Writer, journalist, and editor, Matt A. Hanson, shares insights with editor Melissa Ford Lucken in this episode of Washington Square On Air. A Massachusetts native who now makes his home in Istanbul, Hanson inspires by revealing his enlightened ambition of making meaning of life through art while honoring the humanity found in thought and creation.

Matt Hanson’s piece, Mrs. Grammar, appears in the Summer 2023 issue of the Washington Square Review.

Matt’s literary profile on Instagram

Matt’s review of Nights of Plague by Orhan Pamuk at World Literature Today.

See Istanbul through the eyes of James Baldwin, Matt’s essay on Fodor’s Travel

Matt’s describes his journey as an art writer in Turkey on Argonotlar.

Matt explores Jewish-interest culture.

Website: Washington Square Review

This is Melissa Ford Lucken, Rosalie Petrouske, Susan Serafin-Jess, editors for the Washington Square Review. Washington Square On-Air showcases the poetry and fiction of the latest edition of LCC's literary journal, The Washington Square Review, read by the poets, authors, and editors themselves. Expect the unexpected as our contributors express experience and fantasy with humor, imagination, poetic license, irony, and passion. If you love language at its most original, please join us in our audio Town Square to celebrate a community of writers spanning from around the world to Lansing.

This is Melissa Ford Lockin, editor for the Washington Square Review Today. I'm here with Matt A. Hanson, writer, journalist and editor. We're happy to have one of his pieces in our upcoming issue.

The title of the piece is Mrs. Grammar. Thanks for joining us today, Matt.

Thanks so much for having me. It's fantastic. Very delighted.

Tell us a little bit about your piece. How did you come to write it?

So this piece is really just based on my upbringing in small town America.

I'm from a New England town called Mattapoisit and growing up was sort of like a laboratory experiment in utopian living, I think as a child, which has been so different than my life in a number of countries and cities throughout the world. First city I lived in was Cairo, Egypt, and I currently live in Istanbul, Turkey.

And looking back on my childhood, mid-30s now, and from trying to imagine just the stark contrast between being a seven year old in a classroom versus the concrete struggles of adult life.

So I really wanted to sort of paint a picture of that contrast and the main character, Mrs. Grammer, whose name is based on a teacher I had that rhymed with that name.

And you know, as a child you see these schoolteachers and you see them sort of as single professional individuals and it kind of creates this imaginary portrait of a person sort of disconnected from the rest of their lives.

And in some ways I think childhood is sort of can be a disconnection from the rest of life, unfortunately, perhaps unless you enjoy, you know, more healthy relationship to childlike impulses as a creative person, for example, these kinds of things. So.

So yeah, I just wanted to paint a kind of a stark, tragic portrait of a schoolteacher who's facing eviction and also perhaps resignation from work.

And this contrasts with the students in the class who sort of enjoy this wonderful experimentation and they fail and they are talented and they get to express themselves and they get to be in the center of attention and the teacher brings that out in them and sort of while napping she disappears. And there are these scenes where she's in her home.

And I tried to imagine what that could be like sort of this afternoon in a small town, feeling kind of disconnected and facing a kind of professional and personal desolation.

And so it's got this kind of almost like, I think of this lecture by David Foster Wallace, this is water about sort of like, you know, what it's like to push a grocery cart through a parking lot and sort of realize that such moments, that, you know, life is like, sort of painful and difficult and boring at times and.

But the wonder I think of writing is, you know, perhaps also that a painter or someone drawing would feel in that slight specificity of each moment, we can sort of appreciate just the raw details that sort of appear to us either in combinations of memory and imagination. So, yeah, so I think, you know, short stories are this.

I think Junot Diaz said they're sort of like this close approximation of perfection in literary form, as opposed to novel writing, for example, which is. Can be more loose. And so I tried to really just do sort of a contrast, like a basic contrast.

Childhood, adulthood, you know, the experimentation in education. How precious that is, the learning process. And then where you get to fail. And failing is so much part of learning. And.

And then that up against the fact that so many people are facing these sort of hard, concrete tragedies, you know, and. And facing them alone, I think, which is on top of that. So, I mean, school being a lovely place in which we enjoy communal life.

So I tried to create different contrasts within the story and sort of create a setting in which for readers we can perhaps connect with these, like, slight moments of discomfort along the way. I think especially the commute is sort of this special place.

For example, the story starts where she's listening to a podcast in which there's an author describing the education process as a kind of theater or literature and sort of exaggerating with this kind of like high brow mentality, in a sense.

So I think, you know, these standards, they're, they're, you know, so maybe that could point to this kind of idea of, you know, cultural standard, you know, the models of high culture and genius and, you know, coming down to the ground with, you know, the basics of just progressing through your work and engaging with people and things like that.

