“A masterfully ecstatic, surprising, and humane debut.”
— John D’Agata, author, About a Mountain
“Bjarki, Not Bjarki is the kind of book we need right now.”
— Lewis Hyde, author, The Gift
“…nonfiction that vies for artistic merit with fiction…”
-Robert Moor, author, On Trails
“In Bjarki, Not Bjarki, Matthew Clark is trying to write about everything all at once: love and heartbreak and loss; wood and work and loneliness; friendship and privilege, masculinity and honesty and the sad limitations of both. This is a story that is overflowing with thought and reflection, abundant in self-examination, excessively self-critical, overburdened by its ownership of the past. The result: a lyrical eruption of bittersweet joy, created by a writer who is totally fine in a rapturous state of being lost. Bjarki, Not Bjarki is a lot like the state (Maine) where Clark’s story takes place: full of contradictions and wilderness, always committed to the impossible question of what it means to be a free and honest person in the world. Matthew Clark is a writer who swings for all the fences.”— Jaed Coffin, author, Roughhouse Friday
“Matthew Clark refuses to concede defeat at the hands of our country’s yawning cultural and political divisions. In Bjarki, Not Bjarki, he shows that empathy must be built on actual understanding, and his writing has the self-awareness, the freshness, and the beauty to help us all understand.”—Jeremy Eichler, author, Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance
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Matthew received his BA in religious studies from Middlebury College in 2004 and his MFA in Nonfiction Writing from The University of Iowa in 2009. He is a MacDowell Fellow and has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts and The Maine Arts Commission. His writing has appeared in The Morning News, Ecotone, The Antioch Review, The Indiana Review, The Iowa Review, Fourth Genre, The Seneca Review, and True Story, among other places.
Read a review of Bjarki, Not Bjarki on Lit Hub.
Check out this interview with Writer’s Digest.
Listen to Matthew on a podcast.