Matthew Mitchell

I am a new and aspiring author. At the age of fifty, I recently self-published my first book. Even though I am getting a late start, I still aspire to be a full-time writer. I am inspired by contemporary American literature that exposes and examines the human condition. Every day, we walk through so many lives and microcosms and rarely give them any real consideration or a second glance. And we rarely recognize how fascinating our own lives are. I know people read to escape their reality, and I am no different. I just like to slip into somebody else’s. In addition to a reprieve from my own life, I feel it also helps me be more understanding and empathetic, and I hope to inspire the same in others with my writing. Fifty years under my belt gives me a myriad of occupations, locations, and relations to draw from. My first novel, The Kids on Shakedown Street: A Life and Mind-Altering Trip to ‘90s Haight-Ashbury, is about the time in my twenties when I was deliberately homeless in San Francisco in 1995. I wanted to provide a glimpse of the nomadic sub-culture and counterculture movement in America that existed back then and still endures in some form today. Currently, I live the work-a-day lifestyle and write on the side. I have accidentally become the cliché aspiring writer living on a small piece of land in a tiny log-sided cabin in Maine with three cats.