Welcome back to Mind Over Medium, a series where I interview creatives about their work, their mental health, and the interplay of the two. For this edition, I interviewed Matthew Sharpe, a writer who was my very favorite creative writing professor as an undergrad.

His bio goes like so: Matthew Sharpe is the author of four novels, including The Sleeping Father and Nothing Is Terrible, and two collections of stories. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, Zoetrope, and other publications. He is the recipient of fellowships in fiction from the National Endowment of the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Sharpe has taught in the MFA programs at Columbia University and Bard College, and undergrad at Wesleyan University, New College of Florida, and elsewhere. For the last decade he has been an editorial consultant and writing coach.

Time for the interview!

Who are you?

Either this is a deep question or I’m overthinking it. Born on the North American landmass during the Cuban Missile Crisis, I am a son, brother, father, stepfather, spouse, writer and helper of writers, Jew, ambulatory condensation of matter and energy with a bulbous head full of illusions.

Where do you live?

In a little yellow house on a hill above the Hudson River about 100 miles north of New York City.

Do you have any mental health diagnoses (self- or otherwise diagnosed)? Say as much or as little as you want about this.

A psychoanalyst I went to for way too long in my 20s diagnosed me with Dysthymia. Dysthymia: what a clusterfuck of consonants. A nation-state with no native crops where half the sun comes above the horizon for two hours a day year-round and everyone yells at their cat. I was gnarled up, in the Dysthymia days, the energy was clotted, I was scared. I’m still scared. The energy still gets clotted but I am learning, at my advanced age, to help it move.

How has mental health, yours or those around you, affected your life?

When I hear mental health I assume mental unhealth, what does that say about me? The singer Krishna Das said that for years he spent a lot of time going “Am I ok now? How about now?” and I realized I do this too, always seeking equilibrium, walking along with my head down hoping to stumble across it on the ground like it’s a diamond some god dropped. A state of perpetual precarity. That has been, without my realizing it, my working plan for achieving mental health. I am in the process of letting go of that.

To put it another way: I come from a long line of people who were traumatized and whose attempts to regulate their nervous systems were heroic, poignant, failed and not. Beautiful people batted around by Life, by History, by Racism, Misogyny, individual cruelty, and so on. It may be overly ambitious but I’d like to heal them.

How does your mental health affect your work?

My mental unhealth drove me to my work. You have to be crazy to want to sit in a chair for hours putting the same 26 little black squiggles in different combinations over and over hoping they will turn into love and buildings and trees and car crashes and sex. I write out of anger and terror and ignorance. But none of those without love, celebrating life, even when it’s awful.

How does your work affect your mental health?

When I led a writing workshop for combat vets a dozen years ago, there was this one Marine who’d fought in Iraq who was working on a novel. For weeks he worked up the courage to read aloud a combat scene to the group. Finally he did it. It was very intense. The other guys were super activated. The second he was done, they jumped in and told stories about their own deployments—exactly not the thing I was taught you’re supposed to do in a writing workshop. So I turned to the Marine and asked him if he was getting what he needed out of the discussion. He said, “Oh my god, yeah. I’m so relieved this felt real to you guys. I was sure you were gonna say ‘That’s not at all what it was like over there, and furthermore you’re a punk.’” And he cried. And some of the other guys did too. That clarified for me that writing could be healing.

Of course, writing can also be triggering. Often riding shotgun with me when I write are anxiety and self-opprobrium…

How do you work through it?

…which I work through lately by grounding myself in my body, in my five senses. I’ll start by feeling where in my body I’m feeling the emotional discomfort and put my palms gently there. Then I’ll shift to feeling places in my body where I feel okay: maybe my feet on the floor, my ass in the chair, my shoulders, my hands, my face. I’ll listen to sounds in the room I’m in, and the world beyond the room, and sounds of my own body, digesting food, breathing in and out, pumping blood. I’ll inhale and smell what I smell. I’ll feel the inside of my mouth and what it tastes like. I’ll look around the room and notice colors and forms, and back to the uncomfortable feeling for a bit, and back to feet on floor, air going in and out of my nostrils, etc. I try to remember to stand up every 40 minutes or so and dance or do stretches or pushups or take a walk to help my mitochondria convert food to energy. And then some days I’m overwhelmed by feeling shitty and I let the writing go.

Do you have any other artistic aspirations?

You mean like aside from writing? I come from a musical family and I played instruments as a kid and gave them up for reasons that don’t feel very good to remember. I fantasize about becoming competent enough to generate some beauty on an instrument, sometimes guitar, sometimes flute or saxophone, sometimes piano. I do sing.

Do you have a therapist? Tell us about them. What modalities do they use? What do you find most helpful about the work you do together?

