High school creative writing and English language arts teacher Matt Thompson sits down with Washington Square Review editor Melissa Ford Lucken. Thompson reveals the secrets to successful workshopping with younger writers, explores how preconceived notions and expectations hinder creativity, and uncovers the surprising beauty of being wrong about big things.

Matt Thompson’s poem, Laundromat Blues, appears in the Summer 2025 issue of the Washington Square Review.

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Hey there.

This is Melissa Ford Luckin, editor for the Washington Square Review.

I'm here today with Matt Thompson, author of Laundromat Blues, a poem that's in our Summer 25 issue.

Hey there, Matt.

Hi.

How are you?

I'm pretty good.

Will you read the poem for us?

I would love to.

Laundromat Blues.

It made my thighs ache, your knees hooked over mine, mug resting on your sternum freehand on phone.

No pain is welcomed in the moment in the making.

Sofa commercials of imprints and intimacies on cushions and cuttings clipped from our unremarkable, unremarked upon touchings that pile up laundry in the corner of shared lives.

Thank you.

Thanks for reading that.

Of course.

Tell us a little bit about the poem.

How did you come to write it?

Well, about a year and a half ago, I went through a divorce and I was entirely unprepared for the immensity of the grief of it.

It was, you know, it's something you have in your mind that everyone knows.

You know, half of marriages end in divorce and all that, but no one ever really believes that that's going to be them.

Like, no, you don't internalize that.

That's going to be you.

You're going to be the other half.

I found myself completely unprepared for what I was feeling.

And I wrote a series of poems at the time, over the course of a year or so, just trying to process what I was feeling and what I found really surprised me.

And it's, you know, a cliche to say it's the small things, but it's true.

It's a cliche for a reason.

I expected on some level to feel upset about, you know, anniversaries, romantic dinners, these kinds of memories, the wedding.

And when it comes down to it, none of those things were particularly important at all.

That's not the things that you really think about.

It's the banal intimacies that really are what you remember.

The things that on a day to day basis, like you've heard, you know, life is short, but it's also days are very long.

And over the course of, you know, a whole day being awake a whole week, you come across these small moments and you, that's, that's what really hits you, I found.

And that's sort of what this poem is really About.

So give us a couple examples of what you mean by small moments.

So just things from everyday life.

Just use the poem as an example.

Sitting on the couch together, watching, in my case, hgtv, bad home renovation television that, you know, isn't particularly real.

Cutting an onion in the kitchen while you hear the other person listening to their podcast or their music in the other room.

Not even times when you're necessarily explicitly spending time together, but just sort of the low grade hum of another person in the background of your life.

And when that's there for a long time and then it's not, you really notice.

You know, it's like when a, when a speaker is, is humming in the background and you don't, you don't know it until someone, someone turns it off and you're like, oh, what was that like now?

Everything sounds silent now.

And that, that sort of what I felt like I was experiencing was a silence that was unexpected in my life.

Did I hear you right?

You said there were several other poems that you wrote as part of this process.

Somewhere in the neighborhood of 20.

I would say, yeah, I've written about, you know, I would say the last six months of my marriage and then the, you know, the following six to ten months after going through, you know, counseling, deciding to split up, the legal process and then moving out on my own.

All that just, it was about a, you know, a year period where I was really, it's what I was focused on writing.

I've just, in the last, you know, six months or so, really started, you know, writing about different things.

How did you know it was time to move on?

That's a really difficult question.

I.

How do I know it was time to write about something else?

I just felt compelled to write about something else.

That's not a satisfying answer, but I recently taught to some of my high school students Kafka's Hunger Artist.

And the frustrating thing about being an artist is the compulsion to do it.

It's both the best and the worst part about it.

And for a long time I felt compelled to write about these particular feelings.

And then I lost that compulsion.

And I'm proud of the work I did in that period.

I felt it was really important to me and I think really crucially, it brought me back to writing poetry.

