Welcome back to my Author Spotlight series where I chat with fabulous authors from around the globe to learn about the person behind the writer and peek into their writing world.
Today I chat with Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author, Matthew R Davis.
Matthew R. Davis is a Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author and musician from Adelaide, South Australia, with over eighty short stories published around the world. He’s been shortlisted for numerous Aurealis and Australasian Shadows Awards, winning two Shadows in one year – the only author other than Kaaron Warren to do so – as well as a Ditmar Award and the Washington Science Fiction Association Small Press Award. His books to date are the Shadows-winning novelette Supermassive Black Mass (Demain Publishing, 2019), horror collection If Only Tonight We Could Sleep (Things in the Well, 2020), Aurealis-nominated novel Midnight in the Chapel of Love (JournalStone, 2021), Ditmar-listed novella The Dark Matter of Natasha (Grey Matter Press, 2022), and the Shadows-nominated flash chapbook Bites Eyes: 13 Macabre Morsels (Brain Jar Press, 2023). He’s sung and played bass in the heavy rock/metal bands Blood Red Renaissance and icecocoon, among others, and dabbles in spoken word, graphic design, and indie film. He shares his life with the artist Meg Wright, aka Red Wallflower. Find out more at matthewrdavisfiction.wordpress.com.
Welcome, Matthew.
Tell us about yourself. Who is the person behind the writer, and what do you bring from your real life into your stories?
There is little to no differentiation between me as a writer and me as a person or worker – I’m not a mild-mannered accountant by day or anything, I’m just the same curious weirdo 24/7. Anyone who takes the time to read through a substantial amount of my writing will get a fair idea of who I am and how I think, as the same concerns, interests, and attitudes tend to recur throughout my fiction in various forms and colours. I’m not interested in presenting different faces in different situations, only in being just who I am and approaching the world in the ways I see fit. This means that my own life and experiences often bleed through into my writing – my love of music and playing in bands, my dedication to understanding and compassion, my anger at cruelty and ignorance, my hopes and heartbreaks and desires, and even my unhealthy habits! Everything is grist for the mill, and I take inspiration from all sorts of places: a character name from a co-worker here, a backstory from a friend’s anecdote there, a location I’ve visited, a situation that could have happened to me but didn’t, and so on. I like to steep my work in verisimilitude so that it all feels real even when reality gets warped by forces beyond comprehension, and the best way to do that is to tell as much truth as I can.
Outside of writing, are you involved in any other areas in the writing industry? Eg editor/publisher/blogger etc.
No, not really. I occasionally perform at spoken-word shows, I dabble in non-fiction and indie film on occasion, and I have a blog that I don’t update often enough, but I don’t have the mental bandwidth for everything I want to do – I can barely keep my life on the tracks as it is. I’d like to work on putting together an anthology or two sometime, and I’ve kicked some ideas around with friends, but honestly, I think I’d be a pretty brutal editor! I don’t need more things detracting from my writing time, so we’ll see what happens.
What does a typical writing day look like?
I don’t write every day, or even every week, but I’m always thinking about it, refining ideas as I go about my business. I prefer to put in dedicated stints, so instead of steadily chipping away at things for an hour or so on a regular basis, I usually wait until the time is ripe and then smash through a first draft in one or two sessions. At the start of the year, I wrote a short novel in a week and immediately did a second draft in another two days. This way I can lose myself in the work, get kind of obsessed with it, and I enjoy that feeling. It’s different when I’m editing or plotting, of course, because those things can be broken up into smaller pieces without losing my focus.
When you first started writing, did you have a goal, have you met it, and how long did it take?
I guess I just wanted to be published! I’ve been writing since I was seven, and for years, pleasure was all I got out of it and all I needed. When I finished my first novel manuscript at seventeen, having put two years into this fledgling opus, I submitted it to major publishers, sure that my career as a young Stephen King was soon to begin – but naturally, that didn’t happen, and it shouldn’t have, as I was terrible! Very good for a teenager, sure, and I’ve read worse by full-blown adults, but I would be cringing now if any of that early work had made it to print. I needed to live and love and – well, not laugh, though I do like that – grow as a person, experience things and accrue some kind of perspective and basic wisdom that would bring my work to life enough to warrant attention. I spent a long time focusing on playing music and didn’t start submitting my work and taking writing more seriously until I hit my thirties. I’ve accomplished some of my vaguely determined goals, but there are plenty still to reach, and I don’t think I’ll ever be content with the level of success I achieve.
Was there anything you did or have happen that boosted your writing? Ie: a writing course, mentorship, attended a writing talk, connections with others in the industry etc.
There have been some pivotal moments, for sure. One such was attending MAPS film school, which had an elective writing unit that helped me to edit harder and got me back into the groove to the point where I started submitting my work for publication, so I owe lecturer Leigh Sutton many thanks for that. Another was when I started working with Steve Dillon, because I got to know more spec-fic folk through his anthologies, became more involved with the scene both locally and internationally, and started to see my work published alongside stories by some of my heroes… and that association led to Steve publishing my first collection, If Only Tonight We Could Sleep.
What is your proudest writing achievement?
