 or live. Hey, everyone. Thanks for joining us. We'll get started in just a few minutes. We'll give everyone a chance to enter the room. Can everyone hear me? And Anisa, can you let me share my screen? Yes, I can. Yes, I can. There you go. Welcome, everyone. I think we'll wait just a couple more minutes and then we'll get started. Okay, it is 7 o'clock. I think we will go ahead and get started. And thank you all for joining us this evening to celebrate Matthew Clark Davidson's debut novel, Doubting Thomas. I'm Kevin. I'm a librarian from the Hormel LGBTQIA Center at the main library. And I am excited to be here to introduce our guests. And before I do that, I will start us off with a land acknowledgement and a few brief library updates. And please check the chat box for all the links that you'll need, covering everything that I'm mentioning in my intro. And we will start with a land acknowledgement. The San Francisco Public Library acknowledges that we occupy the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramayutishalani peoples who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. We recognize that the Ramayutishalani understand the interconnectedness of all things and have maintained harmony with nature for millennia. We honor the Ramayutishalani peoples for their enduring commitment to war rep Mother Earth. As the indigenous protectors of this land and in accordance with their traditions, the Ramayutishalani have never ceded, lost, nor forgotten their responsibilities as the caretakers of this place, as well as for all peoples who reside in their traditional territory. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. As uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramayutishalani community. We recognize to respectfully honor Ramayutishalani peoples. We must embrace and collaborate meaningfully to record indigenous knowledge in how we care for San Francisco and all its peoples. And I would just like to tell you briefly about the James C. Hormel LGBTQIA Center. It consists of the reading room you see on the slide as well as archival collections held on the 64 and the SF History Center. We have approximately 10,000 books and 200 archival collections, as well as videos, magazines, newspapers, journals, and more, by and about LGBTQIA people with a special emphasis on the San Francisco Bay Area. And just to let you know about a couple of events coming up on October 12 at 7 p.m. Thomas Moniz and Michelle Gonzalez will be in conversation in person in the Latinx community room at the main library, and that event will also be live streamed. And the next event hosted by the Hormel LGBTQIA Center is on October 20, and that is a panel discussion, queer writing on growing up with the AIDS crisis with editor Matilda Bernstein-Thichomore alongside four of the contributors to the anthology. And we'd like to thank Fabulous of Books, formerly known as Dog Eared Books Castro, for co-sponsoring tonight's event. You can buy the book from them in person or online, and we will put the link in the chat for that. And I am now ready to introduce our guests. Matthew Clark Davidson is creator and teacher of the lab, writing classes with MCD, a non-academic school started in 2007 in a friend's living room. The textbook version of the lab co-authored by bestselling writer Alice LaPrance will be published by W.W. Norton in 2022. His prose has been recently anthologized in Empty the Pews and 580 Split and published in or on Lithub Lambda Literary, The Advocate Bernica, The Atlantic Monthly, The Rumpus, Foglifter, Exquisite Pandemic, and others. Matthew earned a BA and MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University where he now teaches full-time in the BA MFA Departments. Doughty and Thomas is his debut novel and it was published this year by Ambul Press. Michael Nava is the author of an acclaimed series of eight novels featuring gay, Latino criminal defense lawyer Henry Rios who the New Yorker called a detective unlike any previous protagonist in American war. The New York Times book review has called Nava one of our best writers. He is the recipient of seven Lambda Literary awards in the gay mystery category and the Bill Whitehead award for lifetime achievement in LGBT literature. His most recent Rios novel is Lies with Man which was published in April by Ambul Press, an LGBTQ press and imprint of Biowater books of which he is also managing editor. Okay and it's my pleasure to turn it over to Michael and Matthew. Thank you Kevin and Anissa and thank you the San Francisco Public Library for hosting this event. I am a library user and I hope all of you are too. So I'm Michael Nava and as Kevin said I'm the managing editor of Ambul Press and I'm here with Matthew Clark-Davidson to talk about his debut novel that in Thomas. Matthew's book was the first book I acquired as managing editor and it's a book of which I'm extremely proud and I met Matthew through a mutual friend of ours John Trout who had taken Matthew's who studied with Matthew at the lab and was a close friend of mine and I just wanted to acknowledge that because I see his sister Mary is here so hi Mary. Hi Mary good to see you. We will be talking we will talk about Matthew's background as a teacher and a writer more extensively in our conversation. I'm going to skip the introduction since Kevin did such a great job doing that but I do want to briefly introduce the novel which again we'll talk about in greater detail in a moment. So Thomas McGehran the protagonist of Dating Thomas is a fourth grade teacher and an openly gay man at a private primary school serving Portland Oregon's wealthy progressive elite when he's falsely accused of inappropriately touching one of his male students. The accusation comes just as Thomas is being thrust back into the center of his unusual family by his younger brother's battle with cancer although cleared of the accusation Thomas is forced to resign from a job he loves doing a potentially life changing family drama. You know I can't begin to cite the many many growing reviews and endorsements Matthew's novel has generated since his publication in June but I want to quote the closing paragraph of the review in our hometown paper The San Francisco Chronicle quote thanks to the care Davis pays to his characters each one of fully realized thinking human and Thomas's orbit what could be an over-serving of tragedies instead delivered with clarity and nuance the result is a novel that