Type the name “Jack Matthews” into Wikipedia and it will take you to the profile of a Welsh rugby player, now retired.
The Jack Matthews recently interviewed on TeleRead, however, has never seen the underside of a scrum. He’s an author of over twenty published novels and short story collections and, at the age 84, is still teaching young minds how to think and how to write (although he has significant questions as to if that last one’s really possible).
In the interview Matthews himself, as well as his interviewer Robert Nagle, do not disappoint. The conversation took place over e-mail, so both responses and questions are of a more thought out and complex nature than usually found in a Q&A session. It’s split into five parts, concentrating in turn on Matthews’ opinions on writing and storytelling, rare book collecting, and the role of technology in today’s literary world. It reads more like an essay than an interview, moving from questions of genre (“It breathed like a novel, so it became one”) to Matthews’ views on his own authorial identity: “Q: When did you decide to become an author? A: An interesting question, indeed; but unanswerable. Like, when did I become an old man?”
Whether it be about the old west or the new Blackberry, Matthews proves to be sharp, hilarious, and surprisingly thought provoking in his responses to Nagle, in the same breath exploring both the hysterical and more serious sides of the undertaking that is authorship. He begins the interview with a quote, Vonnegut-esque in its sincerity, wondering whether or not “…frequency of semi-colons in a prose text is a clear and accurate measure of the author’s intelligence…” And although I had no idea who Jack Matthews was when I began reading, this man manages, by the end, to endear his readers to his own sensibilities, proclaiming with some excitement, some resignation: “Writing is a chest-pounding thing.”
