About



The Mumpsimus is a personal blog created by me, Matthew Cheney, in 2003. For an overview of the blog's ever-changing identity over years, see the ten posts I wrote for the tenth anniversary in 2013. To scroll through more recent writings, take a look at the archive links and the Popular Posts list at the bottom of the page.

 You can follow the blog on Feedly, subscribe to the RSS feed, or subscribe by email via Feedburner.

 Who am I?

In the 3rd person: 
Matthew Cheney’s debut collection, Blood: Stories, won the Hudson Prize and was published by Black Lawrence Press in 2016.
His work has been published by Conjunctions, English Journal, One Story, Weird Tales, Strange Horizons, Best Gay Stories 2016, Literary Hub, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. He is the former series editor for the Best American Fantasy anthologies, and the co-editor, with Eric Schaller, of the occasional online magazine The Revelator.
He has taught English, Women’s Studies, and Communications & Media Studies at Plymouth State University, and literature and composition at the University of New Hampshire, from which he earned a Ph.D. in English in 2018 with a dissertation titled Lessoning Fiction: Modernist Crisis and the Pedagogy of Form. He is currently the Interim Director of Interdisciplinary Studies at Plymouth State University.

 Website

 Letterboxd (movie reviews)

 On Twitter: Melikhovo
Contact: Email

Popular posts from this blog

On Academic Book Prices, and Other Subjects...

Over at my other blog, Finite Eyes (about academic subjects, and things related to my job as Interim Director of Interdisciplinary Studies at Plymouth State), I've got a few new posts, including one on the pricing of academic books, which might be of at least vague interest to Mumpsimus readers.

There's also a post thinking about John Warner's excellent book Why They Can't Write. And a post that's gotten tons of traffic after being Tweeted out by a few prominent academics' accounts: "Cruelty-Free Syllabi".
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Ghosts: In Memory of Elizabeth Webb Cheney

My mother died on November 3, 2018. She was, in so many ways, my first reader and my first editor. Five days before her death, she asked me to write her something to read. I went home that night and wrote the following essay. I brought it to her the next day. Her eyesight had weakened, and she didn't have a lot of stamina, but she was able to read a couple paragraphs of it. It turned out to be the last thing I wrote while my mother was alive. I read it at her memorial service, and numerous people asked to have a copy of it, so I am posting it here for all who are interested. 


Ghosts
by Matthew Cheney

A reader of horror stories, and a fan of horror movies, I am familiar with ghosts and hauntings. As I’ve grown older, though, it seems strange to me that ghosts are typically represented as frightening, that being haunted is considered undesireable.

Certainly, screaming banshees flying through the ruins of gothic mansions at midnight aren’t exactly comforting. But I’m thinking of a dif…
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A Conversation with Nathan Alling Long

Nathan Alling Long is the author of the flash-fiction collection The Origin of Doubt, recently published by Press 53. Timothy Liu said of the collection, "He blurs the lines between flash fictions and prose poems. All of a sudden, genre distinctions start to give way, and what we thought we thought we knew is altered, transformed. These stories span the gamut from traditional to queer trans-genre forms, marvelous to behold in times like these when political discourses and abuses of language have sunk to unforeseen lows."

Nathan's writings have appeared in a wide range of publications and venues, including Glimmer Train,Tin House, The Sun, Story Quarterly, Strange Tales V, and NPR. He has taught at various schools; currently, he teaches creative writing, literature, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stockton University. Though he has lived all around the country, and traveled all over the world, he now lives in Philadelphia.

I met Nathan in the summer of 2000 wh…
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Elsewhere

I've mostly neglected The Mumpsimus this summer because I've been working on other things, including another blog, one related to and in support of my new job as Interim Director of Interdisciplinary Studies at Plymouth State University: a blog called Finite Eyes.

I have drafts of a couple of uncompleted blog posts for this site, and I do hope to get around to finishing them, but I'm not sure when, as the busy-ness of learning a rather big new job does not leave lots of time for extra reading and writing. I'm also trying to turn my dissertation into a book worthy of proposing to a publisher, and this process has proved immensely time consuming and slow. So not a lot going on here, Mumpsimus readers, and not likely to be a lot for the foreseeable future. (Though there will be some, I'm sure, now and then.)
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Upcoming Publications

I haven't published a lot over the last few years, not from lack of writing, but, as I noted in June, more from working on longer projects. Thus, I'm pleased to be able to note here some upcoming publications.

The biggest is my book Modernist Crisis and the Pedagogy of Form: Woolf, Delany, and Coetzee at the Limits of Fiction. The (expensive) hardcover will be out in January, and a (less expensive) paperback will follow about a year later. I certainly wish that Bloomsbury did like other academic publishers and released the hardcover and paperback at the same time (and/or provided an inexpensive ebook), but so it goes. It will be available at academic libraries, and interlibrary loan is a godsend. (I expect my next academic book will be open access and openly licensed.)

I also have two new stories coming out this fall:
"A Liberation" in Conjunctions 73: Earth Elegies. This will be my second story in the print edition of Conjunctions (and I've had two stories on We…
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