manages to take on a number of the world's traumas without ever being swallowed whole instead using the personal travails of a gay man at the desk of Obama's America to probe at the nature of what it truly means to know oneself that's the kind of review that most writers would give their right arm to have and would probably inscribe on their gravestones so congratulations Matthew but before we get to the novel I want to actually start with your personal story so you were a teenage runaway how did you get from there to here well I maybe I have some things in common with a cat in that maybe I have nine lives I don't know it's so crazy for me to think about that especially when I think about my nieces and and you know being 15 and leaving home and I really was completely financially independent from that time until now and I just I can't believe it sometimes I was super lucky I had a lot of incredible support along the way my mom and I kept in touch the entire time after I left home and she also helped me by the time I got to California when I was 17 my family had moved from Massachusetts to California I mean from California to Massachusetts like Thomas's family and by the time I got back to California when I was 17 my mom had worked at El Camino Hospital in San Jose and she had a nurse acquaintance that had bought a condo that she couldn't quite afford and needed to rent out the second bedroom so it was kind of like a runaway with tethers to my mom still but it was still 3,000 miles away from anyone I was related to and what precipitated your leaving home you know I was just asked this on this podcast that I recorded yesterday and it took me by complete surprise and I choked up and started crying so I hope that I'm I'll do a better job maintaining composure this time you know I think that a lot of people assumed that I left home because I lived in a place that was extremely hostile towards gay kids I was really feminine as a kid and that's the train at Jack London Square I think you'll be hearing periodically and so you know was I bullied and did I have that kind of those gay tropes yes but I think that what I discovered was that my father around his work acquaintances and friends and my older brother around his friends were ashamed of me and I so they weren't I don't think that either one of them wanted to be ashamed of me but I think that they struggled because of what the context in which where we were living and I loved my younger brother so much and he turned 10 and I started to see him growing up and interacting with people in ways that made me fear that he might one day be ashamed of me too and I just I didn't feel like I could handle it plus I had dropped out of high school my father was my parents were married and separated and he was coming back and I wasn't very good at taking orders especially not from him at the time we're good friends now but at the time I wasn't good at taking orders so when did you come out as a writer was there a single precipitating event or is it something you discovered about yourself over a period of time um there was an event I wanted to be an actor um I think that I thought that I could do something on on stage and in fact some of the best you know some of the reasons why I'm a writer now or probably because I was lucky enough to see like the normal heart by Larry Kramer and Bentz by Martin Sherman and then of course I had a bad bad bad date where I didn't know where I was going I went to go see the first part of the world premiere of angels in America the date was really bad but the show was really good and so I thought I mean those were the those were the kinds of plays that I wanted to be acting in things that I thought would you know I didn't know the terminology at the time but I did believe in catharsis like audiences could be changed by witnessing something that was compressed and dramatic and so I wanted to be a part of that but I was so self-conscious from um probably the stuff that happened to me when I was a kid that I couldn't quite be free in my body on a stage um but I did write my own monologues and uh and the casting directors would um would ask me who wrote them so that I took a hint from that but it was really June Jordan and the recently um the recently passed away Janice Mira Katani, San Francisco legend at Glide Church who invited me to participate in a poetry for the people in the basement of Glide Church and it was sort of an offshoot a community offshoot from um the legend June Jordan's famous UC Berkeley class and um it was really there that you know Jan told me that I was a writer and when Jan Mira Katani said something to you you just just it was whether you agreed or not you just went with it yeah well that's very interesting because I think a lot of us needed that permission to be writers um I know for me coming from a working class Mexican-American family the first person to go to college the idea of a life in the arts was unimaginable until my mentor Ruth Barton who was an art scholar told me you you're a writer um that was a permission I needed really to pursue what seemed like an unreachable dream so did you were you always going to write about the experience of being uh queer? Yes I had yes because I don't yeah I yes because I'm um you know gave on Gainesburg times 20,000 I don't think I could have written about anything else but yeah you're pretty died in the womb yeah exactly thank you um and uh but really it was my um my friends my best friend Chuck who was like a mother figure to me that I met at California Cafe at Valley Fair where I got my first California waiter job shortly before I moved to San Francisco in I moved I think I was 1987 Chuck was like my mom he told me what to do he told me what to wear he told me what not to wear he told me how to get in the club he told me what to wear to the club he was from North Carolina from Morale and he had an accent I can still hear it in my mind as clear as day today and um he was 30 years old when he died he was you know I have pictures of us together out on Halloween where his mixture of like painkillers and booze and um other medications that he was on um it was it was a crap shoot you never knew what you were gonna get but um he he died and when he was 30 and I watched that happen along with his lover and this small group of people and then shortly after that my best friend because he wouldn't marry me um I wanted I was in love with him but he um just wanted to be