Writer, Workshop Leader, Writing Coach and Community DJ
Sebastian Matthews,
Based in Asheville, NC
Travelogue: A Photographic Journey
Born out of the pandemic, Travelogue: A Photographic Journey—a collaboration between writer and photographer, father and son—features nearly 80 of Charter Weeks’ amazing photographs alongside my “takes” on them. Along the way, I interviewed Charter on his work, his approach to photography, and on his life as a traveler, street photographer, and filmmaker.
Coaching for Writers
Working on a memoir or a collection of personal essays? Trying to structure a book of poems? I've worked with writers like you for over twenty years--one-on-one and as a workshop leader--helping them create, draft, and revise their creative works. Let's sit down over Zoom and see if I can assist you with your project--whether it be just a bunch of notes, a rough first draft, or a complete manuscript ready for revision.
Jazz Hybrid
Each week I host a radio show called, Jazz Hybrid on 103.7 WPVM. It’s a community-based show celebrating good music and engaging conversation by highlighting some of the many amazing writers, teachers, artists, activists, and musicians living in the area and the projects they are working on. I play modern and contemporary jazz music—working to widen and deepen the notion of “jazz” —while engaging with local and national figures.
Beyond Repair
Living in a Fractured State
A Memoir in Essays
Beyond Repair: Living in a Fractured State was awarded bronze medal for the Foreword INDIES Book Award of the Year (in the Essay category).
“In Beyond Repair, poet and memoirist Sebastian Matthews brings an epic consciousness to bear on the grudges and griefs, the tribalism and follies, that warp our politics from the historical to the mundane. Maybe it was the near-death experience from a car accident combined with his abundance of integrity that makes Matthews keenly attuned to inequalities and his place within the machinery of American culture. Maybe he’s just a guy who’s had enough of the nonsense. In this collection of lyric micro-essays, Matthews shares his perspective of those interactions—the microaggressions that Claudia Rankine exposed in her groundbreaking book Citizen, and this necessary and healing work reveals that to “check your privilege” is, after all, to practice a simple set of values we teach our children all the time: be kind and respectful of one another, be thankful for your good fortune, stand up for fairness. Why should it be so controversial to ask adults to do the same?”
—Gregory Pardlo, author of Air Traffic
Beautifully written and timely, Beyond Repair weaves together personal and national traumas in a way that resonates particularly with me as a writer in North Carolina wrestling with race in the Trump era.
—David Graham, The Atlantic