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Sunday, January 19, 2025

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Matthew Vernon Whalan

Matthew Vernon Whalan is a writer living in Southern Vermont. He has written political commentary and other nonfiction for OpEd News, CounterPunch Magazine, The New York Journal of Books, eoinhigginswriting.com, The Brattleboro Reformer, The Berkshire Record, The Berkshire Edge, and other magazines and newspapers. He has also published fiction and poetry in Foliate Oak, Hitherto MUIC, Thunderdome, Aberration Labyrinth, Literary Orphans, and other literary journals.

written articles

Learning

Rise: Monument Mountain students organize against racism, sexism and gun violence

RISE joins a growing wave of students and educators bringing social movement action into the classroom and education into social movement action throughout the country.
Letters

Open letter to American youth: Calm down, freak out

In his letter to the editor, Matt Whalan writes: “If you are afraid, calm down. You are not trapped. We are not stuck with Trump. Trump is stuck with us.”
Viewpoints

Lessons from the Democratic convention

Demonstrators I encountered at the Democratic National Convention were enraged at the Democratic Party and have been since long before this election season.
Arts & Entertainment

SHORT STORY: Letters From Christopher Diamond

He sent me letters from Iraq. He told me stories that seemed he needed to get down on the page or else he would explode.
Viewpoints

A reflection upon the Charleston, South Carolina shootings

Hate crimes do not occur because one race hates another; they occur because one person or group does not know, and is unwilling to know, another person or group. Hatred and fear are what human beings turn to when they confront the unfamiliar.
Arts & Entertainment

Short story: Dreakfast

“Well, I prolly don't have much time left. That's why I wrote it to her. So I prolly wouldn't be able ta stop waitin on her ta write back before I had the chance ta do anything, before the old bucket kicked me. Guess everybody dies waitin for somethin they ain't gonna get though.”
Arts & Entertainment

Short Story: The Nose Picker

For the most part he enjoyed the secrecy, as though he were absurdly undermining the conventions insisting upon his loneliness — his lostness, his girlfriend, his future in the world, his security, the shame upon his habit.
Arts & Entertainment

Lost Silence

The young poet, Matthew Vernon Whalan , now back at Marlboro College in Vermont, muses about silences, real and imagined.
News

Part II: The heroin epidemic in our town, and our culture of cruelty  

I hate heroin. I hate that it disappeared some of my childhood friends, killed others, and left still others straggling down our Main Streets with those shadows in their cheekbones.
Arts & Entertainment

I think my Blue Neighbor is screaming

A poem by Matt Whalan, with an illustration by Alison Lee, about a particular terror in Housatonic.
Life In the Berkshires

Part I: The heroin epidemic in my town

We cannot dismiss the problem of heroin and the underlying, mysterious madness of the youth here. What do people need to escape from when they need to escape this much, this far?
Learning

Monument Mountain’s ‘Independent Project’: Risk and opportunity

It is far easier to have a teaching disability than a learning disability. Kids who are both intelligent and a bit rebellious are usually the kids who end up struggling in school.
Arts & Entertainment

A poem: Continuous deathly worries

A poem by Matt Whalan, with an illustration by Alison Lee.
Arts & Entertainment

A poem: In My Town

In my town the youth congregate to complain about their futures and Try their hand at drinking away their worries. They want more than their imaginings of the future can give them
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