Matthew Stadler

Matthew Stadler (born 1959) is an American author who has written six novels and received several awards.

Stadler has compiled four anthologies about literature, city life and public life.

His essays, which have been published in magazines and museum catalogs, focus on architecture, urban planning and sprawl.

"Sprawl is the disappearance of an idea", Stadler wrote in the annotated reader Where We Live Now.

"So how can we go on speaking of the city and the country, yet not remain fixed in the downward spiral of loss?"

Stadler's essays and larger projects explore this question by looking for better language and new descriptions.

While there is significant overlap, Stadler's work can usefully be broken down into three areas: novels; sprawl and urbanism; publishing and public space.

Between 1990 and 2000, Stadler published four novels that focus on children, sexuality, and art: Landscape: Memory (1990); The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee (1993); The Sex Offender (1994); and Allan Stein (1999).

In the early 1990s, while living in Groningen, the Netherlands, to research his novel, The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee, Stadler was invited to take part in an architectural conference at the Technical University at Delft.

Through this conference and subsequent invitations to write about architecture for the Dutch journal Wiederhal, Stadler became involved in that country's discussion of urban planning and design.

At a 1993 conference in Rotterdam, called Bliss, Stadler was asked to respond to Rem Koolhaas's recently published "Manifesto for Bigness."

In his talk, subsequently published as "I Think I'm Dumb," Stadler characterized the sprawl of the American West Coast as "the native home for bigness," and endorsed it as a productive, urban landscape.

Many of the subsequent themes in Stadler's work on sprawl and urbanism can be found in this initial essay.

In "I Think I'm Dumb" Stadler writes that the borderless West Coast city "feels like material scattered around in space or like electronic information. The huge glass boxes downtown could easily be kicked over, like models pumped up with growth hormones, huge and brittle air. Walking down the hill from where I live to downtown is like walking over a scab. The interstate freeway…has twelve lanes and cuts right through the middle of the city. It goes from Canada to Mexico."

But rather than condemning this landscape as a failure, Stadler asserts that "this place has given rise to a peculiar, dumb and lovely pattern of work that [as Rem K ponders in his manifesto] 'reconstructs the whole' and is doing something with the collective (it's hard to describe exactly what that is), plus it sheds some light on 'the real.'" (Here Stadler links sprawl to the three positive capacities that Koolhaas's manifesto ascribes to Bigness.)

Stadler's inclination to look for positive potentials in the shapeless new landscapes of sprawl matured over the next decade as he read (and published) the essays of the poet Lisa Robertson.

Writing as the Office for Soft Architecture, Robertson pursued what she calls lyrical research into the new, dynamic forms of cities, especially her home (then) of Vancouver, B.C., Canada.

Robertson's evocations of "this permanent transience, the buildings or shelters like tents—tents of steel, chipboard, stucco, glass, cement, paper, and various claddings—tents rising and falling in the glittering rhythm which is null rhythm, which is the flux of modern careers..."

helped Stadler understand how writing can transform degraded landscapes into sites of meaning and beauty.

This insight was confirmed and persuasively theorized by German urban planner Thomas Sieverts in his book, Zwischenstadt, which came into English in 1997 as Cities Without Cities.

These books were widely discussed and lauded as gay fiction, including the 1999 Lambda Award for Best Gay Novel, for Allan Stein.

Stadler's encounter with Sieverts's work in 2003, catalyzed the analysis of cities and sprawl that he ultimately published in the annotated reader, Where We Live Now.

Where We Live Now is a collection of urban theory, historical documents, and literature that makes three simple arguments: (1) Thomas Sieverts's description of what he calls "zwischenstadt" (literally the "in-between city") is a useful, accurate description of the built environment that has displaced the old concentric city; (2) this condition, of a densely inhabited in-between landscape, has a deep history in North America, predating the arrival of European explorers, which can be usefully articulated if we study indigenous history in the Americas as urban history; and (3), that new literature which springs from this history can help us occupy the in-between landscapes fully and well.

These three arguments — advocacy for the relevance of Sieverts's analysis; an insistence that indigenous history is urban history; and a faith in the power of literature to shape an urban future — form the core of Stadler's work on urbanism and sprawl.

He cites the example of the "public will" conjured by the US government and news media to support that country's 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Publication "is always a political act," Stadler argues.

It is "imperative that we publish" not only as a means to counter the influence of a hegemonic "public," but also to reclaim the space in which we imagine ourselves and our collectivity.

"We feel lonely and powerless when we accept the myth of 'the mainstream public.' When we accept that fiction we relinquish our ability to form our own collectivities and draw hope from them."

A year before Stadler's first novel was released, he began to run a writing class at his kitchen table in Seattle.

He met there several writers, artists, and scientists including Lee Hartwell and Frances McCue.

That same year, McCue and poet Jan Wallace had founded a reading series, The Rendezvous Room Reading Series, to bridge the gap between academic writers at the University of Washington and the underground writers of The Red Sky Poetry Theatre.

Stadler joined them as a co-director of the series.

"One thing led to another, and before long we were organizing classes for writers and artists in a self-generating night school called The Extension Project," Stadler wrote in the introduction to an unpublished manuscript.

During this time Stadler began to publish his novels, which were placed with large New York-based publishers, Charles Scribner's Sons, Harper-Collins, and Grove Press.

He also wrote for widely distributed, New York-based journals such as the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, Spin Magazine, the Village Voice, and many others.

At a 2008 lecture in Vitoria, Spain, Stadler described publication as "the creation of a public ... There is no preexisting public," he went on.

"The public is created through deliberate, willful acts: the circulation of texts, discussions and gatherings in physical space, and the maintenance of a related digital commons. These construct a common space of conversation, a public space, which beckons a public into being. This publication in its fullest sense."

Stadler maintains that the public we think of when we speak of "public opinion" or "mainstream" is the manufactured product of special interests that use the publication to conjure a public that "can justify their own self-interests."

After co-founding Publication Studio in 2009, Stadler went on to use this platform to publish a so-called "cover novel," Chloe Jarren’s La Cucaracha (2011), as well as the dystopian novel Minders (2015).

Reviewing Allan Stein in the New York Times, Edmund White wrote, "What makes Allan Stein unusual is the lyric suppleness and restraint of the writing, a kind of mandarin American casualness that is peculiar to such West Coast writers as Dennis Cooper, Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian and Robert Gluck, a school of refined but deceptively offhand stylists. Matthew Stadler is its newest star. In Allan Stein we encounter the trademark passages of stark beauty...With it Stadler demonstrates that he is among the handful of first-rate young American novelists, one with a wide reach and a quirky, elegant pen."