my friend um he he got diagnosed and then two later two years later died and so really I was less interested in telling my story even though I had a dramatic one in some ways and more interested in preserving their memory so you know was there ever a moment when uh when you were in um pursuing your MFA for example that some well-meaning straight person told you you might be more successful if you tone down the gay stuff well it you know there were there I had some interesting things Stacy who's here was in some classes with me and he was there Stacy I don't know if you remember this but there was this one class where I had written this scene I wrote about this guy named Alex who was like a teenage runaway like me he was pretty autobiographical about my trip cross country when I was very young and um I looked kind of like a cross between boy George and Madonna at the time and I wrote five days by myself in a renewal alliance across country and it was a it was a project that I was working on called roadmap um and I brought in this scene and there's Alex head sex with this guy and um Brian who was in our class referred to them as like the boy and the girl or the man and the woman these two guys and so you know stuff like that happened but believe it or not that actually wasn't problematic for me because he had read my story so carefully and he didn't want me to change anything he just wanted me to get clear and when I kind of talked to him about it afterwards after class um he was just like well you you made them Alex and Adam which is something that if you've read the book or you looked at it I have a problem in which I name all of my characters like the same first letter and that same number of syllables but um the implicit messages were really the more the ones about like you know I felt like I was sending out my work and I did have some really good luck early on but with novels you know I literally have a hard copy of a rejection letter that said we've published one gay book this year we've published a gay book this year we loved your book but we have to pass because we published a gay book this year and so all of those things like really did kind of add up and um and I think they did make me second guess I felt sometimes like I might not have been gay enough for the gay presses and not straight enough for the the state straight presses yeah it uh and I know that we've got in Thomas who had some you know experiences up or a log in those lines which maybe we'll come back to it in a but I mean so it's one thing to decide to become a writer which is in and of itself an enormous staff but then you are also a teacher of creative writing and how how did that happen I remember exactly the moment it happened and also Michael I want to just you know go back to something that you said earlier me too is like you and I both I don't come from a Mexican-American family but I come from an Irish mixed American family and both of my grandmothers had extremely challenging circumstances my my grandma my paternal grandmother was a single mom during and after the depression and then also grew up during the depression and then was a single mom she was pregnant before she was married as was my paternal grandmother and both of them um you know my my parents weren't able to go to college my mother did get to go to nursing school and then later got some degrees but the when she was in her 40s but the you know the the thought of like study and creative writing I didn't know what an MFA was my senior graduating year of my bachelor's degree and the only reason why I got a bachelor's degree is because once again Jan told me to um Jan Mira Catani really took me under her wing and she told me to go back to her alma mater San Francisco State just one of the places she studied she actually went to UCLA but um back to that question um I couldn't perceive conceive myself at all going to graduate school until I got there I never even thought that a person like me could be a teacher in a classroom um and then Bridget Mullen's the wonderful playwright queer playwright um one day was she we she was teaching a class on I don't remember if it was on James Joyce all together or if it was just on the short story or whatever it was but we were talking about the dead that day and I had read it and I was really impressed and she came walking into the classroom and um she had a a bag and she put it on the desk while reciting from the dead by memory she took out a shoe box changed one pump on one foot put it on the the desk and put the new one on that foot and then the same thing uninterrupted reciting James Joyce and then afterwards said the shoe sale at Nordstrom is cheaper than therapy and in that moment I knew I could be a teacher too so that's when I decided that I would I would go for it but it requires a different aptitude teaching and writing that you you discovered that you had the aptitude for teaching for communicating ideas of craft to students for being receptive and encouraging and inspiring them I mean that's a very different thing than sitting in a room and making up stories with no one around when I took the GRE which again I didn't know what that was but back then you had to take this test to get into even to get to go to a creative writing program I had a perfect score in the logic part and I didn't even know I had that aptitude I thought that I was going to score much higher on the English I scored lower than I expected to and my math was the disaster that we all expected but yeah but the the logic was and I think that my mind has always been able to I think it's partially how it was that I was able to feed myself and even have you know like occasionally like a cashmere sweater or whatever it was like I was good at looking at a system and figuring out what its component parts were and then my brain is able to process and chart trends so if I read 100 stories then somewhere in my brain it it stores what they have in common and so those things get me super excited I love creative problem solving I love I love puzzles and that's what I think kind of a story and novel play really is so I but I don't know whether or not I stand up I mean some students are here in the room Paris and Kirsten and some and Ashley I think but the they would have a better way of telling you I don't quite think that I stand up there and tell people what a short story or novel is I think more I share my excitement for works that I think are