This Substack, and What it Will Cover
What you can expect to see here
Hello, my name is Matthew Maichen. I’m the author of a half-dozen novels, none of them published, and several dozen short stories, quite a few of them published. At the moment, I believe I’m significantly more successful than the median self-identified ‘writer,’ but nowhere near successful enough to be a writer you’ve heard of. But I do create art, and I am perpetually interested in talking and thinking about it.
In this strange and horrifying post-2025 world we live in, I figure that, if something still matters to me, with everything going on these days, it must matter to someone else out there, too. From 2016-2020 (Without getting too political, if you know, you know, and everyone knows) art was my escape and my method of psychological survival. Now, in 2025, it feels like even that final bastion I used for self-preservation is under attack. And I’d really like to pay it back by fighting to preserve it, in turn.
Here is an inexhaustive list of topics that I expect this blog (do we still call them that?) to cover:
“Media Literacy” and “Pro-Intellectualism” (Or: Anti-Anti-Intellectualism)
The quest for artistic excellence (And how I’m trying to get there.)
Shoutouts and praise for great (or interesting) art
I hope that you find something here that you enjoy. Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you continue on through the next posts.