Matthue Roth On Legos, All His Best Plans & The Exception That Is Ditmas Park

Matthue Roth has been living in Ditmas Park with his family for three and a half years. The author of Never Mind the Goldbergs, Candy in Action, Losers, and Yom Kippur A Go-Go was inspired to write his latest work,  My First Kafka: Runaways, Rodents, and Giant Bugs, after witnessing his daughters’ reactions to hearing Franz Kafka’s story Jackals and Arabs.

We talked to the slam poet, Cortelyou Library fan, and husband/table busser to The Hester’s Itta Werdiger Roth about the incredible response to My First Kafka, what inspired the writing that came before, and the journey to his favorite neighborhood in NYC.

Matthue grew up in an area of Northeast Philadelphia where, he says, he wasn’t exactly surrounded by art. “You know, when you’re a kid, playing with Lego people and making up stories? I never stopped. I just never knew writing was actually a profession that people had,” he says.

So, at 22, he moved to San Francisco on a whim.

“I got a cheap room and told myself I’d pay for it by doing poetry, or else I’d go home in a month. I was there for the next five years.”  Matthue supported himself by selling his chapbooks and CDs at open mic and slam sessions on a near-nightly basis.

“So it wasn’t one lucky break,” he says. “It was a lot of them.” He sold his first novel, Never Mind the Goldbergs, before moving to Los Angeles.

“That  totally didn’t work,” he says, “since, A, I didn’t know how to drive, B, I started dating a girl who lived in Australia, and, C, my complete plan for getting a job in Hollywood was for someone to notice that I was Orthodox and dressed like a punk and offer me a TV contract.”

Matthue breaks it down at The Hester

Matthue’s currently in graduate school at Brooklyn College, which he says is “amazing”– but on a larger scale, he finds the city to be less enjoyable than stressful. Luckily, there’s Ditmas Park.

“New York is stuffy and sweaty and high-pressure. You work so hard in order to afford living here that you don’t get to actually live here,” he says.

“Ditmas Park is about the only redeeming quality. It’s quiet, there are actual trees, people are friendly.”

As for his books, which have at times fallen into the teen or YA spectrum even if they weren’t intended to do so, Matthue says, “Everything comes out of personal experience, more or less. Sometimes it’s relatively straightforward–Losers is about Jewish nerdy hacker kids who live in a run-down working-class industrial neighborhood, which is an easy line to draw.

“Then Candy in Action, which is about supermodels who know kung fu, gets a little murkier–but some days that’s the book that I think is closest to me. I wrote it as an allegory for a friend who was raped, and there’s a lot of little stories inside that are inspired by Hasidic mysticism, even though you wouldn’t necessarily read them that way.”

“It might be the closest I ever get to writing a straight action-movie.”

Matthue also understands why some readers would be surprised by his choice to write from a female perspective, as he did in Candy in Action and Never Mind the Goldbergs. “Oh, it’s totally weird. Especially with me being a Hasidic Jew and, I don’t know, gender bifurcation and social barriers or something like that?

“But when I sat down to write Goldbergs, I wasn’t thinking, ‘I want to write a book about an Orthodox punk-rock kid, and she has to be a girl.’ I had this incredibly clear picture of Hava, the main character. She’d been growing in my mind for months, years maybe.” Matthue says when he wrote Never Mind the Goldbergs, his point of view wasn’t that of “a girl”–it was simply Hava’s.

An image from My First Kafka’s Metamorphosis, via BrainPickings

Matthue says his experience played a different role in My First Kafka. His day job as a video game designer and work done on a previous animated story project equipped him with the skills to help conceptualize, along with illustrator Rohan Daniel Eason, the perfect visual components to tie the book together.

“I love visual art, he says, “but I’m really bad at drawing. I co-created a series of weird Bible adaptations called G-dcast, and I was expected to describe everything I wanted animated in incredible detail. In children’s books, they don’t want you to describe the illustrations at all.

“In spite of that, I did some pretty lengthy ‘if you’re curious’ descriptions that I didn’t really expect the artist to look at, but because this project was in my head, and because I felt a little sleazy that I was just adapting stories, I wrote descriptions as well. Rohan did his own take, which in most cases was way better than my ideas, but also, I think, used some of my descriptions as a launchpad of sorts.”

My First Kafka has been embraced by outlets including The New Yorker, the BBC, Brain Pickings, and Electric Literature, which Matthue says is an incredibly pleasant surprise.

“I’m so incredibly grateful. I’m totally humbled and totally baffled. It’s also strange–I spent less time on Kafka than any of my other books. It’s literally 2% the size of Losers, which is not a long book. I guess that ‘Kafka for Kids’ makes a catchier headline than ‘Nerdy Russian immigrants try to take over the world,’ which is something I maybe should have thought about before I dove three years of my life into it,” he says, “but I still love the hell out of Losers.”

Matthue says he’d love to give a reading of My First Kafka in the neighborhood. “I actually still haven’t had an official release party. With kids and job, I haven’t been very good at planning anything else in life. One of my best friends ever moved to Albemarle three months ago, and I still haven’t made official plans with him (I’m sorry, Aaron!).

“I definitely want to get something together,” he says. “It’s just a question of getting myself together first.”

http://youtu.be/fyk09_rbcrQ

This one’s not for kids.

Ultimately, Matthue appreciates Brooklyn, and Ditmas Park in particular, as a place where The Hester can best flourish, and where he can be close to publishing houses in New York. He still misses San Francisco in ways, but acknowledges Ditmas Park is the place for him right now–and anyway, aside from wishing he could spend more time with his kids, he doesn’t have it so bad.

“I don’t think I could actually live in San Francisco still,” he says. “It’s too expensive, too crazy, and the open mic scene does not exactly make it convenient to put kids to bed and then hire a babysitter six nights a week.

“I write,” he says, referring both to his books and his day job. “I’m really lucky that I get to write, and make up stuff all day, and get paid for it.”

“There probably isn’t anything else I’d prefer to do with my life. As far as having to go out and do something productive with my life, I’m really amazingly fortunate.”

Want to see more? Keep up with Matthue’s projects, events, and adventures at matthue.com.

Top photo via Observing the Observant