really passionate and then start asking questions to the group like what are you noticing what are you noticing and then we talk about like maybe what some of those strategies were were and then what would and then start to try to to define what each of our individual take on that strategy might be for our own project well it's interesting you know because I thought I was of course who's a lawyer for many years and I found that legal training was actually really good for fiction because as I've told I've said you know a novel is like a legal brief it's a that's an argument you're trying to persuade the reader that though the reader knows these people never existed and these situations never occurred nonetheless you tell it so compellingly in such a logical order that they're willing to you know suspend their disbelief and to enter into it so there are you know there are many ways to approach writing I want to I want to come back to your teaching but we need to talk about the book so so at the beginning of the book it seemed to me that Thomas was in flight from his gayness or at least in the kind of semi closet though he didn't you know deny that he was gay and what what led this otherwise very intelligent and capable person to make that choice to conceal that part of himself yeah well you know of course me for me as a writer and a writer of fiction there is no there is no fantasy that's further away from my reality than someone who can pass us straight so the the I was sort of fascinated by I I really rebelled I still have an anchor streak in me that is dangerous I have a react to situations emotionally and passionately it takes a lot of restraint for me when I'm emotionally agitated not to act out I feel like maybe I've gotten to like a 17 year olds level of maturity around this and I'm 51 so you know I have to I it was of course just wondering what it would be like James Cameron Mitchell on his project Anthem Homunculus talks about that character and that incredible it's a kooky incredible smart amazing podcast thingy I don't even know how to describe it but it's like a musical podcast um audio drama and he talked about it in interviews and he said it's like would he imagined himself yeah how he would be had he not left his small town and I and I kind of wondered like what my life might have been like had I been able because I tried and failed to pass because I wanted the blood inside my body I wanted friends I wanted to be appreciated for my capacities for my intelligence for my humor and in the town that my parents moved to I it is not an exaggeration there are witnesses that I could not move my body through space and time without people negatively commenting on it that was in my home it was in my church it was in my neighborhood and it was at my school and it was relentless and so for me to think like well I tried so hard I would I put on the outfit and you should have seen me trying to wear that plaid shirt and the wranglers and the timberland boots I looked like a polar bear in a bikini and um you know I tried to butch it up and my mom called me snake hips and I said snakes don't have hips and she said exactly watching me walk and so I think that you know I don't really I think that Tom was really haunted by the character who was more like me in the book and that's Chad and he was really haunted that he saw himself in Chad and he admired something about Chad but he didn't want he wanted his blood on the inside of his body and he also loved his brother and wanted to be like him because he admired him um so I don't think of Thomas as being like closeted and I think like many gay men he also struggled to relate to other gay men he was more heterosocial meaning that his deeper relationships had always been with women and so I think that he just he he did this whole theoretical thing in college where he was in grad school where he he decided oh I'm gonna do my thesis on the importance of being an out teacher but then he got into public school and he heard people like bringing their kids to school going you know talking about faggots and this and that like real stuff that I heard right around the same time that the book is taking place I was working for a non-profit and visiting schools in the San Francisco school district and I would hear parents using words like you need to be a little man you need to stop crying like a faggot in 2013 in San Francisco with full voice on the street outside of the public school so I don't really judge Thomas for that that thing I was scared in those situations sometimes I was also scared that they might you know I was always standing five feet I was in observational role and so I was always standing far away from the kids because I just I understand the conflation in the society of queer people and out queer people and and child molesters yeah yeah sure you know it's interesting I mean it's almost a cliche to say that queer people are born behind enemy lines in a way that's unique to us you know people of color are born within communities of color but we are born within straight communities and I think I said you know those of us who can't who can't disguise ourselves who can't pass you know I have a much harder time of it but then I have the impetus to escape it while those of us who can sort of pass really struggle with where our allegiances lie and in some ways it's more difficult for someone like Thomas really to to claim his otherness to claim his difference and to really engage with it because the pool of conformity and the rewards of conformity are so great yeah I have a couple of lesbians like I mean literally one is maybe even here I don't know if I have the permission to out them but somebody really super identifies queer but is in a heteronormative seeming relationship to the outside world and you know they might even call themselves a word like you know fag or dyke in a loving self-loving way to reclaim that word and yet they they might have all the privileges that come with being seen as heterosexual in society and I have another friend who's he's not here tonight but who said to me like after years and years and years of putting up with I mean and had fairly tolerant family members and everything but she accidentally fell in love with the dude and married him and she was just like Matthew I still consider myself as much of a lesbian today as I did before I met my husband but I gotta say the way that I'm treated in an airport in a hotel