Matt Jorgenson – the author of Extraordinary Ostriches, Possible Particles and the Bifurcated Homunculus, The Hermaphroditic Shaman and the Missing Bottle of Ketchup, and Coagulation – A Clot of Stories. The titles alone should intrigue any reader but what really fascinated this blogger was that Matt has hung canvas on his wall, at home, so visitors can express their artistic bent while there.
Q. Matt, where do you write?
MJ. I do the bulk of my writing at home with my laptop. There’s a chair in the den/dining room I use when settling in for a long session. There’s a pub table in the kitchen I switch to when I’m on a roll and family obligations need to be juggled. It’s good to switch back and forth between the two as it’s easy to stand up and work at the pub table. I do little isometric exercises to stave off the aches and pains of prolonged sitting and get my blood pumping. When traveling or trying to break through a tough plot point I will break out a legal pad and a pen and write long hand. Cars, hotels, the basements of extended family members, and bars are some of my favorite places for this approach.
Q. Do you have any special rituals when you sit down to write?
MJ. Big glass of ice water. Hot coffee. Wordless music, typically EDM or House. Since I tend to write fast-paced, intense stories I find that a high level of beats-per-minute in the ambient music of my writing area keeps the energy flowing. Lyrics interfere with the emerging flow of words. Aside from that I have this thing I do just before I actually write. I don’t really have a name for what it is. Essentially it’s “getting out of the way.” It’s not a trance or suspension of thought as such because I’m definitely involved in teasing out word choices and revising sentence structures along the way. Perhaps it’s entering into a partnership with my muse? Whatever it is, I can definitely feel it “click” into place as I’m about to write. Some sort of psychic gearshift I suppose. If you’ve ever run a custom computer 
where you can load and toggle between several different operating systems, it’s kind of like that. My day to day consciousness is still there, but when I boot up the writer OS I have to toggle back and forth between that and the day to day stuff.
Q. Could you tell us something about yourself that we might not already know?
MJ. I have an MBA in technology management. I worked in a tech support role for a group of technical writers who used an SGML based publishing system that offered output to a variety of formats in multiple languages. The company actually paid for me to get my MBA. I got the job initially with “just” my Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. I remember being at either an information mapping class or an SGML class and there was this guy in the class who worked in IT for the Military and he was livid that Lucent Technologies had hired someone like me, with only a BFA, into the job I had at the time. I got a kick out of it.
Part two of this interview will air this Saturday, Nov. 21st.
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