Joseph Matthews, Author at Public Seminar

Interviews

Artists Against Colonels

In Shades of Resistance, unexceptional people take exceptional risks

December 5, 2023 • by Joseph Matthews and Evangeline Riddiford Graham

Joseph Matthews and Evangeline Riddiford Graham chat about using fiction to unravel fascism, and why the “regime of the colonels” found the Greek underground counteroffensive of poetry and music so difficult to control....

Gender

From the Vault: Labor Pains

“One classmate litigator closed up her practice, left a tape of bird songs on her office answering machine, and enrolled in art school.”

September 13, 2022 • by Joseph Matthews

Since I hadn’t been able to get Angela to talk about what trial lawyering may have done to her sense of herself, her “identity” as a woman, I shifted to a different lens: Did she feel, I asked, that the presence of more women lawyers was humanizing the criminal law?...

History

The Blast

An excerpt from a new novel about the radical Left in 1916 San Francisco

May 18, 2022 • by Joseph Matthews

Adding to the cannery women’s travails was their invisibility to—the willful blindness of—the city’s traditional labor unions. The women had no specific skills, the labor leaders would say when pressed, and did not fit any particular craft or trade union, so their requests to the central labor council for some ...

Interviews

A Hotbed of Anarchism and Clam Pasta

Labor organizing and espionage in Joseph Matthews’s new novel, The Blast

May 18, 2022 • by Joseph Matthews and Evangeline Riddiford Graham

There was a great variety of tremendously active Left formations in San Francisco in 1916, and I wanted to explore that variety within the context of the novel....