As soon as he says it, I know this is it: the Key Quote, the Summarizing Expression of Character that all profile writers lust for and jump on, if they’re lucky enough to find it. More importantly, it’s the perfect place to end the article.
“I think we can’t like everybody, but I think we can love anybody. Clear seeing, or truthful seeing—that’s what love is. I think I want that feeling.”
Matthew J. C. Clark ’04 and I are in Bath, Maine, standing on the little wooden porch that shirt-tags off the side of his cheerfully yellow house. Below us, a black-and-white cat is making its way through the crabgrass, which spills like a gigantic mullet from the business-in-front face of the house itself—and then following its path my eye moves in a loose half-circle, down toward the Kennebec River across the road and then up around again until it arrives eventually at Matthew himself.
“Dude,” he says.
“Dude,” I reply.
“Dude.”
He says this last “dude” quietly—and then maybe before we go any further, I should give you a little more about this word, which as Matthew uses it covers a wide range of expressive options. It can be short and declarative, like a sneeze (“Dude!”), or wry and lamenting, like a sigh (“Dude . . .”). Later in the evening, it will echo with a kind of Lebowskian self-parody, as if it were simultaneously trying to both appreciate the beauty of life and make fun of its own “Double rainbow!!” excitement. But now it feels tactically brief—as if he were trying to deflect my attention back out toward the view.
If this is what he’s trying to do, it’s not working; for at six-foot-three, Matthew J. C. Clark is tall enough to be unmissable even when he’s scrunched, as now, on top of a porch rail. I have decided that this must be one of his challenges: that he protrudes like a lighthouse when really all he wants to do is chill inconspicuously in the background. Meanwhile, it’s evening on one of those mid-September days when the temperature is hard to get a bead on, and over the course of the afternoon he has put the hood of his mustard-colored hoodie up and then down several times. Right now, it’s down, exposing his matted hair and the large bump on his forehead that I saw at the February reading when I first met him—the same reading during which he answered an audience member’s question by explaining that one day only a few weeks earlier the bump had just appeared, like the nub of a horn. Looking at it now, I remember the remark a friend made when I told her I was getting a chance to interview him. “Oh my god, I’d love to interview that guy,” she said. “There’s such crazy energy coming off him, it’s like he’s actually crackling.”
She’s right, too—although now that I’m actually here, I’m not sure how much of this kind of anecdotal charisma is going to make it into the article. I am not sure how much of it is really going to be germane to the Story of Matthew J. C. Clark that I’ve been working on at least since I read his book Bjarki, Not Bjarki and loved it so much that I wrote a review hailing it as a mini masterpiece. I have seen the future of under-200-page books about the Maine wood-mill industry, and it is a tall carpenter who enjoys artisanal vermouth. Because what I really want to get at isn’t his taste in liquor, or the beautiful house that he restored himself: it’s his Hero’s Journey, in which a struggling writer (like myself) perseveres and eventually triumphs in the wilderness of backwoods Maine (where I also live). This, to me, is the startling and inspiring thing about Matthew—and why I don’t want to get distracted by the fact that he’s smoked at least two American Spirits since I got here, despite insisting multiple times that he doesn’t smoke.
“Dude, you know I actually don’t smoke,” he says again, in case I missed this the previous few times, or maybe he just likes to contradict himself. And OK, sure, there are a fair number of Whitmanesque countercurrents in the Story of Matthew J. C. Clark too; for example, Matthew’s separation and divorce, which frames the action of Bjarki, Not Bjarki, since it is the renovation of the just-married couple’s dream house (the house that we’re currently standing under) that drives him to The Wood Mill of Maine in the first place. Heck, even the book’s title is a little koan of self-negation. But for my purposes, at this particular moment, I am trying to keep our conversation on the throughline, which is after all what I came here for, and why I have been trying to wrangle all these elements together over the past two hours.
So far, at least, Matthew has been pretty game. He has walked me with a tour guide’s patience through his time at the Iowa Writing Program (“Workshop culture, dude”), the juvenilia (“My ‘Portraits of American Manhood’—I’m glad it wasn’t published”), the inevitable small-press chapbook (“You can read it online, although maybe I should just give you this one—my parents have, like, a box of them at their house”), and then finally the aforementioned moment of Clarity and Love. But now that we’ve made it to the present, I can tell that there’s something about the sound of his career put together end to end like this that bothers Matthew—some part that I can see he feels like he has not gotten exactly right, and which makes him go back to Bjarki Gunnarsson, the owner and founder of The Wood Mill of Maine, and the man who provoked him into writing Bjarki, Not Bjarki in the first place.