The end of, the end of my marriage really did bring me back to writing poetry because I, I went to school to write fiction and I primarily thought of myself as a fiction writer for a long time.

And I found I couldn't do it anymore.

It Just my motivations had changed.

The way I processed things had changed.

The way I wanted to write had changed.

And it brought me to.

To poetry in a way that I hadn't really done since I was in school and I had to take poetry writing classes as a writing student.

Why do you think it was the poetry that was the outlet?

As strange as this sounds, I always struggled as a fiction writer, even though that's.

That's how I saw myself.

I saw myself as a fiction writer.

That's what I wanted to be.

I thought poetry was something that people wrote who couldn't write fiction.

That was the way I thought.

Which, you know, is both not uncommon and very untrue, but it is.

That is the way I thought.

And looking back now, I. I struggled a lot with my fiction writing, and I wrote a lot of stories I'm very proud of.

But it was a real struggle for me because I was so concerned about the precision of language in the stories in a way that was detrimental to me as a fiction writer, as someone trying to write 10 to 15 pages of some things people would want to read.

And I would find myself in workshops just obsessing over two or three words.

And it's just.

I would receive the feedback repeatedly like, this is not.

You need to move on from this.

And so I think in a way, I was.

I was already there, and I just didn't.

I didn't understand that this.

You were.

I was trying to force myself into being a fiction writer in a way that I just.

I saw that as being a real writer in a way that someone who's 23 years old often thinks.

And it's really freed me, in a way to not feel really caught up in the success of what I'm doing.

I saw myself at that time in my life as you have to publish and you have to move on from short fiction to a novel.

And this is like, if you don't hit these benchmarks.

And in one way, poetry is very freeing because, you know, there are maybe 10 people who are, you know, making a really good living writing poetry at any given time.

So it's very freeing to.

To realize this is something I am doing for me.

And while it's lovely when other people want to read it and everyone, you know, wants their work to be recognized and appreciated, but I am first and foremost doing it for me because it's what I want to do.

And that's become.

It's been a very freeing process for me.

It's.

It's been extremely helpful for me.

I can imagine listening to what you were saying.

It sounds like with the fiction, you had a lot of preconceived notions and benchmarks and expectations for yourself that kind of hemmed you in.

But then when you switched to poetry, you didn't have all that.

So it was just the good parts.

The good parts of writing without all that other part.

That's exactly it.

I don't know very much about poetry or.

I mean, it's not something I spent years obsessing over.

And I've, you know, obviously since I started writing it, spent a lot more time reading it.

Cause I never.

I never read much of it before.

You know, obviously I teach it and I've read more poetry than, I guess, the average American.

But it wasn't something I was spending a lot of time doing deep dives on.

And I'm really happy that's changed.

I'm very pleased.

Well, it probably.

It gives you a new sense of excitement to be learning something new in a completely different way.

Like I said, not hemmed in by the expectations and the preconceived notions, but it's like, wow, I'm just learning this great stuff, and it's super great, and I like it.

Yes, yes.

And I. I feel very grateful to the.

The poetry teachers I did have.

They gave me something like I. I did have a. I had a base to fall back on when I realized this was something I wanted to do.

My poetry teacher in graduate school, Laura Newburn, she took my poetry more seriously than I did, which is something I am eternally grateful for, because I. I can remember having conversations with her about, you know, because I. I just saw this class as something I had to do, and she was taking the work seriously.

And she made a comment to me at the time.

She said, I can tell that you think about how this sounds.

And she said, it's.

It's good to think about what this sounds like, to focus on the sounds.

And it's a very small thing and a very obvious thing, but I. I still think about that and how closely she was reading something that I had not spent as much time on as I.

As I should have.

And that's been sort of a.

That's been sort of a guide for me now that what she was.

What she was telling me now is that that is.

That is always what's been important to me.

I just didn't realize it is.

What does this sound like?

And that's sort of a guiding light for me.

I want to go back just a little bit and Clear something up.

Because you mentioned your attitude toward poetry previously.

