English Instructor Wins Prizes

English instructor and poet Matthew Miller won two awards this year for his poetry and prose writing. The awards were granted by two different literary publications, the Iron Horse Literary Review and the River Styx Magazine.

Iron Horse Literary Review selected Miller’s poem, “Ordeal by Water,” as the winner the “2015 Trifecta Poetry Prize.” The Trifecta is split up into three separate sections, with one prize awarded to a nonfiction writer, a fiction writer and a poet respectively. The magazine accepts submissions, poems between 10 and 20 pages long and prose pieces between 20 and 40 pages long, during the month of November. The Iron Horse then publishes the winning manuscripts online in June of the following year.

“I’m always being influenced by different writers, and the more I read, the more I’m influenced, the more I’m informed. You start to find your style the more you encounter.”

Two years ago, Miller read “Ordeal by Water” aloud as a meditation in Phillips Church, but he didn’t submit it to Iron Horse until Claudia Putnam ‘81 notified him about the prize program. Putnam was the 2011-2012 George Bennett Fellow and remained in contact with Miller after she left.

Miller’s second prize, from the River Styx Magazine, was a result of the “Schlafly Beer Micro-Brew Micro-Fiction Contest.” In this variant of micro-fiction, submissions were limited to 500 words per entry. This April, as the first place winner, Miller won $1500 and a case of micro-brewed Schlafly Beer.

With an “I'll try, why not?” attitude, Miller had submitted a short story titled “This Tune Goes Manly.” Named after a line in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the piece takes place on the Exeter campus and centralizes around someone from Miller’s hometown. "[This Tune Goes Manly] is based here, but it’s also based at my home, so my two homes come into play in the piece,” he said.

The attitude paid off. “I won, and it was great,” Miller said. “It’s nice to get, as a writer, a little validation once in a while to keep you coming back to the keyboard, to the notebook.” He went on to describe “dry spells,” which often discouraged writers such as himself and then explained why he still decides to write after dry spells conclude.

“The publication is one part, and the writing is another part,” he said. “The writing I’m just going to keep doing, and every once in a while you pick your head up and go, ‘Maybe I should send some stuff out.’”

Miller continued, discussing the other side of his motivation. “A lot of people write without ever caring about the publication. That’s fine. Emily Dickinson once said that ‘publication is the auction of the soul,’” he said.

English instructor William Perdomo, a close colleague, commented on Miller’s poetry. More specifically, Perdomo referenced a book of Miller’s called “Club Icarus,” winner of the 2012 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry.

“‘Club Icarus’ is a sound, unpretentious collection of poems,” Perdomo said. “Miller’s ability to zoom in on the particulars of how we come to age is pitch perfect. He inspires me to look at my neighborhood in New York City with the same specific lens.”

Since his elementary school years, Miller has loved literature. His teachers would often let him write stories instead of working on other projects. In high school, Miller’s passion for poetry bloomed when he came across “When I Heard the Learn’d Astonomer,” an eight-line poem written by Walt Whitman.

In Miller’s words, he had “caught the poetry bug,” fascinated by “what someone could do, what would take me hundreds of pages, in just a few lines.” He tried to fight it throughout college, but after he graduated he decided to start writing more seriously.

Reflecting back on his college year, Miller recalled a story which had helped him make the post-graduation decision to write. While walking back to his apartment, he had discovered that his next-door neighbor—a close friend—had broken into his apartment to watch television.

Miller’s friend was a burly guy and a carpenter. Besides television, he had been reading one of Miller’s works, and complimented it. Miller reflected that “although my teachers said [I] had good writing, [I] never really believed it until this guy said... ‘eh, you should do this.’”

Now, many years later, Miller has received similar, positive feedback from his colleagues and students.

English instructor Todd Hearon complimented his poetry. “[It] is white-hot with idiomatic charge; he wrings spiritual sparks out of quotidian situations. I love it,” he said.

At the Academy, Miller has had the opportunity to learn from his students and draw upon the experience of like-minded colleagues. “I’m always being influenced by different writers, and the more I read, the more I’m influenced, the more I’m informed. You start to find your style the more you encounter,” he said.

On the other end, Hearon reflected on how Miller affects those at the Academy. “I think it absolutely benefits students to have teachers who are writers—how could it not? Mr. Miller is a rock star without the rock star’s attitude and ego. He’s here to teach the students how to play,” Hearon said.