in a restaurant it's so much nicer she's like I'm ashamed to say it but it is true and I don't I don't I don't mix up what it is to be a person of color with what it is to be a way cisgender gay man in this culture um but I did think that during the Obama administration with gay marriage becoming legal that those the the ways in which like liberal America was seeing president obama's you know skin tone being a reflection of the fact that we're beyond racism in that culture and the fact that gay marriage was becoming legal in a few states and yet and or that there were characters on sitcoms that were gay characters that we were beyond homophobia is a culture and that made me super super nervous and I did feel like there were people in my life who found those things in the same bucket like homophobia and racism and they were part of the same thing and there are people in my life that thought that they were in really separate containers and need to be talked about distinctly and those people are my family both chosen and biological do you know what I mean like through marriage and through um in my friendship circle those conversations were swirling around all over the place during that time and also having lived through the AIDS years and the Reagan administration I just don't trust government or bureaucracies and so I was really really nervous about this pendulum swinging the other way so I thought that within Thomas's family that those things that you just described that would be including like just sort of shame around addiction and and whatever else in the ways in which some people um I felt like those were great opportunities well I mean so that actually leads me to uh my next question which is an important aspect of the book is of Thomas's story is showing us just how provisional acceptance of LGBTQ people is even by our so-called straight allies because in the book you know these liberal wealthy portlanders are quite quick to turn against him when the whift of pedophilia is released into the air so does this reflect something in your own experiences again that or something you've observed yeah but again I think that yeah absolutely and I think you know I do think that um what happens at country day is more of a revelation about humanity I think that sometimes like I've spent a lot of time in New York and I've been exposed to gay people with a lot of wealth and also a lot of access to education and you know there are heart we create hierarchies everywhere it just seems like what human beings are busy doing all the time and I do I just I feel like what happened there well yes it was tinged by like the the homophobia that exists in the culture I felt like I asked myself if somebody had been accused of touching a child inappropriately and I just want to go on record as saying that with Toby J that kid says it's true the kid has not lied the kid said Thomas touched my pants and it's explained in the novel what exactly happened um and in a room full of witnesses it was where it went in the parents' imaginations but once that once that gets into the into the larger imagination of the that sort of bubble that they created with country day could I as a parent spending that amount of money on that school still have sent my kid because there's a gay couple that takes their their kid out of the class too right um and I couldn't 100% say for certain that I wouldn't have been one of them so it's less me trying to point my finger at like the failure of of allies and more my wanting to explore at what point do human beings fail to continue to be each other each other's keepers their siblings keepers yeah although I mean I have to say you know the the the notion of pedophilia and being sexual brothers it's it is such a deeply seated um part of the machinery of homophobia you know I mean would would with a straight teacher accused of inappropriately touching a female student have been subjected to the same level of scrutiny I don't know I mean would he have been given a chance to explain himself in a way that Thomas wasn't some of the straight guys that have read the book and then have interviewed me have expressed their own anxieties around um how quickly an accusation can turn into a conclusion and I think that their anxieties around cancel culture have come up in conversations and such and and I I actually feel a little bit differently than some of the stuff that I've heard expressed to me what I was really most interested in was the toll that takes on a person's inner life when you're an uncle when you're a friend of people that have children when um I feel like anytime human beings attempt to create a utopia and something messes it up in any way they are going to rid the messiness it's the easiest way to get it done is just to get rid of it and so I feel like the this idea that these children this this school is based on a school in Portland that I visited with my best friend and um not at what not it didn't happen there and so I I of course changed the name and what have you but I was just thinking like you know there are people that think that this country is a meritocracy and I was looking at this place these kids literally can choose at the school between Mandarin and Cantonese it's you do need to mean and then there's Japanese and then there's robotics and then there's you know there's these programs that are just like and the the actual atmosphere it's like it's so far ahead of what the average person gets and it's just it is incredible and like so anything that tarnishes that has got to be expersed so I don't know what how like I do think that disasters can happen to anybody accused of something but I do but I was really interested in like how Thomas's entire life that this this thing was just the pin that that popped that that popped out and made him have to re-examine his full life well yeah I mean yeah it's not really yeah I understand the point you're making um that is really about Thomas and the the effect the effect internally on his personal relationships rather than this thing snowballs from accusation to fact but you know just and I want to ask you about Thomas and the family especially his brothers but I just in passing I would say it's true that you know utopias are always first of all utopias are impossible and the notion of expunging or purging a place of its defects or defective people the problem with that is you know it leads to genocide it's bad news is it bad bad bad news