“The thing I kept coming back to was the complexity of him, and of interacting with him in this time we’re in right now. I mean, did you read that Janet Malcolm book?”
I have not, unfortunately, read that Janet Malcolm book.
“Du-u-ude. It’s about how when you interview people, your subjects always know you’re going to sell them out, but they still tell you everything, which is what happened with Bjarki. It was like, you read all these articles about people, and it’s either celebratory or gotcha. But to me that just wasn’t interesting anymore—do you know what I mean?”
I do know what he means, or at least think I do—although to be fair this is not something I want to be talking about either. Because ambiguity is one thing if there’s a whole book to do it in; but I’ve got a Story to tell. I am literally writing one of those “articles about people,” which means that I do have to “get” Matthew. Plus (and though I don’t think about this at the time, it is glaringly obvious now, as I write) there’s the uncomfortable fact that the success I’ve come to Bath hoping to pin on Matthew is not just one I want to write about: it’s one I want to read about as well. It’s something that, as a struggling writer (or maybe just a writer), I need to believe in: that the work will be worth it and the uncertainty will lead to discovery, at which point the drafts will be redeemed and the time spent turn out not to have been wasted, after all.
So—and maybe it’s Matthew’s artisanal vermouth talking here, or the unicorn horn—but when he asks me this question now, I swerve back toward the answers that I’ve already brought with me; the points I already made, in my review and elsewhere. I talk about the fretwork and architecture—the immense thought and planning it must have taken to achieve this voice, which to me feels as meaningful as anything I’ve read from a contemporary. I even tell him about the weird energizing emptiness that I sensed in the book, the absence whose gravity bends all of the book’s unmissable chattering presence around it, like a black hole warping light. The whole thing takes about seven minutes, and when I’m done, Matthew nods.
“I’m not sure I follow you, dude,” he says. “I mean, I wish I meant all that. To tell you the truth, there’s so little intention involved in what I’m doing. It’s just relaxing, and then watching something happen.”
Then he ashes again, delicately, in the direction of the river.
“But I think that if we’re going to eat, we’d better eat.”
We drive to dinner, meaning that now, as I process Matthew’s dismissal, I have a few minutes to tell you about Bjarki, Not Bjarki. When I started reading an excerpt from it in November 2023, three months before it was released, I thought the publisher had sent me a corrupted Word document by accident. But by the time I’d finished, I had decided that these were some of the best sentences I’d read in years.
And that, in my opinion, is the place to start with Bjarki: with its sentences, which are agile and textured and so packed with hot-mic decision that they feel less written than overheard, like snippets of a soliloquy. Some writers jewel their metaphors into perfect little Etsy baubles; others move with tectonic slowness, accumulating their best effects over chapters, sometimes entire books. Matthew’s paragraphs offer a third way between these two extremes; reading the best of them (and there are many great paragraphs in Bjarki), I imagine that I’m walking through an overgrown backyard, in which the myriad buggy data points rise and mingle with blue atmosphere. Which is where my off-the-mark thoughts about Bjarki come in, or came in (R.I.P. my thoughts about Bjarki), for since my initial reading of those excerpts, I have decided that this movement stems not from any lucked-on quality like “genius” but from a consciously—and very artfully—placed space, an absence, which Matthew, for all the radical generosity of his narrative voice, has created in this book—that is in many ways his best creation. Because in a time when so many books are grasping toward Big Answers, what Bjarki, Not Bjarki offers is the opposite. A nonanswer—or maybe, even better, an instruction manual that shows us how to stay thoughtful and engaged with the world in the absence of Big Answers. Maybe even in opposition to them.
By now, however, downtown Bath has rolled up under my car’s front axle, and we are at the restaurant: a Goldilocksian compromise between oysters, which sound decadent and intimidating to me, and pizza, which, as a dad of two under-12 boys, I have already had twice this week. Here, on the other hand, the lights are undaunting and the bar so Labrador-blond that it feels counterintuitive when, a few seconds after he sits down, Matthew reaches behind his neck to pull his hoodie back up.
“I don’t know, dude,” he says, when I ask him what’s good here. “To be honest I always get the burger. I think it’s the only thing I’ve ever had here.”
