Robert Masterson & Doug Mathewson: Truth In Reality; Fiction As Truth

Globe-spanning journalist, writer and teacher Robert Masterson reads solo and in collaboration with editor/photographer and fellow prose and verse writer Doug Mathewson tomorrow night at Curley’s Diner.

A professor of English at City University of New York’s Borough of Manhattan Community College, Robert has placed work in numerous print and online publications and holds degrees from the University of New Mexico, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder and the Shaanxi Normal University, the People’s Republic of China.

In Trial by Water (Dog Running Wild Press, 1982) and Artificial Rats & Electric Cats (Camber Press, 2008). Robert’s accounts and commentary derived from travels in Japan, India and elsewhere mix the ordinary with the far-reaching, culled from years of high-risk award-winning investigative reporting, including New York political corruption and the frightening aftermath of post-Chernobyl Ukraine, to the social tumult of China transitioning from communism to a market economy, ultimately informing the fourteen stories in 2012’s Garish Trouble (Finishing Line Press) on the underestimated branch-point decisions people make in daily life that spawn profound change down the road.

Interestingly, Doug Mathewson’s complementary “true stories from imaginary lives” often depict people adjusting to new, difficult situations, sometimes following personal setbacks or trauma, as in this moving November 28 posting from last year on his blog, little2say.org:

Sunday Afternoons

Long time ago, when I was first back, it was set up that I’d have this studio
apartment near the park. Just use the name “Walt Sizemore” they said, and the

place was mine. It was up on the third floor and looked out over a ball field.
On Sundays, during the good weather, there would usually be a softball game.
I’d nurse my hangover and half read the paper, half watch the game.
I was spooky back then about talking to people outside the center, so watching
the game from my balcony was all the socializing I could handle.

Listing Cultural Weekly, Boston Literary Magazine, Cloud City, the Jersey Devil Press and Rocky Mountain Revival among his credits, Doug has also contributed to the anthology Scabies and, reflecting his fascination with precision through brevity, is Senior Editor of Blink-Ink, a quarterly journal devoted to flash fiction of the fifty-word variety.

Find out more about Doug on Facebook.