we need to learn how to like you know recognize yeah yeah reconciliation not not segregation anyway so um one of the most I think gripping scenes in the book is when Thomas is older brother it turns to him and says did you do it um because of what that reveals about the relationship between Thomas and that brother and I know that you and I have talked about this you know for a year now that this is a book about brothers and I wanted to give you a platform to talk about why that was important for you and about the relationship of those three brothers yeah I do I do feel like when I talk about this system I mean I don't know what I'm talking about patriarchy capitalism I heard um somebody and really smart talk about um it was Talman and and um and on other people podcast with Brad listy talking about um oh god the um oh there's a name for it it's just like a synonym it's a gen it's a non gender specific synonym for um dominator society I think is what he called it and he was quoting some other really smart writer um so sorry I don't have the um the goods on that right now but I I think that whatever it was my brothers and I always loved each other and sadly the system whether it was coming from the Catholic church or coming from the town values where we lived or um you know fear it destroyed our opportunity to know one another and it wasn't until my older brother had his first kid that we had an opportunity to start to get to know one another and so my brothers and I became friends later in life and I was always haunted my first novel I wrote in grad school was about a um a only child because I didn't have the emotional maturity or the skills in order to deal with how overwhelming those emotions were for me that I essentially left home when my younger brother was 10 years old and had barely any contact with him um again and so when I read Justin Torres's novel We the Animals it brought up a lot of memories for me about what it was like to just be like wild feral feral boys with uh a kid I didn't think of myself as a boy I was probably as a child gender non conforming were um I didn't think of I don't know if I thought of myself as a girl but I definitely thought that my brothers and dad were a part of a group that I was not a part of and that maybe me and my mom are the other group and my mom was kind of butch in a cute way so um so you are a lesbian we it was a we sort of met each other halfway and um anyway I was haunted by that and I do I'm sad that the society that I grew up in including some of the I'm very proud of my working class background but that town had such a hardcore way of uh I think of myself as a worker more than I even think of myself as a writer or a teacher um and and I think that something about that kind of pulled the rug out from underneath us and I and I have wondered who we would all be to each other um had we had those years and so I explored that with James and Jake and Thomas and um they're very different than my own brothers in almost every way um because my brothers are kind of too sweet and drama free in many ways to earn a place in a novel so um I layered and layered and layered them with some of my own problems and um also get you know made them composites of a lot of a different relationships in my life and that moment I do think it fits with James sort of more fumbling like Tourette's like you know oh my gay brother like let me shout about it at the airport sort of way to be perceived by others is like down or cool or woke um without really considering the consequences but he's he's earnest like he's trying to be in relationship and have intimacy but he doesn't really have to consider the consequences in a way because he's not gay so you know he's in fact very sheltered yeah no um uh and uh Jake is the younger brother yes Jake is the younger brother yes very a very complicated I mean very gentle and sensitive man who's straight which is you know they that that that that hardens men in a different way than if they're gentle and sensitive and gay I think and I think you portray that really well thanks I only just realized this I mean I've read the book many times and I only just realized in having a conversation with somebody else about the book that um that Thomas made a mistake in his conclusions about Jake and Cherie he always always thought that they were saying oh we're addicts and so we're defective and so we're like you and so we're us and Thomas was always like my gayness is not the same as your your your addictions and then with Cherie his sister-in-law he he felt that he could have done a better job being a brother-in-law but he felt like they were always surfacing making like because she was a hairdresser and because she works with a lot of gay men in her business they they operated on this sort of superficial level sometimes and Thomas wondered whether or not he could have been a better brother-in-law and he was sometimes but more consistently because they were too busy seeing each other like he Thomas didn't want to be mistaken as like conflating his struggles as a white gay man with her struggles as a black woman in the society and and really what Jake and Cherie were saying to Thomas the whole time was no it was through some sort of struggle that we had to actually investigate ourselves and come to find out that we're the same they weren't saying you're gay and we're addicts and so we're the same they were saying addiction gave us the opportunity to dig deeper into our own humanity and that's what made us realize that we're all the same and Thomas never he never realizes that in the in the trajectory of the novel well addiction and recovery kind of spiritual coming out in a way I mean having to examine yourself in the same sort of rigorous way I'm going to interrupt us for a second because I'm going to there is a question I'm going to now open it up for questioning questions if anyone has a question for Matthew and this one is from Natasha hi Natasha it says yes I'm interested in the use of time in the novel are the passes revealed in snippets drip fed into the narrative in some places it works backwards and in some places forwards can you comment Matthew on the timeline in the book yeah I mean I I I have mixed feelings about MFA programs and in MFA programs I think that they can be a great place if you can afford to go and or get a full paid scholarship and that you know that they're not sitting there shaking their fingers but one of