Matt Cahill's blog
Coming up in November! I’m sooo excited (and nervous!) to be interviewed by CBC Radio One’s Gill Deacon for her program Here and Now Toronto. It’s going to be LIVE on November 1st @ 4:45pm (and it will be archived for future listening). I hope you can tune in!
I had the pleasure of speaking with Richard Crouse for a nationally broadcast interview about Radioland. It was aired live last Saturday on NEWSTALK 1010, however now there is a permanent link, for anyone who would like to hear it. I really enjoyed the depth of our discussion and appreciated his attention to the mental health angle of the book.
As my second novel, RADIOLAND, nears bookshelves (the pub date has slid by about a week — it was supposed to be the 11th, but more likely the 17th, in case you’re waiting for yours) it’s been nice to see word get out. NO I’M NOT NERVOUS AT ALL WHY DO YOU ASK?
It was picked as one of CBC Books’ top 40 they’re looking forward to for October.
I just finished an interview with Richard Crouse which will be broadcast across the country — you can hear it this Saturday (it will be archived as a podcast which I will link to later).
The book got a nice shout-out from PinkPlayMags.
Regular visitors have probably been frustrated with the lack of updates here. So have I. The truth is that I’ve been swamped with doing the finishing touches on Radioland…and taking care of an ailing parent. I cannot express how exhausting the last while has been, on so many personal levels.
The good news is that, as of Friday, I signed-off on the last of the changes to the manuscript. It is, for all intents and purposes, out of my hands…which is both satisfying and frightening.
I finally have had time to update my website as well as post an update here (and add Radioland to the sidebar links). My next task is to gird myself for publicity, which I’m both excited for…and intimidated af. If there’s one thing I need to work on it’s getting out of my Writer Head and speaking about the book so that someone who isn’t in my head can understand what it’s actually about, which would be easier if I hadn’t written a fairly complex novel. There are worse problems.
Also…
I should mention that Radioland was picked as one of CBC Books fall fiction titles!
Anyhoo, I hope to be here more regularly.
Hello all,
It’s been a time-and-a-half to get to this point, so it’s with a mixture of relief and exhaustion that I’m able to share the cover for my next novel, Radioland.
Nice, eh? The cover is by designer extraordinaire Ingrid Paulson.
This book has taken a lot work, and I can’t wait for you all to read it. Here’s another thing: it’s now available for pre-order, which means that you can order it now, and when it’s released (currently looking like October) it will get shipped to you ASAP then. Presales are also cool b/c they can build interest from stores, retailers, etc, so there’s that too. I trust you to do the right thing.
You can read more about Radioland on the publisher’s site (where you can also pre-order it): Wolsak & Wynn
You can also bug your local independent bookstore or local library to order it for you.
You can also pre-order it from these folks, too:
I’ve been putting some of the final touches on Radioland, and while I’m still convinced it’s going to be one of those books that is ultimately ripped out of my hands by my publisher, I’m happy with how this second round of revisions is coming along. Part of me just wants to walk away from it. It’s been five years, and that is a long time to work on something that is as dark and introspective as Radioland is. I’m confident that I’ve pulled it off, but there’s another part of me that wants to make sure that every. single. section. works. Ugh.
Book Three is looking to be sent out to publishers in early 2022, and at that point I will publicly reveal the title, and spill a little bit about what it’s about. Keeping the title and details secret is just a bit of prudence on my part; I think it’s natural for any writer to want to protect their works-in-progress from the possibility of someone else riffing on their material before it’s released, and I realize that this is probably a little bit of paranoia on my part.
And there’s a Book Four, folks. Yes. I’ve barely sketched it out, but I can tell you that it has good bones. I look forward to falling into its hole come December.
I have handed off Book Three to my faithful, patient agent, Kelvin. I (rightly) anticipated that the next round of Radioland editorial notes would be coming at the end of September so I spent last month making revisions to Book Three, and I am very pleased with it. For something written under less-than-ideal circumstances (ie 2020) it is surprisingly solid, with only minor improvements required. You know you’re in the clear when you’re just moving words around for the sake of clarity, and not — as is the case with some works — moving around ideas.
And sure enough, Radioland notes will be coming my way a week from now and my dance card will once again be full for the next few months. I’m happy I had a summer virtually free of writing projects. It was necessary.
As for Book Three, I’m hoping it will do the rounds of publishing houses in the new year (if not sooner). I am, as much as I hate the word’s overuse by the Wellness crowd, grateful to be where I am as a writer. I was recently bemoaning my concerns about the reception of Radioland with my partner the other day — I’ll get into that another time — and I realized after sharing this with her that there are worse problems in life to have. Writers are an ornery bunch. We get stuck in our heads and it can be hard to step back and understand the privileges we have. Although writing requires an inevitable amount of sacrifice and dedication, there are many who simply, because of life situations, do not even have the opportunity to be able to sacrifice or dedicate themselves to such an uncertain endeavour.
