From the PP69 book reviews section:
Seattle-based certified genius Matt Briggs’ recent collection of short stories, The Moss Gatherers (StringTown Press), relates tales of families in the Pacific Northwest gone somehow wrong. It’s charming, beguiling, and slightly disturbing—not totally unlike the writer himself.
You won a Stranger “genius” award in 2003. What did it do for your writing career to be able to put “genius” right there on your CV?
The first difficulty of this award, which I was pleased to receive despite the fact that it would be far more cool to shrug it off and point out the negative things about the paper that sponsored it, The Stranger (it’s sustained sexism being one thing), was how to handle that word. The word “genius” is caustic. It implies, to me, that my work might be a symptom of a distressing illness rather than the product of labor. But the award came with enough money that I had to resolve these issues because I wanted the money.
You’re also a writer-in-residence at the Richard Hugo House, Seattle’s one-and-only center for reading and writing. As far as writers go, are you a “made” dude?
I sometimes think about this, that writers get “made” like the Mafia. I would like to believe that there is some order behind the actual production of literary work. I would like to believe there is a society who confers at a spaghetti house, reads manuscripts, and then has an aspiring writer go out and whack someone. I mean, yeah, I’m “made” insofar as I’ve done these things. I’ve whacked a few poets. But I’ve found whacking poets doesn’t lead anywhere. My proposals still get rejected by the arts commissions. My manuscripts still come back from literary magazines with rejection slips. Editors still say, “nice but no thanks,” to my books.
How important is place to The Moss Gatherers—both your location and the location in which the stories are set?
Place is important to me, but not in the way that would be important to someone like Thomas Hardy or Wallace Stegner. I am more sympathetic to Richard Hugo, who grew up in Pigeon Hill at the edge of White Center, a working class neighborhood south of Seattle that edges one of the most polluted rivers in Washington State, the Duwamish. This river starts as the Green River. The Green River Killer’s first bodies were found not far upriver from Hugo’s childhood fishing spots. I guess to me that this place is real insofar as air and trees and stuff like that are real, but that place becomes interesting to me when I begin to think about how people take possession of it and make it into something else. What is perhaps interesting about Seattle is that it is a malleable place. Right now there is a billionaire, Paul Allen, who is busy taking possession of the city. Before him the city was the neglected holding of another rich man, Sam Israel. A city like Baltimore or London cannot really be shaped by a single person, but Seattle continues to transform at the whim of just about anyone who thinks about it. Paul Allen thinks of the city. It changes. When he loses interest, someone else will have some thoughts. In terms of a fiction writer, this is very handy because the city can be whatever is required of it.
Family and alienation also play strong roles in the stories in The Moss Gatherers.
My family spent most of the 1970s in a halfhearted back-to-the-land experiment. Of course the only useful thing we were able to grow was marijuana, and that happened in an old root cellar underground with the aid of florescent lights. My brother and I were raised as atheists. My parents would answer as carefully as they could any question we asked them. This environment became a kind of hermetically sealed paradise and really was pretty perfect through the ’70s, aside from my father’s biker friends, the PCP-fueled rages of my uncle, and the fact that we couldn’t help but regard anyone outside of my immediate family as other-worldly and potentially dangerous (since the foundation of this paradise was a controlled substance). ¶For a long time I thought that there weren’t very many people who had grown up like this, but I’ve since found that a lot of people did live and are still living like this. Maybe we all live on these self-defined little islands, anyway? Everyone is freakish in some way. —Anne Elizabeth Moore