the things that's championing and a lot of championed in a lot of MFA programs and Stacy and I didn't have this we were really encouraged to just take our story wherever they needed to go by most of our wonderful teachers if anything we could have used more help with plot and or characterization but the the in people sometimes people say that you know flashbacks and I've and I have gotten some criticism on the book that I've appreciated and I think is fair that sometimes the level of detail and the level of flashback slows it down and all I can say to that is to me there is no difference between a present moment in the past because right here in this moment right now as I'm talking I'm remembering something about the past and I'm thinking about dinner so those two things get braided together and so Natasha to answer your question I only wanted the past to come up when he was going to recontextualize it based on his present moment and the way that it worked in the narrator narrative was so that he could imagine his future if that makes sense so to me it wasn't really flashback or the past it was the present day realizing something about the past that he had sort of left behind without examining because of the present day situation was pushing that on him whether he was in a locker room or whether he was in the car with his brother or whatever was happening he um he was remembering college and every it wasn't he wasn't telling you what he thought he experienced back then he was saying what he didn't realize back then now he was expanding the story expanding his consciousness okay Katie uh Herne has a question one of my favorite details in the novel is when and Thomas is confused about what's happening he keeps mentally returning to the fact that he was wearing his weekend pants anything to share about where this detail comes from and you might want to give context for those who haven't yet read the book but who soon will I trust um Katie hi Katie and I were in a writing group together for years we were so disciplined like I think we met at like nine o'clock in the morning maybe eight on Fridays like we were we called ourselves the steel magnolias even though it was a really bad movie just because we liked the idea of like we were all femme and or and or female identifying at the time and we were all um really dedicated we didn't the rule was you could have small talk after so anyway the um the weekend Michael helped me I had sex scenes in the book and I had um I was really interested in how much of a good boy Thomas was I was really wanting to push on how he dotted every eye and crossed every T and there were sex scenes in the book and I loved botched sex scenes where people misread each other's cues and then think that they're going to be scoring and then and then don't I I don't know why I find those excruciating scenes really compelling about humanity but there are there are some sex scenes in the book um and Michael at one point and I think your exact critique was I need to see Thomas' cock from remembering your editorial advice and I think that like when he's when he's in the restroom with the dad in the community and the the divider is taken out um I in the early drafts there was a divider and then he was just like oh god it's weird to be in the bathroom with people that think I'm a sex offender and then I took out the divider and then I and then that's where I I gave Michael what he editorial felt like the novel needed but it resonated and also Michael encouraging me to really push on the sex scenes that existed because it's much easier to hate the country day parents if Thomas was more neutered and so I wanted him to be wearing like these these and and also in Portland I'm not a big crotch gazer I I'm more into chest arms faces teeth but hands but in Portland like is there a scratch of underwear does anyone have a regular pair of parents like at my best friend lives there and I've been there a million times it was just like you're just seeing the male anatomy swinging through sweatpants in that city all the time so I just wanted to put those on Thomas and make it more of a symbol of his virality and sexuality so it was tougher for I mean I wanted um Mr. and Mrs. J to have to deal with with that reality so I hope that that's a good answer Katie. Yes apparently so she's she's indicated so um I don't see any other questions so I want to ask you about the lab how did that come into existence and can you talk about this um this book that you and Alice La Plata are coming out with next year which is based on the lab. Yeah um so the lab started because I work at a university in a two-tier system and you don't get paid enough to live in the Bay Area when you're a lecturer in creative writing in the California State University so I was forced to start the lab in order to pay my bills so um you know necessity calls I always want a cashmere sweater and a dentist so you know I'll never forget I was in my 20s waiting on this woman on the counter my friend Betsy she came into the counter all the time at Ilfernaya and I once touched her in order to indicate that I was going to put her hot plate in front of her and I said oh my god that's the softest sweater I've ever felt and she said once I turn 40 it's cashmere only and I never forgot that so I wanted to be able to to you know Antu and I my husband and I lived in a studio together for eight years in a wrench controlled studio and I lived in it by myself for a long time before that and that was the only reason why I could afford to do that job and still I couldn't travel so I had summers off but I didn't have the money to go anywhere and so I started the lab also because I had kept in touch with a lot of former SFSU students were like when are you going to teach something so that's how it started and then Alice the plant and I were colleagues in Francisco State I was visiting her in Mallorca where she relocated after she had a best seller that was optioned for a movie and um we did a class together and it went off we we ended up being like really compatible and so we decided to do a week long thing that um and she had done have it right here actually the making of a story with Norton and um it's a wonderful book and she had sent out the the announcement that we were doing this week long thing to her mailing list and her Norton editor um was on the list and said this I can't go she's also a writer a poet um our editor she said I can't go but this