Um, did anyone know that you thought that way about poetry back then, or was that a private matter?

That was more of a private matter.

I. I'm sure knowing what I was like at the time, As a young 20s writing student, I feel like that attitude was.

It probably came across in some way, but I.

You know, this wasn't something I was spending a lot of time.

I wasn't saying it to people out loud.

I wasn't.

I didn't want to belittle, you know, poetry workshops.

We were doing nothing like that.

Right, right.

But, you know, is mostly an internal thing.

But, you know, I do.

I do remember thinking, you know, in any writing program, there are people you think, you know, it's full of people who are young and excited about their writing, and they're all, you know, judging each other, and they're so.

So dramatic.

Right.

For the most part, they aren't tainted yet.

The life has, like, given them a bunch of disappointments.

So they can just.

Beautiful.

Yeah.

They can just bask in the beauty of the written word and have faith in the future.

And it's very lovely.

It's a beautiful thing.

It's fun to look back on, but at the time, it's a beautiful time, and I don't regret it at all.

Awesome.

All right, so you had your collection of 20 poems, and then it sounds like at some point you just woke up and didn't need that venue anymore for your emotional outlet.

What did you start writing about next in your poetry?

Several things.

I mean, it's still, you know, on some level, it's still about what I'm processing emotionally.

That's what comes naturally to me.

Not always.

I would say 90% of the time, I have, you know, I have moments where I want to write about other things.

For, you know, example, I've written two or three poems about.

About Anna Karenina because it's my favorite novel.

And, you know, the emotional depth of the characters in that novel, I think about all the time.

I read it once a year.

I'm always think.

Thinking about.

About Levin.

That's always on my mind.

So I've written a couple poems this year about Anna Karenina, but for the most part, it is still about what I'm processing emotionally because I'm, you know, I'm still.

I'm still going through something different.

For me, I'm not, you know, I'm not in the immediate.

The immediate throes of getting divorced.

You know, being single for the first time.

In many years, in my 30s, living alone, all of these things are fairly new to me.

I had, I had never lived alone until I was 32.

I believe that was a whole new experience that I actually spent a lot of time worrying about.

Was that, am I going to be able to handle this?

This going to send me into some kind of spiral to live alone.

So it's, you know, it's largely the way I.

The way I process things.

You know, if I have, you know, if I have a inexperience that I feel like I can't conceptualize in any other way, it at least benefits me to turn it into a process.

So, you know, the process of writing a poem for me is.

It's so engrossing in a way that it stops my mind from doing anything else.

It's because I'm.

I'm so.

I'm so obsessed in that moment with making it sound like I want it to sound like I know it should sound in my head, that everything else just kind of stops and allows me to do that.

Talk a little bit about the process.

What does that look like?

So I write on paper first.

Always, very rarely in my house.

I like to leave, I like to be somewhere else.

I like it to be a little bit noisy.

And I always write it down on paper first.

I find from a rhythm perspective I can type too fast.

And so I need the time it takes for me to write it down, to think about the rhythm in my head, about what it sounds like, and is this what I want?

And I need the process of scratching it out, putting in something new, starting it over, reading through it.

I need the, the real time drafting process.

I'm not big on typing it out and then doing, you know, I've heard some people work this way and then going through four or five drafts.

Once, once I've.

I've typed it out, I will change things, I will move things around, I will move, you know, commas, periods and dashes, that sort of thing.

But mostly it's a process of deletion and moving some things around.

Once for me, I've typed it out.

It's 90% there.

I like to do my thinking on paper because I find that that's a more acceptable pace.

My mind doesn't move fast enough for typing.

I will type out the whole line and then I don't know what's next.

Whereas by the time I've finished writing the first line, a lot of times I've been able to process and I can, I can move on.

And so that's the way I have to do it.

Are you the kind of writer that likes a particular kind of paper to write on?

A particular kind of pen or pencil?

I go through periods.

Right now I'm using le pens.

I really like those.

