Permanent Exhibit
This collection began as a series of well “Liked” status updates that the author posted on Facebook over a six-month period in 2016. He expanded these updates into a series of essays that capture the disjointed yet dopamine-inducing feeling of scrolling through a friend’s timeline.
These essays are highly experimental yet familiar, compelling, and engaging. Vollmer infuses his work with personal details: Red Bull, G.I. Joes, Depeche Mode—all of these grab readers like a memoir or short story, and the stream-of-conscious narration will keep them guessing where Vollmer’s mind will go next.
The essays read as a case study of conscious thought: drifting from one idea to the next, latching onto strong images and repeated ideas, and more often than not land on profound aha moments that draw the disjointed thoughts together into an extended meditation.
HOT TOPIC: living in “Trump country,” life in rural Appalachia, growing up in an Evangelical family, Gen-X nostalgia, fatherhood.
Matthew received a literary grant in 2010 from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Sturm Award for Creative Arts at Virginia Tech. His work appears in Best American Essays, Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House, and elsewhere.
Matthew is known for his experimental writing and has edited several collections of prose that break conventions and explore forms of writing beyond established literary traditions (e.g. prayers, epistolary stories, epitaphs, etc.).
Matthew Vollmer was born in Asheville, North Carolina and grew up in the mountains of western North Carolina. A graduate of the University of North Carolina, he attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. He is the author of two collections of short fiction—Gateway to Paradise (Persea, 2015) and Future Missionaries of America (MacAdam/Cage, 2009; Salt Publishing, 2010)—as well as a collection of essays: inscriptions for headstones (Outpost19, 2012). His work has appeared in Paris Review, Glimmer Train, Tin House, Virginia Quarterly Review, Epoch, Ecotone, New England Review, The Sun, Best American Essays, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology. With David Shields, he co-edited FAKES: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, “Found” Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts (W. W. Norton, 2012), and he served as editor for The Book of Uncommon Prayer, an anthology of everyday invocations featuring the work of over 60 writers. A winner of a 2010 NEA grant for literature, he teaches in the English Department at Virginia Tech, where he is an Associate Professor, and lives in Blacksburg with his wife and son.
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