Burger, candied Brussels sprouts, a pair of Manhattans so full that they look precarious even on the lacquered bar. Matthew sips at his quickly, as if he were afraid that the other patrons might notice his good fortune and get upset about it. He has seemed uncomfortable since we walked in, even more so than before—although to be fair, it’s hard to tell if this alertness is social awkwardness or a kind of heightened writerly noticing. Because, granted, maybe I’m wrong about my larger interpretation; but if there’s one thing that I am sure about, it’s that the writer of Bjarki, Not Bjarki is a top-flight noticer. He’s an egg of human Silly Putty, rolling through the world picking up twigs and dropped coins—except that what this metaphor misses is the conscious leaving-out that every writer knows is the real challenge, and which is at least partly what I want to hear him talk about now. I want to hear him tell me how he does it, or at least how he did it—and then maybe this is why, when the second round of Manhattans are delivered and I notice him noticing how distinctly less overflowing our glasses are than they were for our first round, I feel the sudden urge to try again—to push past the whole “I just sit there and the book drops out of me” thing he offered me earlier. I decide to go back to the beginning, back to when presumably he didn’t know himself. I ask him about the first, unpublished project, the “Portraits of American Manhood” that he said he was glad was never published.
“Oh yeah, dude, that was super derivative. It was me trying to sound like all these other writers I liked.”
OK, then what got him away from that?
“Well, I think I stopped trying to be someone else I admired and just let the voice run through me. I mean, you get to the right place with all this stuff and something just shows up. It’s a relief, really—but you’re not exactly in control. It’s you and it’s not you.”
I try to hide my disappointment about this, since, let’s be honest, if there’s something the rest of us can use from the Story of Matthew J. C. Clark, this is not it. It’s the usual half-veiled Calvinist malarky, with the artist essentially one of God’s chosen and the rest of us chewing our cud on the sidelines. But before I can ask him more, something unexpected and maybe even a little revelatory happens. Matthew flags down our bartender—a cheerful and hitherto unflappable woman—and proceeds to point out to her, in a friendly but insistent way, exactly the thing that I just noticed him noticing; that is, that our most recent two Manhattans were definitely less full than our first two had been.
There is a moment of shock, as the bartender stares at Matthew as if he had just reached across the bar and honked her nose. But just as quickly, something shutters inside her, and she smiles at us.
“You got me,” she says.
“I don’t want to be a dick or anything,” Matthew says.
“No, you’re right, you’re right. It’s because I’d already mixed them.”
“I felt like I had to say something. Maybe I shouldn’t have said something.”
The bartender doesn’t show it, but it seems obvious to me that she agrees with him on this last point—although to be fair, in a few more seconds she is down at the other end of the bar serving other people as if nothing’s happened. I nuzzle my Manhattan feeling more than a little confused. Whatever else it may be, this is not the kind of comment I would have expected from a transcendent writer-yogi. On the contrary, it’s a painstaking gesture—an eye-mote that I realize Matthew has been scratching at for a good 20 minutes now. Having said it, he ducks his head back into his shoulders.
“Shit. I don’t know why I did that,” he says. The hoodie’s skin is thin and shimmering: a fabric designed to wick. It looks scrappy and inefficient, like the top-half of a broken cocoon.
Dessert? “No, I’m good man, I’m good,” Matthew says, although he is clearly not. He is embarrassed, which to someone of my WASPy, conflict-averse background is pretty much the worst thing you can be. Still, now that I’m looking at him closely, I must admit that there is a twinkle in his eye that was not there when we entered the bar—or at least, that I didn’t notice. It’s a gleeful look: a glint of self-delight or maybe self-mockery, as if he were not the ridiculous customer who had just said something rude to his bartender (or not just that) but a person watching someone else make that remark and enjoying it. Somehow it allows Matthew to be, weirdly, both present and not present in the action—both uncomfortable and in control, in a way that feels to me like it should be impossible but isn’t, apparently.
And indeed, now that I’m here, I’m surprised to find that Matthew’s look is really the thing I want to learn from him—because isn’t that what writing is? A faux pas, a worrying, a willingness to spasm past the barriers we’ve learned to erect between one another and then stay there, no matter how uncomfortable it makes us, until a more honest connection has been made and a more durable truth revealed? What it is not, absolutely (admit it!), is transcendence; or at least not the kind that lasts for more than a little while, let’s say the time it takes you to read this paragraph. I pay over Matthew’s protests, because I’m the interviewer. For a second I consider leaving an enormous tip; but I don’t, mostly out of habit, I guess. The bartender gives us the “Goodnight, guys” she has no doubt given a dozen times already this evening and will give again a dozen more. As I stand up, I notice that Matthew has left about a third of his Manhattan undrunk, bringing the glass to exactly the same level as before the bartender gave us our top-off.
I try to hide my disappointment about this, since, let’s be honest, if there’s something the rest of us can use from the Story of Matthew J. C. Clark, this is not it.
