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Matthew Neill Null
"...the work of a master storyteller..."
- The San Francisco Chronicle
Reviews!
Null applies a poet’s voice and vision to the depiction of life and death in a world that is neither cruel or merciful, but, rather, spinning through time, exhibiting only indifference to the hopes and sorrows of its passengers. This is the work of a master storyteller." - The San Francisco Chronicle
"Null’s exacting description of the environmental destruction and collision of social classes during the Gilded Age elevate this historical fiction to the level of a classic.... In spare, perfectly crafted prose, Null does for Appalachia what Cormac McCarthy does for the American West." - The Southern Literary Review
“This remarkable story collection . . . is a clear-eyed look at an area that has been torn apart for more than a century. . . . Together these stories show the human and natural calamity that follows when an entire region is seen merely as a resource to be carved up, mined and sold. Null never yields to nihilism, but captures the rich and complex, if imperfect, lives of the dispossessed.” —The New York Times
"Works of fiction as great as Matthew Neill Null’s epic evocations of West Virginia deserve better ... Null’s great subject is human interaction with the natural world. " - Rumpus reviews
"With his debut novel, Honey from the Lion, Matthew Neill Null crafts a rich narrative about a team of timber workers who plan a violent general strike amid the deadly working conditions of the early twentieth century ... Null establishes himself as a writer with a rich prose style and a flair for world building," - FOREWORD reviews
Some of the stories read like historical fiction in the Faulknerian mode, surrounded by a universal nostalgia without sentimentality." - The Paris Review
“With Floodgate, Matthew Neill Null continues his artful, now monumental, consideration of the American empire run amok and the grievous consequences for its own land, its own ideals, its own citizens.” - Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Tinkers
“In a lot of ways, it was a fluke that I became a writer ... In another life, I might have become a game warden.” - Matthew Neill Null
Growing up in West Virginia and beyond
In the 1880s, a hundred years before Matthew Null was born, out-of-state logging companies started stripping West Virginia mountains bald. They hired thousands of loggers to do backbusting work that turned New York owners into millionaires. Loggers slept in unheated wooden barracks at night and chopped down huge hemlocks and spruces, poplars and oaks by day. They clearcut the mountainsides of virgin forests that once covered West Virginia.
After the last giant trees hit the ground in the 1920s, the camps shut down, the mountains were left bald, and the loggers, the “woodhicks,” were left to fend for themselves. “That’s been the story of West Virginia,” Matthew Null told five more voices. “I think of West Virginia as this colony that’s always having its resources pillaged, but gets little back.”
be a coal miner and a mechanic. It was very mixed, which is extremely rare now in America, but it also turned out to be great for me as a writer, later on.”
Listening to people talk, Matthew gathered scraps of information about things like railroads and floods, coal mines and timber camps, and loggers who used to ride the big logs down the river to the sawmill.
They lived in a log house with a wood stove, out in the woods, down a winding road, miles from the nearest neighbors. He and his dad liked to go hunting together. “We’d go early while it was still dark. Once we got where we were going, my dad would say, ‘OK, Matt, why don't you go over in that direction, and I'll see you back at the truck at dark?’ It was like, ‘You have a sandwich, come back at some point.’”
Matt liked that. “I’d get to ramble around in the woods all day, and I learned a lot," he said.
“I can’t imagine letting my 10-year-old go out in the woods alone now, but back then, it seemed like a pretty ordinary thing to do. He had his 22 rifle, and “occasionally, I’d fire off a shot, maybe get a squirrel or grouse,” but mostly, he hiked, climbed, played in creeks and enjoyed edible plants his great-aunt and grandmother had taught him to recognize, tea berries, mushrooms, and so forth.
Above all, he watched animals. “Animals filled out my world,” he told Rumpus magazine. “In bed at night, I would wonder what the deer were doing up on the ridge. How the trout lived under the ice.”
Sometimes he found things loggers had left behind decades before. Half-burned pine knots they used to start their fires. Old bottle dumps. He knew what they were, from hearing people talk. “I was just a kid then,” he said. “I didn’t imagine myself using it to start a fire in a blizzard or anything,” he said. “I just looked at it and thought that, once upon a time, lots of people were living their lives here, and now it’s all empty.”
One time, he found a rusty, disintegrating crosscut saw, lying in the leaves. He knew that loggers used those saws to fell huge trees, one man on each end of the saw. "This is where it happened," he thought.
He frequently came across rotting wooden cross ties, all that was left of railroad spurs timber companies used to lay into the camps. After an area was logged out, the company pulled up the rails and hauled them to a new campsite. “They were everywhere,” he remembers.
