Your Incredible Neighbors: Inside a Green Valley writer's amusing mind

Green Valley resident Matt Freese pulls from his mind stories from his childhood and stories from life. Some of his complex works reflect sarcastic humor, others reflect a deep and dark side.

As a former clinical social worker and psychotherapist, Freese’s essays and short stories are a result of delving into his Brooklyn and Queens, New York childhood and of life in general.

Sometimes heavy, sometimes off-the-wall comedic, Freese describes his writing as “ornate and very earthy with very rich imagery.”

He’s been most influenced by Nikos Kazantzakis, author of “Zorba, the Greek” and says, “I write stories about myself extrapolating to the fifth degree. I like to write about compulsives… ‘the did I shut off the coffee pot type.’ ”

In his short story “Little Errand,” the narrator is paranoid and obsessed with the safe and secure mailing of letters. A neighbor who asks him to drop a letter in the mail box gets this response, “I declined, for the tension for caring for another while coping with my own needs is much too much.”

When setting off on a new work, he says, “I go to the edge of the diving board and I jump off singing…What I really do know is that fearlessness makes for authenticity in writing…endless literary chatter I abhor.”

Whether writing fiction or non-fiction, essays, short stories or novellas, Freese says he was never trained in organized format.

Many conversations within his stories relate back to his vivid New York City childhood. “I enjoy being retro… I remember being able to walk into the middle of a movie and seeing it from the middle to the end, then sit there and watch it from the beginning to the middle.”

He’s deeply aware of the impact that memories have on a person and how they last decades, if not forever.

In the safe and secure New York street childhoods of the 1950s, he recalls eating a Charlotte Russe—a round piece of buttery sponge cake that was topped with a big swirl of whipped cream and rolled into a cardboard tube that had fluted edges.

“You had to eat it the right way; there was an order to things that kids today don’t have,” he said.

Asked about his use of strong language and if he does it for shock value or if it just flows out of him, Freese said he’s not at all afraid to use strong language.

“It’s very cathartic; I know when to use it for shock value. The function of a foul-mouthed word is to emancipate.”

Having recently won an Indie Excellence Finalist Book Award for “Down to a Sunless Sea,” Freese is also a semi-finalist for the Reader Views Literary Awards. It’s a collection of short, short stories each focusing on personal experience about a universal phenomenon where everyone is in a state of suffering.

His novel, “The I Tetralogy” about the Holocaust has been described as a “gut-wrenching epic depiction of the dehumanization of man” and has received the Allbooks Reviews Editor’s Choice Award.

Of that work he says, “That’s the book I’ll be remembered for.”

A life that has witnessed several family tragedies, Freese says he’s able to write about pain and suffering with humor; he refers to himself as “a very, very happy discontent.”

Then musing about Green Valley and retirement in general, his inner wit comes out in full force. He describes the area as a “geriatric Disneyland” where people think “if I sit I won’t die.”

“Retirement is a boondoggle in our culture. It’s a farce,” he says. “It’s a variation of death.”

Ellen Sussman is a freelance writer in Green Valley. Contact her at ellen2414@cox.net.