About the Author
M. C. Fox is a poet and aspiring novelist who currently teaches 9th grade English. He published his poem “Soil Sorrows” with Modern Reformation and his Master’s Thesis titled The Quest of Love when he received his M.A. in English in 2020.
Matthew has had a passion for writing of all kinds, especially fiction and poetry, since he was a young boy. When he was first learning to write, he made simple picture books out of construction and computer paper with little or no plot to speak. At the age of nine, he wrote for his younger siblings a series of short stories about his stuffed penguin Waddle and his other stuffed animals (a la Winnie the Pooh), which he called Waddle’s Adventures. It was then that he decided that he wanted to be an author.
He continued writing through middle and high school. He finished three more installments of Waddle’s Adventures, the sequels of which featured one long narrative each. Around the same time, he began work on a science fiction novel called The Zord Invasion, which was heavily inspired by the Animorphs series that he read voraciously at the time and which he had hopes of being the first in a sci-fi trilogy. In eighth grade, he began work on a fantasy trilogy set in an alternate world called Zeroshliva and which followed a lone adventurer who was modeled after a close friend from school. Neither book was ever finished (though he finished about 2/3 of each book), but he hopes someday to return to Zeroshliva and finish telling the story (after substantial revisions). In 9th grade, he fell in love with writing poetry, especially with meter and rhyme, experimenting with different meters and rhyme schemes to strengthen his skills as a poet.
After high school, Matthew pursued his writing in college, studying Creative Writing and Theatre at Susquehanna University. In his time with the writing program, he focused on poetry since the fiction teachers were less interested in sci fi and fantasy that Matthew wanted to write. With the theatre program, he learned a great deal about what makes for a compelling character as well as how to structure a scene, both from a narrative and a spatial standpoint.
After graduating, he taught English Language Arts for a year in Kyiv, Ukraine to eighth, ninth, and tenth graders. While teaching there, he began writing The Lie of the Beholder, which was inspired by Fahrenheit 451, which he had been teaching to his ninth graders, and the detective fiction that he had been teaching to his tenth graders as well as a short talk he had given to the school about the virtue of curiosity. He read the first two chapters of his book (slightly modified for content) to his eighth grade class, and their positive reaction inspired him to keep going. Though he loved teaching at the school in Ukraine, he returned to the United States to receive his Master of Arts in English and get married. For the last few years, he has been teaching 9th grade English in a local public school while he continues working on his current novel, The Dragon’s Widow.
Matthew lives with his wife and two-year-old son. Besides reading and writing, he enjoys playing board games, running D&D, hiking, and watching movies. His favorite authors include J. R. R. Tolkien, Ray Bradbury, C. S. Lewis, and William Shakespeare.