotes, public workshops, single-day passes, and other ways to engage outside of the full registration (not to mention smaller classes and workshops with the Piper Writers Studio). There are always plenty of free talks and readings, too.”

To learn more about the Virgina G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, click here.

Contributor Update, Matt Bell: Conjunctions: 71, A Cabinet of Curiosity

Conjunctions Issue 71 coverToday we are happy to share news about past contributor Matt Bell. Matt’s short story, “Fur, Bark, Feather, Leaf, Faun,” is upcoming in Conjunctions: 71, A Cabinet of Curiosity. About the issue, the description reads:  “Curiosity in all its guises is the wellspring of revelation. It is a prime mover behind our deeds, good or evil, simple or complicated. While the thirty-one writers gathered here individually explore many of the ways in which curiosity drives and defines us, together they propose that the realms of curiosity are, finally, inexhaustible.”

Conjunctions: 71, A Cabinet of Curiosity is available for preorder through the Bard College here. Shipping will begin by the end of November, 2018.

Our interview with Matt can be read in Issue 18 of Superstition Review.

Congratulations, Matt!

#ArtLitPhx: Southwest Editor’s Forum

Hayden’s Ferry Review is hosting their first “Southwest Editor’s Forum” on Saturday, February 10, located at the Piper Writer’s House at ASU’s Tempe campus.

Their announcement states: “We will explore process, share resources, network, and even feed you. It’s so easy as editors to sit in our offices and lose sight of our community. We focus on writers and discuss their efforts, but as editors, we have different needs and unique challenges to surmount. At this inaugural event, we would like to convene the editors of our region for an afternoon of discussion, camaraderie, and sharing. We hope you will join us and register for this free event right away.”

Presenters include Matt Bell, a founding editor at The Collagist; Rosemarie Dombrowski the inaugural Poet Laureate of Phoenix; as well as Sally Ball, the associate director at Four Way Books.

Reserve your free seat here.

#ArtLitPhx: Mesa Community College Presents Matt Bell

A-tree-a-person-Matt-Bell

Matt Bell will be reading from his latest book, A Tree or a Person or a Wall, at the Mesa Community College Art Gallery on Wednesday, November 9 at 7 p.m. A Q&A and a signing will follow the reading. For more information, please visit the Facebook event.

Matt Bell is the author of the novel In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, a Michigan Notable Book, and an Indies Choice Adult Debut Book of the Year Honor Recipient, and the winner of the Paula Anderson Book Award. He is also the author of three previous books, How They Were Found, Cataclysm Baby, and Scrapper. His stories have appeared in Best American Mystery Stories, Best American Fantasy, Conjunctions, Gulf Coast, The American Reader, and many other publications. He teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.

 

 

#ArtLitPhx: Benjamin Rybeck: The Sadness with special guest Matt Bell: A Tree or a Person or a Wall

The-sadnessA-tree-person-or-a-wallBenjamin Rybeck presents his debut novel, The Sadness, on Wednesday, October 19 at 7 p.m. Arizona State University creative writing instructor Matt Bell joins Rybeck, with his latest work, A Tree or a Person or a Wall. The event takes places at Changing Hands Phoenix.

Benjamin Rybeck is the marketing director at Brazos Bookstore in Houston, TX. He received an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona. His work has appeared in Kirkus Reviews, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, Literary Hub, The Nervous Breakdown, and elsewhere. The Sadness is his first novel. He lives in Houston, TX.

Matt Bell is the author of the novel In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, a Michigan Notable Book, and an Indies Choice Adult Debut Book of the Year Honor Recipient, and the winner of the Paula Anderson Book Award. He is also the author of two previous books, How They Were Found and Cataclysm Baby, and his next novel, Scrapper, was published in September 2015. His stories have appeared in Best American Mystery Stories, Best American Fantasy, Conjunctions, Gulf Coast, The American Reader, and many other publications. He teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.

For more information, please visit the Changing Hands website.