I have a few, I suppose. Being shortlisted for a Shirley Jackson Award was incredibly validating; seeing my name on TOCs next to Ramsey Campbell, Clive Barker, Peter Straub, Tom Piccirilli, and the like is still thrilling; being mentioned by Ellen Datlow in her Best Horror of the Year collections means a lot; and becoming not just peers, but good friends with writers I used to admire from afar, like Kaaron Warren, is something I find very rewarding and satisfying. More recently, I did an interview with Kayleigh Dobbs from Happy Goat Horror where she told me that, if she had read The Dark Matter of Natasha without knowing who’d written it, she would have assumed it was by a female author. I’ve had similar comments before – “You get us,” fellow scribe Chris Mason once told me – and knowing that my work resonates in that way, that it does justice to women when so many men don’t care to or are just fucking clueless, is a huge point of pride for me.
I’d like to note something else that isn’t directly about my writing: I’m dead proud of my partner, Meg “Red Wallflower” Wright, who is becoming as much a part of our spec-fic scene as I am. Alongside album sleeves and live gig photography, she has a growing number of book covers to her name, and her cover image for Midnight Echo 18 has been shortlisted for a Ditmar Award. She’s amazing.
What did your path to publication look like? Indie/small press/trad?
I started out in the small press, and there I remain. I’ve made some advances over the years – from starting out with stories in exposure-only anthologies with crappy covers and no promo to cracking more notable markets and sharing pages with Names – but there’s so much farther to go. I’ve had a couple of close calls with major publishers, and I hope to cross over as much as I can without compromising my work and ideals, but for now, I’m a well-kept secret.
When you craft a story, do you write for entertainment or to fit the submission call, or do you have a deeper message you’d like to convey?
Sometimes I’ll write something specifically for a themed open call, but only if I already have an idea that fits or if I think of a good one that plays to my strengths. In all instances, I write first and foremost to please myself, because if I ever just crap something out with no true concern or attachment, I may as well not bother. Readers can smell bullshit, and they’ll never catch a whiff of it off me. I do have some deeper messages and themes that I return to in my work – the importance of equality and honesty in the face of indifference and cruelty, for example, or the effects of past trauma on the present – but I don’t always make that the thrust of the story. One notable exception is “Heritage Hill”, the novelette that was nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award. That one had a lot to say about generational hatred and inculcated racism because the theme of its parent anthology was “Australia”, and as much as I love my country, we have got some serious shit to sort out.
What effect has writing had on your life and/or those around you?
It has absolutely made my life, that’s for sure – my ability to create original fiction and music has sometimes been the only thing that makes my life tolerable, and without that talent, I just don’t see the point of me. It has had a detrimental effect on my personal relationships at times because I get so deep into it that I’ve neglected people and let the other aspects of my life drift into the weeds. I’ve no doubt that my focus on music and writing has contributed to all my past break-ups, and that’s something I’ve had to learn from to avoid repeating old mistakes. It’s something I must keep learning from, but I think I’m doing better now.
What are you currently working on, what’s coming out, and what are your future writing goals?
What I’m most excited about at the moment is my second collection of horror stories. It’s called Songs of Shadow, Words of Woe, and it will be coming out through Journal Stone in early 2025. It’s garnered some glowing blurbs from some of Australia’s best genre authors, with more on the way, and I’m working with Meg on the internal illustrations she’ll create for it. Shortly after that, the world will be subjected to my novelisation of Dick Dale’s splatterpunk indie film Ribspreader, which will be published by Paroxysm Press and will also include Dick’s screenplay and a bonus short story I wrote based on his character backstory notes. It’s more violent and trashy than my usual work, but it was a total blast to write, and this whole idea makes sense since both me and the publisher appear as extras in the film! If that sounds like your kinda thang, the Blu-ray’s out now through Umbrella Entertainment, and it’s also streaming on multiple platforms – but bring a barf bag! And then there’s a third book, a non-fiction music tome, but we’ll leave that one in the shadows until we get closer to a release date… and a novel that has made it through two rounds of assessments by a publisher and may well have been picked up by the time you read this… next year is looking crazy busy!
Before then, my work will be appearing in two new Australian anthologies. The Black Beacon Book of Ghosts (Black Beacon Books) releases on October 11 and features my novelette “Effigy in Flagrante” as well as cover art by Meg. Spawn 2: More Weird Horror Tales About Pregnancy, Birth and Babies (IFWG Publishing) comes out on November 25 and contains “Water is the Womb of the World” – as well as a story by one Pauline Yates! As always, there are a few other things in the pipeline, too.
I’m also about to start writing my next full novel manuscript, because it’s been too long since I stretched out to that length, and I’m really looking forward to getting this one out of my head and onto the page. No title or juicy details for you yet, I’m afraid, but it’s going to be very interesting, very deep, and very dark.
As for my future goals… does world domination sound like too much to ask? Of course it does, because it is, and I’m not into dominating anyone. But I want to get my work in front of as many eyeballs as I can, for it to live rent-free in as many minds as will welcome it, and I’ll keep working on that until I drop and rot.
Where can we read more about you and your publications?
Website: https://matthewrdavisfiction.wordpress.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/MxRxDx
Final question:
Do you have a furry friend support crew? Who are they and how much do they distract you from writing?
I don’t live with any animals at the moment, but Meg has two cats now, and when they all move in with me next year, I’m sure I’ll find them as distracting as she does! Juniper is a pain in the bum at times, but she’s my little fur-daughter and I adore her; Lexi is a new addition who’s still keeping her distance from this booming giant, but we’ll continue bonding until she realises I make a great place to sit, no matter what I’m trying to do at the time. At least I have an office now and can close the door when I need to get stuck in!
Thank you, Matthew, it was a pleasure chatting with you.
That brings us to the end of today’s author spotlight. Learn more about Matthew via the links above. Perhaps you’ll find your next great read.
Until next time, happy reading.
Discover more from Pauline Yates
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
