Matt Kliewer
HPPR Radio Readers Book Club ContributorMatt Kliewer, originally from Cimarron, Kansas, is a professor of humanities. He holds a doctoral degree in English literature from the University of Georgia. His scholarly writing has appeared in The Georgia Review and Transmotion. Additionally, he served as an editorial assistant for the anthology When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry.
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I’m Matt Kliewer, once from Cimarron, Kansas, now from Austin, Texas, coming to you from San Diego, California. In Nick Hunt’s introduction to Lyall Watson’s Heaven’s Breath: A Natural History of the Wind, Hunt argues that in this book “[a]ll the winds of the world are inside. If you open it, you will be blown to places you never expected.” -
In his seminal work Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud argues, “We all live in a state of profound isolation. No other human being can ever know what it’s like to be you from the inside. And no amount of reaching out to others can ever make them feel exactly what you feel. -
Like many of the books in our series on humor, Allie Brosh's Hyperbole and a Half is so specifically temporally located that a less generous person, or even my younger college-aged students, might call it "dated." There is something about the freneticism, vulnerability, and seeming universality of "adulting," to crib a similarly dated phrase, that calls to mind BuzzFeed quizzes, Onion horoscopes, and the early days of YouTube virality. -
Sometimes, being an adult just means being a larger version of the tiny little monsters we were when we were children. In Allie Brosh's Hyperbole and a Half, the book-length collection of Brosh's popular mid-aughts webcomic and blog, readers encounter the familiar struggles of getting up in the morning, compulsive behaviors, and everyday absurdities. -
We started with the Puritans, traveled the 1950s, visited the New Yorker and now we’ll explore blogger and web-comic creator Allie Brosh in a graphic novel. Bill Gates, said, “I love her approach—looking, listening, and describing with the observational skills of a scientist, the creativity of an artist, and the wit of a comedian.” -
In Art Spiegelman's MetaMaus, the reflective companion to his graphic memoir Maus, Spiegelman claims that in creating graphic narratives, "You've gotta boil everything down to its essence. . . It's a great medium for artists who can't remember much anyway." -
It takes me a month to mentally prepare to drive through the High Plains and a week to recover. The only ties I have left are a love of an old hotel on Main Street in Cimarron and this book club. -
In The Wordy Shipmates, Sarah Vowell offers her readers a unique time capsule into the political and literary stylings of the early 2000s. -
How do we come to terms with the people and events in our life that defy convention? How do we navigate the complexities of love, trauma, and grief as we narrate our own journeys? -
To end this set of readings with Plainwater by Anne Carson feels perfect. If not perfect, well, it still feels. Carson, once described by Bruce Hainley as “a philosopher of heartbreak” doesn’t just mix genres in her works but calls into question linguistic and cultural bedrocks that inform our reading of the continuity of human experiences.