I went through a fountain pen period.

I went through a sharpie period.

That was a dark time.

But I write in whatever notebooks come to hand.

Right now I have the.

The floppy moleskins I have to have.

I have to be able to fold it flat.

I can't deal with hardback notebooks.

Those don't work for me.

I'm not particularly twee about my notebooks.

I don't.

I keep them, but I'm not.

I don't always date my poems.

I'm not like, oh, this is from this era.

I'm not particularly twee about that.

But I. I do go through periods of where I have to use these.

I have to use these black le pens that I have, or I have to use these fountain pens I'm using.

But it's a.

It's a process.

Lined pages or unlined?

Absolutely lined.

Has to be lined.

Oh, see, there's where you and I are different.

For me, it has really just blank page.

Totally blank.

I can't deal with those lines.

Can you write.

Can you write straight across the page without lines?

Because I'll be writing in a circle after three lines.

Why would that be bad?

I mean, if you want to do a John Donne style, like, I don't know what those poems are called, that have shapes, if you want to do that, be great at that.

Unintentionally.

Yeah, I. I guess I should confess that I did teach cursive handwriting to third graders, so I can write cursive, like, real nice and straight across a board.

So, yeah, I can write straight if I really want to.

I. I can write in cursive, but I.

My handwriting on the board is so bad.

Oh, my.

My handwriting on the board is terrible when I teach.

Yeah, it's.

I'm always worried.

I'm always worried on the.

In 10 years of teaching, I've never gotten over, I'm gonna spell something wrong on the board.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's like.

It's fine.

It's misspelled.

You know what it means?

They probably are not gonna notice anyway.

Yeah.

I don't know.

I'm surprised that.

Well, maybe there are some students out there that take pictures of our terrible handwriting on boards and, you know, make that into artwork.

Mine like to.

Mine like to ask if they can Take a picture of it instead of writing it down.

Oh, for sure.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

All right, let's talk a little bit about your teaching.

What, what do you teach right now?

So I teach at a private school.

So I teach actually every grade of High School, 9th through 12th.

So I'm, I've got opportunity to teach American Lit, RIT Lit, World lit, and then just a general survey for my ninth graders.

But I also have an opportunity to teach a creative writing workshop as an elective class which I really enjoy are.

The creative writing workshop.

What grades are in that?

It is 10th and 11th grade in my creative writing workshop.

It's worked out very nicely because not that many high schoolers want to do a creative writing workshop when the other course, when the other course option is robotics with Legos.

So I have tough competition, but the five who did want to do it are invested in it.

And so we have a really good, we have a really good group committed to doing some fun writing and workshopping this year.

So I'm really enjoying that.

How is the workshop experience different from when you compare high school, the vibe and just the general pattern of the progress High school workshop versus college.

They are uncomfortable criticizing their co students.

The high school students.

Yes, yes.

Because we're aware, well aware that grad students generally are.

Grad students are a.

Okay at that.

Yeah, they're uncomfortable, which is in some ways an irony because high schoolers are very, very good at being mean to each other.

But there's a level of earnestness in high schoolers willing to be in a creative writing workshop that they are.

I think we're sort of self selecting for kids who don't necessarily want to criticize each other's work because they're all, I think on some level worried that it's going to come back to them.

But that is, you know, I have to kind of draw them out on that is that this is what we're, you know, we're here to improve each other's work.

This isn't to be mean.

We're not trying to, we're not trying to drag each other down.

You know, we're trying to improve each other's work.

And in order to do that, you have to tell them what your honest experience was with their work.

And that's been the biggest, you know, hurdle for us for, you know, 15 to 17 year olds with work.

And you know, I find, you know, drawing them out to more, more critical comments, it's not so much that they're unable to do it, it's that at times they just don't want to hurt each other's feelings, which they'll take five steps into the hallway and immediately say the most heinous things to each other.

But inside the creative writing environs, they don't want to do that.

So we just have to find the happy middle ground between, you know, between high school bullying and serious, serious reading.