I’ve been to a lot of therapists over the decades. There’s only so far I ever got with them. I think the particular way I have difficulty trusting people, and way my ego defenses are organized, made the therapeutic dyad, how the therapist is both present and withholding, not ideal for me. But then when I started meditating a dozen years ago a lot of those therapeutic lessons started landing.

Now I have a Zen teacher who used to be a psychiatrist. We meet for 30 minutes a week and most mornings I meditate with him and 20 or so other of his students on zoom. I go to weekend-long meditation retreats maybe half a dozen times a year. The daily meditation with ongoing guidance is super helpful. The 30-minute meetings aren’t quite therapy, but a lot of similar stuff comes up, daily problems, places where I feel stuck, things that trigger a trauma response in me. “To study the self is to forget the self,” a 13th-century Zen monk named Dogen said. Which I interpret as, studying how my conditioning causes me to project all kinds of crap onto myself and others and activates my sympathetic nervous system helps me get out of the way of myself, i.e., get out of the way of the compassion that is already and always available in me. All this is slow and incremental and a lot of days I feel like a balloon tied to the neck of an angry ox.

I’m also taking a six-month online workshop with Luis Mojica, this remarkable healer who is teaching us somatic practices. The somatic regulation stuff I talked about above I am learning both from Luis and from my Zen teacher.

What inspires you?

That enormous river next to the little yellow house I live in. I look at it and feel it every day. I don’t know if inspires is the right word. It supports me, the power and slowness and oldness of it. The other day I felt numb, I was struggling to feel anything, and I imagined myself a giant block of ice drifting up that river, that was helpful. I regularly ask the river for help, and if I’m able to tune in I feel the help. Also my kids and my wife inspire and help me. They are fucking lunatics. Gorgeous and irritating and amazing.

What are you reading/watching/listening to right now?

Two pages of David Foster Wallace short fiction per day on the shitter, like a little hit of acid. Before that, Grace Paley. Before that, James Baldwin. Always poetry. In the last couple weeks, Larry Levis, Elizabeth Bishop, Jean Valentine, Alan Dugan, Szymborska, Bob Frost. And Buddhist stuff, like Dogen; and The Mind Illuminated by Culadasa, the most detailed and helpful meditation manual I’ve read. Listening to a lot of Brazilian music lately, Caetano Veloso, Rosa Passos, Gilberto Gil. My mother and sister and bro-in-law and niece and nephew were/are musicians, their music helps me.

Has a song or a piece of art ever saved your life? If so, what is it?

Saved, I don’t think so? But it’s hard to imagine wanting to live without music and art. Like right now there’s this dance by the Ailey company that I’m glad exists, called “In a Sentimental Mood,” choreographed by Jamar Roberts, with Duke Ellington songs turned into these electronic sensory immersions by Rafik Bhatia. You can find scenes from it online. I think fundamentally music and art have helped me live, and maybe especially jazz music, because the musicians compose it while they play it, usually in groups, like a murmuration of starlings, this feels like important life instructions.

Share some words of wisdom with us.

Don’t go into a donut shop looking to buy a power saw.

Below, Matt shares a bit of microfiction with us. Read this, then read his books.

Congratulations, It’s a Boy!

 Alvin was talking on the phone with his son, Russ. “So how’ve you been?” Alvin asked.

“Not so good.”

“Why?”

“Mom was always working and her boyfriends didn’t treat me that good, one in particular.”

Alvin was 34 and Russ was 17. They had never spoken before. Alvin hadn’t known Russ existed till a minute ago. It was nighttime and Alvin was standing in the bedroom of his small suburban house. He lived off the modest proceeds of a motorcycle accident, had jobs sometimes but they didn’t last. He hoped Russ wasn’t going to ask him for money. “What do you mean, didn’t treat you that good?”

“Beat me.”

“With what?”

“Different things, belts, fists, books.”

“Books?”

“He liked to read.”

“Do you?’

“I’m more of an action guy.”

“Me too. How often did he beat you?”

“Once or twice a week.”

“I got beaten too, same amount of times, different objects except the fists.”

“By who?”

“My dad.”

“Would you have beaten me if you were around?”

“I don’t know, I’ve been in lots of fights. Why are you calling me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you need money?”

“You offering?”

“Is that why you called?”

“Gonna hang up now.”

“Wait!”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. He still hit you?”

“Not since I hit him back.”

“Where are you?”

“Outside your house.”

Alvin walked down the hall to his front door and opened it. The face of his son made his knees shake. There was beer and soup and bread in the fridge. He figured there’d be a fight at some point, he hoped not more than one. They seemed about evenly matched.