sounds like a book are you interested and because it was COVID and I think that canceled we wrote the proposal of the book to Norton that's fantastic yeah yeah but I the reason I the lab also is my non MFA it's like my non scholastic it's like I don't care about grades I don't care about assignments I don't care if you're luck I always say there's 495 requirements to get into the lab and each one of them is a dollar you have 495 dollars you too are welcome at the and then I meet people like John who are wonderfully talented and so many other people I mean I'm not kidding I can't believe some of the people that have come through there who already had several books but I get it why they do and it's because it's all generative it's I show you somebody else's process and then I break it down even visual artists architects etc you never stop learning if you're a writer even if you're doing it in other solitude I mean in my 50s I started writing third person after writing books in first person point of view yeah it took me 10 years to teach myself how to do that I should have taken the lab well the fun thing about the lab is that some people that I didn't even know were writers were in it I didn't maybe I didn't recognize their name and and they didn't they didn't differentiate themselves we don't it's sort of based a little bit on a 12-step model where it's just like we don't talk about who we are in the world and also we don't critique each other what we do is we if we want to we read up to a two-minute portion of newly generated works where everybody's on an even playing field and then the only way that we really give feedback to one another is you know the students read back a line that resonated for them in that that person's work and then I might say something a little bit more about craft or about read this or check this out or have you seen this short story by mary gateskill or have you read um you know brandon taylor's novel if that story if there's there might if it seems to me there might be a key inside of it that might help unlock something for the person so you said you mentioned earlier that you're 51 um you published your first novel and you have this book from norton coming coming out how does it feel it feels great you know i also moved during co-vid and beautiful condom thanks that my people that come to visit my apartment is like what's it like to have like a you know whatever the amenity might be and i'm like oh i adjust to luxury instantly does it it takes me no time whatsoever to step into i waited a long time to have a book i came close to having a book with three different manuscripts the the next book i'm planning on sending out on friday um as in the day after tomorrow to probably more realistically be monday but um and and you and i have talked about the details about that particular novel and what our plan is but um yeah it's i wrote the entire time the thing about being growing up queer the way that i did as and i'm a survivor and i'm a fighter and i'm a worker is that i did not let the mainstream publishing industry tell me who i am i remember what jan and chuck and richard and june and my my steel magnolia's writing group and stacey my other friends that i met at san francisco state the the ways in which they encouraged me and saw a kernel of something worthwhile in me that's really what i focused on not that i did not have some very very dark days but one get what i was given one gift in this life that keeps me from being completely petty at all times and that is i am genuinely happy for other people's success even in areas that i don't have it so thank god because so many of my students had books for years before me um so it feels good to now i do interviews now they they interview me because they can elevate my status by being associated with them which is amazing feeling the best feeling i've ever gotten really is seeing students publish i the feeling of publishing myself has been great but the best feeling i've ever gotten is seeing students succeed well i have to say you know i've i've published 10 novels and um publishing you and um monique and uh kasey and and joe it's the most fulfilling thing i've ever done it's right you're my mom you're our mama you're our daddy i i believe you and i felt that from you and i feel like the the um i talk to my students all the time about the pros and cons of um you know indy small press versus mainstream since i now have both contracts and um you know there are positive and negatives to to to anything and um you know i always say i couldn't bring you out to sushi on what i got for my advance for doubting thomas but um you know i got a second what did you say you got an advance which is more than right yeah that's true um but i i wasn't looking for that and like i knew that when you said that thomas could be queer and angrier that i was just oh okay there's this and i also saw what i am i do have a very pronounced inner lesbian and so the thought of being one of the first books because there's alan's book before mine before you came on but to be one of the first books um that i had a historically lesbian press it just felt like do i need another signal from the universe that this is the place for me so um i i just i could not be happier that that joy that you have for us really comes through and it it was like getting a second mfa you you said to me oh i would take it as is there's just a few things but i felt like you had read it so carefully that i really wanted to deliver on them and it took me it took me quite some time well it's a wonderful book um you deserve every iota of success that it brings you and so um thank you again um kevin anissa and the san francisco public library thank you san francisco public library may just say one last thing um to kevin anissa and that is that doubting thomas was partially written in the golden gate branch on green street in san francisco because my um wi-fi was going out all the time and i wanted to stay married and my husband and i lived in a studio so sometimes i would go down the street to that library and work for hours on doubting thomas so i love the library i love the friends of the library thank you so much for carrying our books and thank you so much for having us tonight thank you kevin thank you matthew thank you michael thanks for that great conversation thanks to the lovely audience for being here so we'll see you next time have a great night thanks everybody for