My name’s Matthew Hand.

 

I write stories about people under pressure—moral, spiritual, familial, sometimes all at once. The characters are often trying to make sense of something bigger than them: grief, memory, belief, God, or the silence that follows when none of those things show up the way they expect.

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I don’t write to explain. I write to document what happens when there’s no clear rescue, and no one left to blame. The stories aren’t tidy. They weren’t meant to be.

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I grew up around the Southeast. The site’s called Southern Melancholic because that more or less covers the mood. This is just a place to keep the published work in one spot.

 

Thanks for reading.