Larry Mathews teaches creative writing and fiction courses at Memorial University, and is the author of The Sandblasting Hall of Fame, and The Artificial Newfoundlander — two books of ultra-witty, very vibrant, character-driven fiction.

Some of us also have 1 of only 600 copies of his collection of poetry, The Sweet Tears of the Judge, published by Fiddlehead Poetry Books. Most recently, Larry was solicited by Breakwater Books to curate a 10-story collection entitled The Breakwater Book of Contemporary Newfoundland Short Fiction.

For episode 6, we asked Larry to choose a story from this wonderful, brand new collection. He chose David Andrews’ “West Orange,” in hopes that David won’t be overlooked in the anthology on account of being the only unpublished author in the collection, alongside such household names.

He also chose the story because of its poetic prose and well-crafted, after well-crafted sentence, which lends itself well to hearing it read aloud.

Larry first met David Andrews during 9/11 — it was the first day of the creative writing course David was taking with Larry. David has since that time written a short story manuscript entitled West Orange, which won the $5,000 Fresh Fish Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. Thanks to the new anthology, we can all hear a piece of Andrews’ Work.