Creative Writing Lecturer Matthew Clark Davison Discusses His Novel, Our Need for a Pariah

Friday, September 24, 2021

ZYZZYVA (SAN FRANCISCO) -- Davison’s writing has been published widely, including in Guernica, The Atlantic Monthly, Foglifter, Fourteen Hills and other publications. In addition to teaching in San Francisco State University’s Creative Writing Department, Matthew also created The Lab, a non-academic school that for nearly fifteen years has been helping writers “generate new work or deepen existing projects.” A textbook based on The Lab, co-written with Alice LaPlante, will be published by W.W. Norton in 2022.

“Queer people and other historically marginalized folks have an opportunity to see the holes in the mainstream scripts because they weren’t written for us, but we’re not immune from forming our own scripts or hierarchies, either,” Davison said. “I hope the book examines the difficulty of being our siblings’ keepers, and that the family I portrayed offers a very particular set of opportunities for the bigger questions like yours.”

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