One of the things that stood out to me about the story was the narrative style. How did you make that decision? What went into the way that you approached it?

So do you mean, for example, describing the character?

It has kind of a, you know, an omniscient kind of floating above feel that I think helps with that contrast that you've been describing.

Yes, yes. Yeah. I mean, I sort of, I think gravitate toward.

I gravitated toward third person in that sense because, you know, I really wanted to create this effect of trying to see, you know, more of a person than a person could describe of themselves. Perhaps, maybe from the outside kind of. Perhaps in an objective sense. A lot of my writing comes from working as a journalist in the art world.

So I kind of have this. I think I'm. I'm sorry.

I tend to think of things in terms of a relationship to objects, describing objects or describing an image in that sense, which comes through in the.

In the classroom scene where the children are trying to paint, are trying to draw things and having ideas and trying to make connections between language and image. But the narrative style is an interesting question.

Somehow I almost kind of see a quick leap from journalism to short story writing in terms of my practice, which comes from this almost like cathartic way of seeing journalism as a kind of short story form in a way. And so I'm trying in that sense. I like to practice the short story form in order to become a better non fiction writer in that sense.

So typically, I mean, of course, you know, first person is a wonderful also non fiction device, but in this particular sense I really wanted to look back. This is kind of a remembering. So it's almost like I didn't want to place myself.

I didn't want to directly address the reader, but I wanted to sort of have this be a kind of memory that is really also about the present. I wasn't facing eviction or anything, but I did move twice in the last year. That could subconsciously have affected the story. But.

Yeah, well, the, the narrative style that you used really creates that observational feel. So it is, it reminded me a little bit about the play Our Town. Are you familiar with that?

I'm not. So.

Okay. It.

It very much matches what you're describing where you observe people and you get to interpret their lives from a distance rather than, like you said, with first person putting yourself in it. It's more observational.

Exactly. Yes. Yes. I didn't want to sort of assume that degree of tragic circumstance perhaps, but I did want to explore it.

So can you talk a little bit more about your journalistic work?

Yeah, so, I mean, I started in culture journalism in a digital section of a newspaper while I was still in high school in New Bedford area. And then I went on after university to into alternative forms of journalism, cooperative media in Canada.

And I was always concerned with, you know, healthy subjects, for example, not over victimizing, you know, narratives of oppression, that eruption through our society, but trying to show empowered at the same time, you know, really reporting about, you know, difficult subjects, you know, in terms of migration and land defense and environmental journalism in that sense or so. So that kind of was why I think I ended up doing more cultural journalisms.

Because what I found was that a lot of artists are from these incredible backgrounds of untold stories that really fit into the grander narratives that sort of dominate the news cycle in terms of war and economic struggle and these sort of things. So I was kind of looking to connect the dots while making for interesting reads.

And I continued to do that in New York City for a number of years, working mainly in the dance, actually field. I was reviewing two to three dance productions a week and doing other forms of cultural journalism.

And when I moved to Istanbul, I decided to focus more on the art world property, which sort of ended up becoming successful on a local scale. I ended up doing editorial work for every museum and number of galleries and written for the leading art review publications around the world.

And I always love when the idea and the practices of writing about art make themselves known in terms of their relationship to literature, because so much of writing about art is rooted in literary work. And so that's been so fascinating for me. And I've come to a point where I'm trying to do more literary reviewing and other kinds of reportage.

I tend to. I try to find unique approaches in the search for my voice within this incredibly challenging field.

Can you give us an example of a project that you've worked on that really stands out in your mind as achieving your goals?

I mean, something that comes to mind is I did a profile of a Kurdish painter named Zehra Dhawan, who was exiled to London after she was imprisoned for painting the scene of essentially a war crime, where the Turkish military destroyed a town and she painted the town. The painting was seen as evidence, I suppose, and she was criminalized and thrown into jail.

And her story from that point is just increasingly interesting and compelling.

On the event of her first solo show in her home country of Turkey, I was interviewing her and producing this piece about how she survived prison and in prison, learned more Kurdish with her fellow Kurdish prisoners, and produced a body of work while imprisoned, which was incredibly moving.

And at the same time, she was when I interviewed her, and still today, of course, she's a young woman who is really rising to types of challenges and types of realities in this world that are unfathomable, perhaps to me. And that when someone decides to continue to respond to that with beauty and self. Personal self expression, it's.

It's so inspiring and, and, and lovely to.

To have the opportunity to be in dialogue with, with that kind of story and try to understand that perspective or that the ways in which she is connecting to everyone is trying to connect to people, you know, by telling those stories.