Later, in his 20s, when he started to write, he drew on those memories. Then he pictured huge trees crashing onto the forest floor or, worse yet, onto loggers. Or giant logs starting to slide while horses dragged them down a steep mountainside. His characters tried to get the loggers to strike. There were murders.
His growing-up experiences influenced the way he sees history. “When you live in a place that's on the decline, after an industry has gone away, it invites you to think about the past in a way that I think is very different than it would be if you'd been growing up in suburban Long Island. On Long Island, there’s lots that’s new, things are always developing. During my entire life in West Virginia, the place was in decline. Things seemed to be corroding and going away.
“That invited my gaze toward the past, not so much the future.”
Looking forward
Matt Null was 31 years old when he published his first novel in 2015. Honey from the Lion, set mostly in a West Virginia timber camp in the early 1900s. “It only took me three or four years to write it, because I'd been thinking about it all my life,” he said. “All that was still very much with me and very much on my mind.”
From the Booklist review: “Beautifully written in fresh, lyrical prose, Honey from the Lion brilliantly creates a land and a people experiencing tremendous change.”
From National Book Award-winner Jaimy Gordon: “Matthew Neill Null is bound to become one of the most admired and influential fiction writers of his generation.”
In 2016, he published Allegheny Front, short stories set in West Virginia. It won the Mary McCarthy Prize and racked up rave reviews. The Rumpus reviewer called it a “superb collection,” adding that the book “runs its fingers virtuosically across the keyboard of West Virginia’s history, lighting on two centuries’ worth of farmers and drovers, hunters and fishermen, scientists, poachers, preachers, and criminals.”
In summer 2026, Null published a second novel, Floodgate, set during the
building of the Gauley River Dam, also a fixture of his childhood. “We drove
over the lake on the [dam] bridge every time we went to town. At that time,
it was new, only a few decades old. But it had totally changed that landscape
and life in that place. There were ghost towns beneath the water.”
Jayne Anne Phillips, Buckhannon’s Pulitzer-winning writer, called Floodgate “a masterpiece and a saga.” She urged people to read it “for Null’s gorgeous, flint-hard, shining language and for the lost worlds – villages and mining camps – bulldozed and drowned…”
How did he go from rural kid to nationally-praised writer?
When Null was 13, his family moved to Wetzel County to be near his ailing grandparents. Matthew didn’t know a lot of people his age, and he wasn’t interested in sports, and “there wasn’t a lot of other activities for people my age. “So when school shut down, I didn’t know what to do with myself.”
He learned a little banjo, a little guitar, a little fiddle, and he started reading. The local library turned out to be packed with great fiction writers. “Somebody hip must have worked at that library,” he said. “I found Philip Roth, John Updike, Nabokov, a lot of Toni Morrison, a lot of Latin American boom writers. Garcia Marquez. Dostoyevski, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Faulkner and Joyce. I read it all, all of those books, one after the other, before I even went to college.”
“In a lot of ways, it was a fluke that I became a writer,” he said. “I started reading because I was bored, and I was not from a family with any kind of artistic or literary background. My parents weren’t readers. In another life, I might have become a game warden.”
He didn’t know of any writers from West Virginia. “I was just going to the library and picking up whatever was on hand,” he said. “West Virginia writers may have been there, but I never found them.” Still, with influences from all over the world, he decided he wanted to be a writer too.
He didn’t get a lot of support for that idea. “In the world I grew up in, people uniformly discouraged the idea of taking part in arts, culture, music. My parents encouraged me because I was stubborn, and it was clear that I was going to do what I wanted to anyhow. Otherwise, people discouraged me, pretty much at every turn. I don’t think it was because they were cruel. It was just an honest reflection of that blue-collar world. People were so broke. They worried about how to make money, and you were counseled to make a conservative choice, so you could get a job and make some money.
“Also, in rural West Virginia, people didn’t know anybody who did that kind of thing. It was a total aberration to want to do something like that.”
Persistant, he studied writing at Washington and Lee College, then got accepted into the University of Iowa’s prestigious graduate Iowa Writers Workshop. “When I went to Iowa, I was the least sophisticated person in my class. I didn't know what a literary agent was. I didn't know how publishers worked. I just knew that I'd read a lot, and I liked to write.”
He was so determined to learn to be a strong writer, he regretfully gave up playing music. “I could have worked on music for years and still been mediocre,” he said. “I didn’t feel I could do both.”
