matthew clark davison

writer & teacher

Matthew Clark Davison is co-author (with bestselling writer Alice LaPlante), of The Lab: Experiments in Writing Across Genre (W.W. Norton ’25) and author of the novel Doubting Thomas (Amble Press ’21), which was hailed as one of “46 Must-Read Books by Queer Authors” in Esquire Magazine. He is creator and teacher of The Lab :: Writing Classes with MCD, a non-academic school started in 2007. Matthew is a member of The Writers Grotto and has served on the board of Foglifter Journal and Press. Matthew is Emeritus Faculty in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, where he also earned a BA and MFA.

the lab

experiments in writing across genre

Co-authored with Alice LaPlante

Two novelists and experienced writing teachers compile a multigenre guide with exercises that help writers move from initial impulse to final draft.

Many of today’s serious literary writers are moving out of traditional categories of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction to experiment with new types of writing that push the boundaries of form and meaning. The goal of this book is to help writers develop an artistic practice that incorporates craft and inspirational techniques from multiple literary genres.

doubting thomas

a novel

“Sharply probing…Thanks to the care Davison pays to his characters—each one a fully realized, thinking human in Thomas’s orbit—what could be an over serving of tragedy is instead delivered with clarity and nuance. The result is a novel that manages to take on a number of the world’s traumas…using the personal travails of a gay man at the dusk of Obama’s America to probe at the nature of what it truly means to know oneself.” —SF Chronicle