Matthew Clark Davison w/ Stacy D. Flood, THE LAB

Novelist and educator Matthew Clark Davison visits the store to discuss his new book, co-written with Alice LaPlante, The Lab: Experiments in Writing Across Genre, with ten chapters and ninety exercises challenging writers to play with fiction, memoir, and poetry—or push toward hybrid or entirely new forms.

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Great writing doesn’t begin with form—it begins with obsession. Two novelists offer an inspiring guide to transforming that obsession, using whatever genre fits best.

Writers don’t need formulas; they need encouragement to take risks. The Lab offers a bold, hands-on approach, urging writers to embrace uncertainty, experiment with form, and investigate what haunts them.

The Lab features ten chapters and ninety exercises challenging writers to play with fiction, memoir, and poetry—or push toward hybrid or entirely new forms.

This is a book for those ready to dig deep and write fearlessly.

Matthew Clark Davison is co-author (with bestselling writer Alice LaPlante), of The Lab: Experiments in Writing Across Genre (W.W. Norton ’25) and author of the novel Doubting Thomas (Amble Press ’21), which was hailed as one of “46 Must-Read Books by Queer Authors” in Esquire Magazine. He is the creator and teacher of The Lab: Writing Classes with MCD, an online and SF-based non-academic school started in 2007. Matthew is a member of The Writers Grotto and has served on the board of Foglifter Journal and Press. Matthew is Emeritus Faculty in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, where he also earned a BA and MFA.

The author of The Salt Fields (Lanternfish Press), Stacy D. Flood’s work has also appeared at ACT, Ghost Light Theatricals, Theatre Battery, and Theater Schmeater in Seattle, as well as in SOMA Magazine, Seattle Weekly, three Seattle Fringe productions, the Akropolis Performance Lab’s New Year/New Play salon, Playlist Seattle, the Adaptive Arts Theatre Company’s Night of New Works, Macha Theatre Works’ Distillery series, Mirror Stage’s ‘Expand Upon’ readings, The Hansberry Project’s REPRESENT festival, Infinity Box’s Centrifuge, FUSION Theatre Company’s ‘The Seven’ Short Works Festival, and in Starbucks' The Way I See It campaign. He has served as an instructor at Seattle’s Hugo House and Portland’s Literary Arts as well as a lecturer at San Francisco State University — from which he holds an MA in English, an MFA in Creative Writing, and a Clark/Gross Novel Writing Award — and he has additionally been awarded both a Getty Fellowship to the Community of Writers and a Gregory Capasso Award in Fiction from the University at Buffalo. Furthermore, he has been a finalist in the Forward Flux ‘Three New American Plays’ competition as well as the Ashland New Play and Playwrights Foundation Bay Area festivals, and in addition, an artist-in-residence at the Haut de Fee Centre in France, La Serrania in Mallorca, DISQUIET in Lisbon, Djerassi in California, Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus in Bavaria, and Millay Arts in New York. Lastly, his play entitled The Optimist, or What Space Travel Means to Me will be featured as part of ACTLocal in 2025.

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