the writer.

I considered myself a writer long before I ever picked up a paint brush. My earliest writing memory is from first grade. At seven years old, I submitted my handwritten short story, “Car Crash,” to the school literary contest. The premise of the story was one of my biggest fears at the time – a family car falling off a cliff-side road. I was disqualified for the vivid imagery in which I used to describe the accident.

I continued writing fiction stories in private until I entered a second contest during my freshman year of high school. For that story, “A Life in Ten Minutes,” I took home the first place award for the entire school. A year later, I wrote a story about a fearful and insecure bride-to-be who couldn’t bear to become a failure of a wife, so she took her own life in her dressing room moments before she was supposed to say, “I do.” That story led me to a required discussion with the school counselor. Throughout my teens and twenties I continued to write as I masked my fears, anxieties, and passions with the comfortable veil of fiction.

It wasn’t until graduate school, at age twenty-nine, that I began to write about my own life through memoir essays. Some of those memoir essays served as a monthly newsletter via my official Substack account and others were published with online and physical literary journals. I selected eleven of my favorite essays and published them in my debut collection, Self-portraits. You can purchase a copy by clicking the book cover image below.

warmly,
Matty