Another thing I’m sure of, still: Bjarki, Not Bjarki is a worrying book, and one of the things that it’s most worried about is our desire, as a society and individuals, to stuff the messy personalities of our neighbors into caricatures that we can loathe or worship without needing to extend ourselves. Its method for doing this is to explode exactly the literary form you’re consuming at this moment, the “magazine-style essay” (as Matthew puts it) or profile piece; sluicing its easy clichés through Matthew’s second-guessing sentences until our original prejudices become less important—if not completely unrecognizable. Most of the time our experience of this is gorgeous and intuitive; but over the course of the book even I must admit that it begins to get boggy. It’s like trying to watch a baseball game through a kaleidoscope: “Where are we going, what’s the point and resolution of this?” we occasionally want to shout; for example, when I find myself back on Matthew’s porch, staring out at the same river rolling past the same pretty, bucolic slope. I feel antsy and transferred—I want to reach through all the theories and thoughts we’ve been tossing back and forth and touch something that convinces me I’m not a sucker. Because the surprising (for me at least) truth is that, after spending an entire afternoon and evening with him, I find myself even further from believing in the Story of Matthew J. C. Clark than I was before. Is this what a great new writer looks like in 2024? Is The Wood Mill our Walden Pond? Or am I just making this all up: seeing artful absence where there is really just a half-baked inability to face one’s demons and move on, already?
I keep waiting for Matthew to put my questions to rest—because isn’t that how this kind of thing is supposed to end? He wrote the book, after all, which must mean that something has changed: some neurosis has been overcome, or some spiritual shame transmuted and solved via the miracle of achieved form. The book works, so shouldn’t Matthew? So I ask, for maybe the third time that night: what changed?
Matthew raises his right hand, curling his fingers into a One-does-not-simply-walk-into-Mordor ring—and then for a second it looks like he’s trying to pick a single sound out of the late summer air, a ground cricket or mouse rustle or whatever. Watching him, I think, somewhat depressively, what a joke our idea of “story” really is—as if we ever could or should pinch a single strand out of the world. Although who knows, maybe Matthew is about to show me the way?
“I just signed up for a six-week meditation retreat, if that’s what you mean,” he says, which, of course, is not at all what I mean. But then he smiles, and I get the feeling that we are in the middle of one of those Bjarki paragraphs that is going to pratfall its way into some further, even less likely truth.
“I think I thought publishing the book would be, like, happiness. Like it’d be the answer, and then I’d be done, and doors would open, and I’d move somehow, like, through the world. But what it really feels like sometimes is that I fooled everybody with this book. There’s nothing in it, and now it’s like ‘How did I do that?’ And the worst part is, there’s no way I’m going to trick them again. So, it’s daunting, to just sit down and not know what you’re listening for.”
It is not what I was looking for, but man: here, now, do I know what he means. It is daunting to not know what you’re listening for, although maybe not any more daunting than finding it—and then though, unlike Matthew, I do not really understand how to write about this yet, I can, on this particular evening, find the words. Or a word.
“Dude,” I say.
“Dude,” he says. And then right after this he says what I will later realize is really the best line of the night, which he tosses off parenthetically and apropos of nothing (everything) after glancing above us one more time.
“I mean, we were going to live in this house with a family. Now I live in this house with a cat and a roommate.”
It’s hard for me to write these sentences in a way that doesn’t sound depressing, but the interesting thing is that what I remember about Matthew actually saying them is that he sounded not heartbroken or even sad, but calm, as if the return to an empty house and a blank page were the real accomplishment of his time writing Bjarki, Not Bjarki. The clear sight, or at least a glimpse of it.
No doubt this is a good place to end the Story of Matthew J. C. Clark, too—although as usual life has something to add, or take away, which I guess is what the best books always tell us. So as we stand there bobbing in the awkward finality of what Matthew has just said, my eye lands on a white-haired man in a fishing vest walking out of the house directly across the street from us. He looks up, flashing an upraised palm, and then proceeds to mount what appears to be one of those elaborate sitting-down bicycles, which he maneuvers so laboriously that I am unsure whether he is trying to K-turn out of his driveway or pull further into it, or maybe just stay there performing his spirograph curls for some unknown observer, or maybe just for himself, like a girl practicing baton late into the night.
Matthew watches him closely, a look of attention and pain and humor on his face, all mixed together in a clear appreciation of the awkward grace of this moment.
“That’s Rodney; he’s a writer too,” he says eventually, smiling as the man glances up one more time. “He’ll probably come over and talk to us.” But the prospect of our company must be either too daunting, or not daunting enough, and after a few more turns Rodney clears the driveway, gliding down the road to follow the river as far as I can see him, and then finally farther than that.
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