Matthew Salesses

In Drew Arnold's wide-ranging interview with Matthew Salesses at The Rumpus, he recalls meeting Salesses at a career panel. Arnold notes that Salesses "seemed like the most level-headed person in the room." Although I’ve never meet him, I get the same sense from his prose, how his non-fiction captures the atmosphere of the moment. I feel placed in his non-fiction worlds, rather than shoved or forced there. As a new parent myself, I’ve really appreciated his representations of that responsibility, his willingness to chart the “uncertainty” of that life. And I respect that he can pivot to fiction that, somehow, feels both independent of that non-fiction, and yet when reconsidered, carries the same, real wisdom between plot and character. Read “The Eastern Western” from a recent issue of Birkensnake, and you’ll also be convinced.

Salesses ends his interview with The Rumpus with a line that applies to much of his fiction and non-fiction: “I like a sense of hope.” I’m happy that he was able to share some of his thoughts about parenting, Catholicism, and teaching writing.

1. In "What It Means to be Baptized," over at The Good Men Project, you discuss your childhood and adult Catholicism, and the familial pull to have your children baptized. It's a great piece, and I suggest people head on over to the site and read it themselves, but I have a few specific questions about it.

First off--

There is a palpable hesitation about Catholicism in these first paragraphs, including your father's coded warning about unbaptized children, your wife Cathreen’s reaction when shown a video about the sacrament (she "is looking back at me with the ideas people have about Catholics all over her face"), and the admission that "sometimes I tell people how often I go to church and they look at me like I’m crazy." From where does this hesitation arise? Does it remain now, several years later?

Hi Nick, Thank you so much for asking me to do this! I actually don't often get to talk about my Catholicism in terms of my writing. As far as my hesitation goes, when I was younger, there was this talk about "Catholic guilt" as the guilt that Catholicism instills in you, particularly about sex before marriage. But there's this other kind of guilt that comes from being Catholic, when you're around non-Christians, or non-practicing Christians, and they look at you like you're the type of person who isn't having sex before marriage. Or maybe it's the idea of not wanting to push my thing on others. I hate that feeling, that someone thinks they know what is best for you without knowing your context. I never want to say my thing is better than someone else's thing. I never want to say, this is normal, because normalizing seems like a really dangerous thing to me.

2. Also in this essay, you write that "upstairs [at the church], there is no air conditioning and we sweat it out as the priest goes through the rituals. I am thinking about our luck and lack of luck." Yet, throughout this piece, there's the sense that you've managed a sense of your daughter's namesake--the expectation of complications, but the ability to handle those moments. Does it help to have non-fiction, or even fiction, as outlets? 

I can't handle these moments at all! It's nice that it comes off as if I am. In my nonfiction, I actually like to talk about how I can't handle these moments, or maybe rather how I try to handle these moments. I try to be better than myself. But I hope that I am writing about how I truly am. About the struggle.

3. Could you describe your experience(s) with Catholic Mass? How has it evolved, for you, from attending as a child to now, as a father and husband?

I go to mass now (well, for one, less frequently, or at least in waves) more for tranquility than to "pray." This probably has something to do with being very lucky, with being in a place of privilege. I have some things I pray for, but I also have a lot of privileges, and a lot of agency. 

Tranquility-wise, I love the traditions. It actually has thrown me off quite a bit how mass has changed recently, how the language has changed. The traditions that remain, the structure and repetition of mass, are comfortable and they allow me a lot of space for my thoughts. I need structure. As a father, I know how much people need structure, need repetition, need a pattern from which they can tell they've broken, when they do. But because I am a father, we currently prioritize our daughter's education in choosing which church we attend. We go to a church with an amazing kindergarten.

4. You have a story in Issue 76 of Glimmer Train that dramatizes grief ministries, and have mentioned that your parents were involved in such work. How did their experiences inform your story? Overall, how does their Catholicism affect your own faith practice or intellectual perception of the religion?

I went home for Thanksgiving break one year and my parents had joined a grief ministry. I had never heard of grief ministries--maybe they were newer then?--and I thought the whole idea of them was fascinating, probably in a different way than my parents did. I thought it was interesting that we thought we could minister to grief in any systematic way. I asked my parents many questions and got the materials and it all struck me as a way someone might easily stay in denial of grief. So I wrote about that, that gap. That isn't to say I'm against grief ministries. I know they do a lot of good work. What is interesting to me is the personal nature versus the industry of grief, especially within the church, which is already a place where grief holds a lot of weight, where people often return to or leave, out of grief.

If you're asking how my parents' Catholicism affects my faith, I am adopted and they are why I am Catholic.  

5. Your "month of revision" at Necessary Fiction, and your interview at The Rumpus, convince me that you've got the unique ability to help other writers revise and reconsider their work. This is no easy task--you offer real advice and approaches, based in a necessary observation that in the workshop classroom, we often don't talk about revision: "I want us to teach revision up front when we teach writing, to demystify it, to make it the first thought rather than all reaction."

This leads me to a question, posed particularly because you've recently entered the PhD program at Houston. Why teach fiction? What appeals to you about being in the classroom? What can you do to help writers?

I love teaching fiction. Part of what I want to do in the fiction classroom is to teach fiction as a practice, to give applicable lessons. The reason I wanted to do that revision month was because I felt like revision was something that really could be taught practicably, and also because I felt like revision is somewhat of an afterthought in the classroom. We spend a lot of time in workshops talking about what to revise, but less so how to revise. I wanted to talk about what we actually do, how you re-see the piece and then how you make the changes.

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Matthew Salesses is the author of I'm Not Saying, I'm Just Saying and The Last Repatriate. His latest project is a couple of ebooks forthcoming from Thought Catalog Books. He has written for The New York Times, NPR, The Rumpus, Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. He is the Fiction Editor and a Contributing Writer at The Good Men Project.