Yeah. As you're saying that, I'm thinking about what you said earlier about not focusing on the victimization, but really looking at the humanity.

And I can hear that in what you're saying that you're admiring the way that she is doing, moving forward and creating things and still sharing her voice and perspective.

Exactly, exactly.

You mentioned also doing literary reviewing. Can you talk some about that?

Yeah, I frequently review novels and nonfiction works and for example, with a magazine called World Literature Today or Words Without Borders or, you know, a number of outlets, I reviewed a very interesting book last year called the Undercurrents by an art writer named Kirsty Bell, based in Berlin.

And that was very fascinating because of the way in which the first person writing was able to unravel this tangled web of Berlin's history, tied to its cultural heritage and in a way that was excitingly contemporary and at the end spoke to these themes that are very alive in contemporary art, where it's not about what.

What is necessarily visible, but what about what makes itself known through experience, for example, or through being in a particular place and having a connection with something that is personal.

And I think that's a sort of lovely way that, you know, any art making tries to come to a place in which, outside of the increased commodification of objects and images, how are these ways in which we communicate actually moving us and actually, you know, connecting us and inspiring us to, you know, whether it's an ecology or whether it's our sense of history or whether it's our experience, Health, family, always, you know, any theme you want but that. So I liked that, doing that book.

I mean, I recently reviewed Knights of Plague by Orhan Palmuk, in which I really got to discuss the adaptation of history and contemporary fiction in a way that I found I really grasped that was exciting to write that about his latest 700 page historical epic.

Do you find yourself doing research while you're working on the reviews or doing research perhaps, after?

Of course. Yes. Yes. Research is so essential to engaging with material.

I think with any material in this field, of course, there's always a Constant, for example, constant research of words. Constant research of references and supplementary material. Yeah.

And of course, I mean, seek in search of, you know, all kinds of sources, whether it's academic or, you know, any kind of artistic work or that kind of research is necessary. Speaking with people, friends and readers and such.

It sounds fascinating. You must learn a lot of new things. That's why I was wondering if you did additional research even after you finished the project.

Of course. I think because so much of what motivates us is this kind of threads of continuity, you know, and been always in sort of pursuit of.

Of something that, you know, we feel like we're getting towards. We're kind of more able to express with greater clarity or. Yeah. Some kind of firmer grasp or something. Yeah.

So, I mean, everything becomes, in that sense, material, becomes sort of the next sort of stitch or not on, you know, a line of inquiry that I think.

Yeah. What kind of project are you working on now?

There's a number of projects I'm doing. I'm doing a piece for a journal called Public in Canada, and they're an art journal. And the piece is a profile on. Artist name is okay.

Ostut, who has created a fictional archive out of an alter ego who lived a century ago. And she.

Although she lives in the contemporary art world and she's a installation artist, she has essentially created a literary narrative in the form of an autobiography, which is very much in the vein of Virginia Woolf's Orlando and Gertrude Stein's Autobiography of Alice Beato. Class and wonderful. Yeah. So I'm finding whenever an artist approaches literary history and.

And writing, but not necessarily with as much words, for example, or in the same form, in terms of writing as. As a novelist would or, you know, a writer would, I would. Or however we can say.

I mean, as someone who deals mainly in images and mainly in spatial expressions, for example, I find that that's always so captivating to me because I come from, you know, a sort of background that is really remote from art world type of thinking. I'm sort of coming from a very literary middle class. It's either books or music, you know what I mean?

Whatever you can get at this store around the corner, you know, I mean, this idea of, you know. Unfortunately, I shouldn't maybe say so generally, but really, as an adult, I've come to sew my work, fortunately enough to.

To appreciate different takes on historiography, on how we're creating history and heritage and culture. And so that artist in particular, who I've known and became the subject of this recent article.

Yeah, for example, I mean, I'm, I'm drafting novels as well these days, but I mean, historical fiction and. Yeah. And I'm trying to sell them to literary agents and, you know, going through.

The, through the process.

The great joys of.

Familiar. No. If our listeners would like to stay in touch with you and follow you in your work, where can they find you online?

Yes, I mean, they can find me. I have an Instagram, I Twitter. My name is Matt A. Hanson. I'm in a few different publications. I suppose I'm reachable.

All right. We'll put that information in the show notes. Thanks so much for spending time with us today.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for listening to our talented poets and authors. Until next time, this has been Washington Square On-Air, where we showcase selections from Lansing Community College's literary journal, The Washington Square Review, a publication featuring writers from the Great Lakes State, across the nation and around the world. To find out more about The Washington Square Review, visit lcc.edu/wsr. We hope you enjoyed listening as much as we enjoyed sharing.