Ryan D. Matthews
Fiction
Brooklyn, NY
Ryan D. Matthews is a writer from rural Washington State and earned an MFA from the New School. A Hawthornden Castle Fellow, his work has also been recognized with fellowships from the Ucross Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Blue Mountain Center, the Ragdale Foundation, the Jentel Foundation, and others. He was recently nominated for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, and was a finalist for the 2019 Emerging Artists Program from the Jerome Foundation. He is the host and curator of The Rally—a political reading series—and his work has appeared most recently in Joyland, Lit Hub, Litro, and is forthcoming from the Michigan Quarterly Review. Follow him on Twitter @RyDMatthews.
Featured Work
Country Music
Story by Ryan D. Matthews
We were kids. Pieces of shit. Hicks. Unwanted pregnancies, fetal-alcohol eyed.
Where I come from, when you’re 13 you drink. You smoke camels.
Cowshit. Kids without underwear. Kids that stank all day long. Socks soaked with muck. We wouldn’t smile, mouths just rows of mangled teeth.
Life wasn’t cheap in the valley. It was blue-light special. Deep discount. That’s an imprecise cliché but there it is. It was dirt bikes ridden through barbed wire at high speed. Little brothers run down by logging trucks. Older brothers shot by Uzis an uncle brought over the Idaho line. Fathers? Cirrhosis.