I handed off the first substantive pass of Radioland a few weeks back to my editor and, lo and behold, two weekends ago found myself without a novel to work on, which was the first time (I’m not counting vacations, etc, obviously) I’ve not had a novel to work on in years. It was and is such a weird feeling.
I’ve been working on Radioland since about 2016, and last year, when it was being circulated to publishers, I was working on Book Three, which is currently simmering in a figurative pot as I wait to see if I can get any C/O/T Arts Council grants to be able to afford an editor for a substantive reading of it. I’ve never gotten a grant in my life, which is not to say that my previous applications have been sterling or anything — it’s just that I’m not hopeful. Windfalls are for other people, or so I tell myself. And yet it’s silly if I don’t try.
I’m not going to get notes from the editor on Radioland until August, and I’m trying not to reflexively fill in the intervening time with — surprise! — another writing project (though I wouldn’t put it past me). I’d like to give myself time to reflect.
I don’t like the literary world. I don’t feel I fit in, which is saying something considering writers are interloping creatures to begin with. There’s a lot of smarm, a lot of performative politics, a lot of preciousness, a lot of passive aggressive bullshit, and a lot of public ass-kissing. I don’t want to get caught up in any of it. I don’t want its insecure “loving” hypocrites, or its logrolling. All of this obscures the highlights: the truly deserving people (writers, publishers, editors, publicists, agents, reviewers, and readers) whose passion and support for others are unwavering.
I just want to write and find (let alone build) an audience. And I worry the day will come when I have to choose between belonging to the literary community (and potentially worsening my eyesight because of constant eye-rolling) or just walking away. Or I can just get off Twitter — ha.
I also want to think hard about the future projects I need to get off my chest, versus the ones that are “nice to have”. I’m over 50, and while my ability to churn out work is better than ever, I can see how it’s possible to have resentment build for projects I commit to that end up eating my weekends and spare moments. I suppose to some extent I don’t know what I want the next 50 years to look like. I know what I don’t want it to look like, let’s put it that way. Among other things, I don’t want to feel (or be made to feel) like I’m competing with people in their 20s, like in some fucked up Logan’s Run reboot, nor do I wish to see the landscape scooped by a literary version of Spotify, where we are asked to write faster for our rewards.
It’s been a long year.
I’m in heavy novel revision mode at the moment. In fact, as I write this I’m at Artscape Gibraltar Point. It’s day 2 for me. Only a handful of artists here, given the lockdown conditions, which, as a writer, I don’t mind at all. I’m here to work. And eat like a 12yr old.
I’m very happy to have happened onto Tindersticks awhile back. This is from their newest:
So, as you might have read, my 2nd novel, RADIOLAND has been picked up by a publisher, and I’m very happy and excited about this. A lot of work went into it over a number of years and…
…and it’s a week later, and I’m reading over the manuscript (actually, “reading over” is not quite accurate, I’m squinting at it) and I’m experiencing a darkly familiar feeling as I had with the last book. With THE SOCIETY OF EXPERIENCE I was initially ecstatic to realize that it was going to be published. And then something inside tapped me on the shoulder, and I turned around to hear it say: “You realize you wrote this years ago and that it doesn’t reflect you or your interests as a writer currently?”
And as I’m squinting over the current draft of RADIOLAND and going over the editor’s notes (five pages), I am finding part of myself wishing in the same familiar way that, if time, patience and energy were no object, whether I could just rewrite it from scratch.
Now, of course I’m not going to do that. I need to honour the work that I started. However: why the hell am I thinking this in the first place?
It’s complicated, but I’m going to try and break it down anyways. First, part of it is the sheer amount of work I set up for myself, having written a fairly ambitious piece of fiction that is trying to blend a number of genres and comment on a number of things, all while attempting to maintain a sense of rhythm while keeping the reader interested in the characters and where they are going. With any level of ambition comes the requirement to follow-through with what it is you’ve promised the reader or else you may not deliver the goods and the reader might feel ripped off. We can call this the weight of expectation. Second, and perhaps something only writers or other artists might identify with is that, while it’s healthy to have time away from your work for sake of perspective, there’s a part of me screaming out but I’m not the same person/writer now as I was when I wrote this, and so, as I squint at the manuscript with an eye to revision, I’m needing to find a way to re-approach the work so that I’m respecting what it was I was not only going for as a novel, but what I was going through and ruminating on at the time that I wrote it. I honestly don’t know if other novelists experience this, but I certainly do. Third is easy to explain but hard to do. It’s called: letting go.
In any case, I look at these as growing pains, and I’m privileged to be in a situation where these are my problems.