That storytelling voice, that cadence
Over the years, he says, he has become what he calls “a serious writer,” a person devoted to writing. “For me, as soon as you become a serious writer, literature becomes your country,” he said. He likes tales set in rural places. “Rural people don’t often get portrayed in literature,” he observed in a 1916 essay called “Nobody’s Writing the Real West Virginia.” (Note: Matthew says, “I did NOT write that headline!”)
Rural people all over the world have a lot in common, he insists, whether it’s West Virginia or Albania. “I’ve been reading a lot of Ismail Kadare, who writes about rural Albania. His books are a lot about village gossip that could easily take place in Summersville, West Virginia. People in small places have a certain way of seeing the world and interacting with the world. It feels very West Virginian in a way. His books remind me very much of books set in Appalachia.”
In August 2026, he started a new chapter in his own life. After six years teaching at Susquehanna University, he is now Associate Professor at the Iowa Writers Workshop, where he once studied writing. He wonders at that fact. “If you would see where I am now, and you went back and looked at me at 16, I don't think you would have said, ‘Well, that's going to happen.’ I don't think it was obvious, you know?”
He is working on two more books, both set in West Virginia. A collection of short stories covers maybe 300 years, and a novel takes place during “the Trump era in Marion County,” he said. The novel builds on ‘The Dropper,’ a short story he wrote that won a Pushcart Prize. “I kept thinking about the characters from that story, so I’m writing their extended universe.”
He credits West Virginia for his work ethic. “The thing that helped me was that I knew I could work harder than a lot of people, and I do think people from West Virginia often have a very good work ethic. They know they can't coast along in life, that if they want to do anything, they're going to have to work for it.” And he credits West Virginia’s “tolerance for eccentricity.”
A lot of his storytelling voice, also, comes from West Virginia, he thinks. Growing up, that cadence got fixed in his head. “West Virginians are very good storytellers,” he said. “I was always hearing stories and jokes.
That storytelling voice “comes from discomfort and things being difficult,” he said. “That's why so many great American writers are from the margins. That grid of discomfort, around which the pearl forms.
“Talk is the main way a lot of low-income people spend time,” he added. “The best talkers are always from places where there’s a lot of dark humor.
“I wonder,” he said, “if I had grown up in a more well-heeled place, where everything was flourishing and wonderful and there was no pain, would I have been a writer? I'm not sure.”
As a boy, 70 years after the last tree fell, Matthew had no thoughts like that. He was just a skinny Nicholas County kid rambling woods and creeks, climbing rocks, catching salamanders and frogs, going fishing with his dad, and soaking up stories in town, from his grandparents, at his dad’s office. “My dad was a country lawyer,” he said, “and a lot of old people and poor people came to him for help.”
Sometimes they’d talk to Matthew or he’d hear their stories. They got him used to different points of view. “My parents had a real working class background,” he said, “so when they had a party at our house, you’d have your doctor and lawyer, but there’d also
Passages from Null's books
From Honey from the Lion, a novel
This book is set the early 1900s, in the mountains that will become West Virginia. Young Cur Greathouse has been thrown out of his home by his father, following a furious brawl with fault on both sides. Carrying nothing but his clothes and shoes, Cur signs up, in desperation, for a lumberjack job in a timber camp on an isolated mountainside. On his first day, a logger named Neversummer picks him to work all day on the other end of a two-man crosscut saw. Cur has never used a crosscut saw before. Newsummer tells him they are cutting down a gigantic spruce tree. Cur tries out the saw, drawing it to himself.
... Cur drew the seven-foot saw. Neversummer murmured, "Don't fight me, now. Simplest thing. If you don't got rhythm, you're the poorest man. Can't make chicken salad our of chickenshit, can you? There you go. It's like fucking. Don't think too much about it."
The handle warmed Cur's hand and drew blisters within the hour. [Newsummer said hurry up. Dust was spitting all over. It hung in their noses, brows and hair. Cur tried to wrap a bandana around the handle, but sweat and pitch made it hard to hold the saw. It tried to jump from his hand. He cussed and finally stuffed the bandana into his pocket. Occasionally, they dribbled kerosene on the blade. Wolves called the crosscut saw the misery whip, a name understood by anyone who's ever used one. Finally, Newsummer said quit, for if they cut anymore, the tree would fall of its own choosing, and that's the last circumstance you want. When Cur let go of the saw, its rhythm hummed in every finger.
"Get on my bond side," Newsummer said. Shoulders straining, he swung the ax, hollered a Jericho shout, and gave it nine licks. When it began to wince, he flushed out of there and cried gamely, "You oughter run!"
With a metallic groan, the tree twisted and fell, so fast, so slow, like drizzling molasses, like they all do. It parted the forest like a blade, the world shook and blurred with its percussion. Branches snapping, birds flaring. Like a courthouse coming down.