That's kind of what we're looking for.

So that's nice if you have only five people at the table, because it seems like you're talking about drawing them out.

It seems like you would be able to model the conversation right there with them.

What kind of things do you prompt them with or ask them to get them to move towards speaking out?

So it's difficult because they don't have a lot of experience with short texts, which is, in a workshop, the backbone of what you're doing.

Because you don't, you know, we don't have time for to read your novel you wrote in middle school.

You know, this is a text you wrote recently.

It's, you know, five, eight pages.

And they haven't spent a lot of time reading short fiction.

Now I have a group of readers, right?

We've self selected for readers.

They want to be in a creative writing class.

And so they know how to engage with the, you know, the Brandon Sanderson fantasy novels they're reading at home.

They know how to engage with sort of fan discussions.

But what they've never spent much time talking about is the craft, how it's put together.

And so I try to focus, at least at the beginning of the year, really heavily on, on craft topics.

Let's talk about how this particular paragraph was put together.

How does this scene work?

Why do you think he started it in media res here?

How does that change our experience of the scene?

How does it change that he put a large space here instead of a transitional scene?

Should this be a transitional scene?

Would that make it clearer to you?

And I just try and hone in on very specific things at first so that they get an idea of the kind of things that we should be talking about.

Because if you at this age have spent most of your time in, you know, in fan discussions talking about, well, what's really behind the plot.

It's very interesting to talk about.

There's a reason people love to talk about, you know, what is, what's off the page with these characters.

What do you think these characters are like in this situation?

It's fun to do, but there's a reason authors don't really usually engage in that kind of discussion because it's not gonna, it's not gonna help them put together the next story.

And I find often when authors do engage in that, we end up with something that's not very good often.

So I, I try and I try and hone them down to very specific things.

And we've been doing many workshops the first half of the year.

We just finished the first half and we're signing up actually today as we speak.

We'll be signing up this afternoon for our full workshops, which means they'll have a whole class period to their story for the second half of the year.

And my hope is now that we've spent some time talking about craft, that we'll have an easier conversation about how these stories are put together.

That's the goal anyway.

That makes sense.

I hear what you're saying about focusing in, on smaller pieces in order to help them understand, you know, what kind of conversation you're moving them toward.

Building, building their own toolkit.

Like, how is it working here?

How could you use that in your own writing?

Yeah, in some, in some way you have to disenchant them from the magic of it.

Oh, yeah, for sure.

Yeah.

Sorry.

Yeah.

It's not a magical process.

No, it's, it, it takes a lot of work and that's, you know, I remember being disenchanted by that.

You want to think that it's, you know, it's straight from the genius's mind onto the page and that is just not how it works.

Right.

That's a sad, happy thing though, is once it's been deconstructed for you, you can start to make use of the tools that you find.

You know, you can, you start to look at things in a new way.

Yeah.

And it can, it will eventually become as happy as it was before, just in a different way.

Absolutely, absolutely.

That's me putting my rose colored glasses on it because.

Yeah, yeah.

Once you start watching movies and breaking the plots apart, no one wants to watch movies with you anymore.

I mean, I find the breaking point for movie conversations is if you start talking about cinematography, I think most people lose you.

So I think as long as you can, if you can stay away from cinematography, then they might follow you.

But once the C word hits the airwaves, it's over.

All right, so how does that, the experience of talking about literature in your creative writing class vary from the conversations that take place in your other classes?

Oh, they inform each other for sure.

Because in high school English and in college English as well, which I've spent a long time teaching composition classes.

The real goal of the class is to teach them to.

To think and communicate in productive ways.

And what we're reading is really just a springboard for that.

So we're, you know, we're breaking things apart to see how good writing is done so that you can take from that what you need moving forward.

And that, I think, is also difficult for students to understand.

And one thing students always find very amusing is when, you know, they ask, you know, can I.

Can I write this paper with this thesis?

But I don't.

I don't believe this thesis.

