Chapter Break with Matt Cashion

BIO:Matt Cashion’s fourth book, HOW WE DO THINGS HERE (a finalist in the Flannery O’Connor Award for short fiction) is forthcoming February 17 (Cornerstone Press). His story collection, LAST WORDS OF THE HOLY GHOST won the 2015 Katherine Anne Porter Prize, and his novel, OUR 13th DIVORCE, won the Edna Ferber Prize. Other work appears in The Sun, Cincinnati Review, Willow Springs, Carolina Quarterly, The Writer’s Chronicle, and elsewhere. Born in the North Carolina mountains and raised in Coastal Georgia, he earned an MFA from the University of Oregon and now teaches Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. SYNOPSIS:In Wisconsin and Florida backyards, waiting rooms, boardrooms, and bedrooms, HOW WE DO THINGS HERE exposes the hilarity and heartbreak caused by mess-makers struggling to survive themselves, each other, and the places they’re trying to call home. Gun-toting neighbors offer too much help, dead grandmothers make demands, music professors erupt from noise-pollution, a daughter confronts her estranged father (and his pet vulture) after a hurricane, outcasts humiliate themselves at high school and family reunions, men resolve violent confrontations from their backs, the world’s loudest typewriter threatens sanity, a college student educates his professor in the art of failure, an emergency meeting of the Hospitality Committee adjourns with murder. Inside moments that make us laugh and wince, these slow-learners teach us how to fail and forgive and try again to forge connections in all the troubled spaces we’re so desperate to share.LINKS:https://mattcashion.com/