In a moment, the forest was as still as the day it was born. The spruce had torn a hole in the canopy and let down the light. Tons of timber, a tree that took 212 years to grow and kept rain off generations of deer. Its absence was more powerful than its existence.
Cur soon falls in with a group of loggers who want to start a general strike, and the story goes from there, paced with memorable characters and scenes.
From Allegheny Front (short stories)
From "Something you can't live without"
In maybe the 1860s,Threadgill, a traveling salesman (drummer), gets "shot off a farmer's wife by the farmer himself." Threadgill has done well, so a guy named Cartwright is happy to replace him in the Blackwater area. His job is to go farm to farm and try and sell them farm equipment from the back of his buckboard wagon
This story starts out like a classic folk tale and morphs into something entirely different.
... The week the Company hired Cartwright on as a drummer, he found the dead man's [Threadgill's] sucker list wrapped in oilskin and tacked under the wagon tongue. It was the secret of Cartwright's success. He grew flush off commission in no time.
Polishing a new gold tooth with his tongue, Cartwright clattered down the road in a buckboard wagon. He followed the split-rail fence that wormed along the trace. Ironweed and seven sisters grew between the ruts, tickling the horses - a gelded pair of blood bays. The farther he traveled, the more the roadbed degraded. The spring rain had grawed small ravines into it all the way down to the shining black chert; he kept his horses to a low canter, should they come upon a slip. The tunnel of rain-lush forest gave way, finally, to cleared farmland around the bend.
The only thing Cartwright knew about McBride, today's prospect, was that the farmer was a sucker, though he few neighbors around there would have told Cartwright that no one knew the valley better than honest Sherman McBride. - the creeks that bred trout, the caves that held flint - except for the two boys he raised off those mouthfuls of corn that rose from the fields and strained for sun. Even though, honesty would be the man's downfall.
Cartwright gazed up at the Allegheny Mountains that were a series of flue lines on the horizon. This was long before the forests were scoured of the mountains and the coal chipped from their bellies, before blight withered the chestnut stands.
A dozen passenger pigeons trickled through the sky, the first Cartwright had seen that year, despite all his travels. The cherry of his cigarette tumbled, and he jumped and slapped it out of his lap
.... "Whoever cut this grade," Cartwright said to the horses, "must've followed a snake up the holler. Followed a damned snake!" ... SHOULD I ADD TO THIS?
Cartwright finally meets his "sucker."," and from that moment, it is not clear who the sucker is. The story devolves into a fascinating, deep study of human nature and the fragility of our existence.
From Floodgate
"... the blood on his sleeve ..."
Lance Drennen used to be a coal miner at the Loveridge Mine. When the federal government announced in the 1960s that they planned to build a big dam in Nicholas County, he applied for the project foreman job and got it. Now, a bolt of lightning has killed a man.
In this passage, Drennen is driving home from the hospital, after helping bring the dying man in. He blames himself. In this passage, we are getting to know him.
... After the accident, Drennen drives home in the night, and in that black county where few houses are, he cherishes the odd stab of light that appears on the roadside. As Drennen drives past, each stab becomes a phosphorous square: a child watching television, head in hand like a suffering man; an empty room; a bearded fellow hunched over a vise, witching feathers and thread into something a fish would bite; then white shirts on hangers, gleaming like skinned ghosts. This last one startles, until he realizes it’s the new dry cleaner’s, a single plate of glass in the cinder-block building. Who’d pay another person to clean their clothes? It’s a profligate gesture, like flinging money in a fountain. Summersville now, the scabby end of town with its pinebox houses knocked together back when by the Company, and there its Legion tavern and UMW hall. Most trucks he recognizes pulled in aslant—coal miners. Drennen rolls up his window against the tart smell of woodsmoke. A yellow dog lopes in the street. He hasn’t seen another car. Where is everyone? (Or anyone, he should say.) His hands are hard upon the wheel.
He lives way out past Swiss, on Right Fork of Tory Run of Birch River. Town lights fade behind. He is released into the woods, the blackness.
