MATTHEW ROBINSON’S FULL CIRCLE MOMENTS

First-time novelist, MHCC instructor and National Guard veteran Matthew Robinson is a finalist in the fiction category for the 2018 Oregon Book Awards for his novel, “The Horse Latitudes.”

Competing in Robinson’s category are some quite familiar names in the Mt. Hood community: Omar El Akkad, a recent “Mouths of Others” featured speaker on campus, for “American War” – and Lidia Yuknavitch, former Mt. Hood writing instructor, for her recent work, “The Book of Joan.”

Robinson served six years in the Oregon Army National Guard, including deployment to Baghdad, Iraq in 2004-05. He came back, took some time and then in 2010 he started college for what would be his third time doing so.

Robinson began at Mt. Hood, and it was here that he started the beginning stages of what would become “Horse Latitudes,” which centers on American soldiers in Iraq.

“I took Lidia Yuknavitch’s fiction writing class here in 2012,” he said. That commenced his roughly four-year writing process, before the book was published in autumn 2016. He went from learning from Yuknavitch to being a finalist in the same awards category as her. “I took a workshop with her and we were in it when it was announced and we both came in the next week and just looked at each other like, ‘I don’t know if we’re supposed to say anything yet, but we both know,’ and it was a really nice moment,” he explained.

Gravitates toward fiction

“Horse Latitudes” is based on a unit similar to his own while in Baghdad, he said. “The events and the characters are fictional, but I knew the setting pretty well, so I used that same setting from 2004 in Baghdad to inform the novel.”

Robinson decided to lean towards fiction because he likes being able to experiment in ways that can’t be done in nonfiction without altering the truth.

“The consequences would change if the events changed and I found value in that,” he said.

After Robinson studied at Mt. Hood, he continued on to Portland State to earn a master’s degree in creative writing. The following summer he had time to fill, so he started an online literary magazine, “The Gravity of the Thing.”

The focus of the site is to allow space for experimental work to be published. A technique called “defamiliarization” – in which writers present common objects or situations in unfamiliar fashion to offer a fresh perspective – is one of his favorite things to practice and teach, but many publishers he encountered weren’t so fond of it.

“If it’s in any way experimental, we (at Gravity) want to see it,” he said. “We have rolling submissions, so out of three months (prior to publication) we’re open two months for people to send it, and it’s free to submit,” he explained.

Helping Mt. Hood students

Following that summer, Robinson entered into Portland State’s creative writing master’s program. He had no previous interest in becoming a teacher, largely due to social anxiety, but in his last year of his master’s program, he was offered a job to teach an introduction to fiction writing class at PSU.

“I taught that class and loved it, and then after that I applied for Mt. Hood’s adjunct (instructor) pool, and luckily they gave me a class,” he said.

Currently, he’s teaching Writing 115, and he’s seen great student success stories come from an assignment he gives.

“I assign a certain number of essays per term and for one of them we work on a cover letter,” he said. His students pick a job or scholarship they may have genuine interest in applying for, in order to make the practice as realistic as possible.

“I’ve had students come back in following terms and say they got the job or they got the scholarship when I never made submitting it part of the requirement, so those kinds of things are nice when I see a tangible result of a student applying something we’ve talked about,” he said.

On the other hand, Robinson’s also gotten to read some unique fiction work by students, which can touch on subjects he may not have adequate knowledge of.

One recent term, “for some reason, Bigfoot came up more often than usual in stories,” he said. He looked up Sasquatch stories and lore to try to give students solid feedback, “Like, I don’t know, what do you call Mrs. Bigfoot? Is there a different term?”

Next novel in works

When Robinson isn’t teaching, he’s keeping up with his four children, ages 10, 13, 14, and 15.

“The kids and I are trying to keep up with all of the superhero movies, and that’s hard because getting all four of them on one time-line to watch them has been difficult,” he said.

He also tries to keep up with new releases from his author friends while working on new writing of his own. “I’m in the process of writing a short story collection with another writer who was also on my deployment,” he said.

The stories dive into the backgrounds of some of the characters, confronting toxic masculinity and issues of violence at a young age. “That will be compiled and hopefully published in August by a small press in Portland,” said Robinson.

On top of that, he’s already planning his next novel, likely a follow-up to “Horse Latitudes” that takes place 10 years after the characters’ re-integration process back home in America.

It’s safe to say that Robinson is keeping busy.

The Oregon Book Awards take place on Monday, April 30, starting 7:30 p.m. at the Gerding Theater at the Armory in Portland. Tickets are available at BrownPaperTickets.com.