Like, I don't think this is true, but I think it would be a really good paper.

I'm like, of course.

I don't care.

This is not.

This is not a problem because I'm trying to teach you how to make this argument.

Okay?

This is.

This is what I want you to do.

Whether or not you believe what you're saying.

This is.

This is a whole separate issue for me.

I don't want you to try and figure out what I want you to say.

I want you to be able to make the best argument you can make, because I think these are tools you're going to take into your life later on.

And it's.

Again, sort of the disenchantment process is sort of what close reading and writing does to students when they really get it is when you break this down, what you're doing is.

It is somewhat mechanical, especially in.

Outside of creative writing, when you're doing argumentative writing and when you're learning to read and break things down, it's that.

That is very, very mechanical process, because ultimately most of these students are not going to be English teachers.

They're not going to be writers, but they should all be good communicators later in life.

I've, you know, right now the AI conversation is unavoidable with students.

And I've told them my philosophy on.

And that I do think eventually these skills are going to be more rather than less valuable as people willingly give up the ability to learn how to do these things.

I think at some point in time, these things are going to be more valuable than they are now, that they're going to be a whole host of people who have no idea how to do this.

And if at any point in time these large language models become unprofitable, they're just going to take them down.

It's.

And if, you know, if you no longer have access to it and you don't know how to write an email.

They're, they're not going to be sad for you, you know, And I, I try to use, you know, metaphors of technologies from earlier on in time that, you know, that I used when I was their age.

And I thought these things would be there forever.

And when the profit model was no longer there, it's not there for me anymore.

I can't use that thing anymore.

And I think if you're going to outsource your thinking and writing to something that is a for profit tool, you, you need to be aware of that.

Like this is a skill you need to have.

And I'm not telling my students, you can never use this.

It's like when I used, you know, Easy Bib when I was in college, which is, you know, I don't know if that hits for you, but that was, you know, it made work cited pages.

And I didn't use EasyBib until I knew how to make a worksite page for myself because I needed to know if EasyBib was wrong and if it went down and it wasn't there anymore, would I still be able to do this?

So I, you know, I tell my students they can use, they can use these, these tools if they want to, but they need to understand that you cannot come to rely on this thing.

You need to have this skill.

You need to be able to, need to be able to do this.

And that's, I'm sure I went way off topic from what we started about.

I don't know how that works.

Well, I think it fits in because we were talking about understanding the small pieces of writing and building your own toolkit and understanding what you're reading and understanding why the author made the choices that they did and how it is and isn't working and contributing to the overall message.

And then to me, that branches out to looking at the whole structure of the piece, the whole, the way that short story is constructed.

So you're looking at technique and structure and if you, like you said, if you outsource that to AI, then you can't go back.

And if you don't know how to evaluate all the little pieces and you don't know really what it's working and if it's working.

Yeah, I've, I've, you know, I've told them they are, they don't know at their current age, most of them, if you don't know what a good paper looks like, then you don't know if Chat GPT has written you a good paper.

Right.

It may have all the trappings of good paper.

The words are all in the right places.

It might be formatted correctly.

But if, if you haven't spent the time to know what it takes to write a good paper, you don't have the skills to evaluate if the tool you're using is helping you or hurting you.

Right.

It gets very simple and very complicated at the same time.

Yes.

And it's probably not going away soon, so I can see why it's on your mind.

It has been on my mind lately, yes.

All right.

So you mentioned your poems and your fiction, and I'm wondering if people want to read some of your other work that's out there.

Where can they find you?

Yeah, summer.

Summer 25.

I have some in Lone Mountain Literary Society, Hare's Paw, and some of my fiction is in Apt and Recovery Quarterly as well.

Those are findable online for the most part, and hopefully more coming soon.

Always the goal.

All right, well, we'll include those in the show notes so people can check them out if they like.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, thanks a lot for coming on today.

It was nice talking to you.

I really enjoyed it.

Thanks for stopping by the audio.

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