Country music on the radio cuts off—it makes him flinch. A local voice announces, Cat-eye shift will work, cat-eye shift will work at the Loveridge Mine. Repeat, cat-eye shift will work—and back to the snap of guitars. Once Loveridge had been his portal. So many nights he listened for those words, making coffee at 10 p.m., for that and for announcements of school closings in winter, for his daughters—with his wife the way she was, he did all the things that mothers do. He was the one to dress them, fix barrettes, and send them off with a final, studying glance, so that no one could call them neglected. Now the radio goes on to Shoemaker Mine, Plum Creek too, and reminds everyone that Local 147 will hold its annual fish fry, buy your ticket, don’t be late, all goes into the strike fund. Drennen rolls the window back down. He’s forever waiting on that phone call, that shout that announces disaster. Like an animal, a state of deft, alert nervousness that becomes normalcy, becomes life; dipping a mouth to the green table of grass while waiting on the black arrow, the claw. Today. The arrow has blood to the fletching.
Should he tell his wife? For the first time, Drennen notices the blood on his sleeve—another man’s blood.
He is Management now. He should have called a stoppage when that first blue seam of lightning parted the day. Hasn’t told anyone of seeing that. Not even a minute later, another bolt set off the charge, stepping down from the sky, seeking metal in the rock face and finding it there, finding soft human hands and turning pink to black. He should have been quick.
The road turns to gravel, and he slows. The tires grind, and a small mammal flicks itself across the road.
But Drennen doesn’t want to think of this, of the merely visual, he wants to know how he failed. He obsesses, he recalls the radio and the lightning and how drowsy he was and the feelings that braided together. Crew laying dynamite, thin haze of dust, a single laughing mouth above a jumping drill, a bitterness on his palate like crushed ants, and then the windshield splitting its length under the knuckle of a single, terse stone flung by the blast, and it’s over, all over, and Cottrill on the ground. A lifetime couldn’t prepare you for that. There will be, should be, an investigation. Well, this ain’t the mines, he doesn’t know how it works. He hasn’t been on the dam that long.
He did not intercede. God offered up a moment—be your brother’s keeper—and Drennen failed it like a math test.
Drennen obsesses, for he is a geologist of failure—a strange thing, because he’s a naturally happy man, quick with a joke and a grin. You can see it in his pale, friendly eyes, the happiness that abandons him time and again. He’s of that vague generation, too old for World War II, too young for Vietnam. They only had Korea, that war that wasn’t called a war and ended in truncation, with plenty of dead bodies in cold mud just the same. When the country was divided at the parallel, Drennen wondered, Why didn’t anyone think of that before? He can laugh bitterly now, hating the forked-tongued politicians and oh how he once so desperately wanted to be one—and still does. Drennen is a big man, barrel-chested on skinny legs, slow moving but with a certain vitality, hands like mattocks, thick ox neck, but with long, sensitive fingers like a fiddle player’s. Though he’s physically imposing, those gray eyes of his tell you he’s a friend. In a crowd of five hundred, the lost or the schizophrenic always seek him out. You can tell he suffers with dignity, uncomplaining, made wise by some tragedy known or unknown. His father-in-law chided him for fighting in that businessmen’s war, against men who carried the red banner, and how it ached to hear that criticism from a man he admired so. All Drennen could say was that he was young, didn’t know no better, draft takes what it wants. The flagwaver in him shriveled in that moment. Korea at the end: refuse, pariah dogs, naked children with distended bellies. A woman begging with a baby in her arms. She lifted it to him, and he saw it was dead, a black clot at its throat. No proud war for him. “Food? Food?” she asked, gesturing at the baby.
The gravel pops under his tires. His grandmother said, “Don’t let the sun go down on your grievances,” but the sun is down, and whom would he grieve to? Not his wife. Not to Johnny.
He smells of the hospital. Is it his fault? Will he (Management, after all) be called into courtrooms to explain himself? He recalls mine executives who testified in good blue suits, so calm, so dispassionate, even when the people jeered. Drennen cussed them too, to no effect. They had no soft parts where the barb could enter. Outside the court, a stone was pitched from the crowd, and one executive clutched the thatch of his hair and the welling spot of blood. He looked unruffled even then. The blood ran into an eyebrow and caught in the hair. He straightened his tie and sank into a waiting sedan. Maybe Drennen threw that stone.
He pulls into the drive. Dogs leap into his arms, their eyes reflecting light. Something is glad to see him. He wonders why their eyes are aglow, then realizes he forgot to pull keys from the ignition. The truck’s headlights hold a swirl of moths like a cast net ...
Matthew Neill Null received the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Mary McCarthy Prize, the O. Henry Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the Michener–Copernicus Society of America Award, a fellowship for graduates of the Iowa Writers' Workshop to support promising writers, in recognition of his early fiction and literary body of work. His stories appear in The Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, Ecotone, Oxford American, Ploughshares, Electric Literature, PEN /O. Henry Prize Stories, The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, and The Best American Mystery Stories. A native of West Virginia, he holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he now teaches.
