This week on Authbition, I sit down with Matthew A. Bamberg, writer, photographer, educator, and author of Coconut Grove Chronicles, for a conversation about autofiction, self-publishing, Medium, persistence, and what it means to keep going until your work finds its people.
Matthew is 70 years old. He has been writing these stories for 25 years.
That sentence alone is the episode.
👉 Listen or watch here:
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This episode took longer to publish than any episode in Authbition's history.
And I want to be honest about why, because Authbition is built on honesty, and the backstage pass is the real story.
I don't love editing. I never have. The conversations are what light me up. Sitting down afterward with a timeline and a cursor is a different kind of work entirely. It's necessary. But editing is not where my energy lives.
A recent episode made that worse. A guest shared something personal during our recording that she wanted removed. Finding the multiple references to it, cutting it cleanly, making sure it was really gone — that was a chore. The kind of chore that makes you not want to open the next project file.
So when this episode was ready to edit, I wasn't.
This one also had moments that needed attention. Not just the mechanical stuff I trim from every episode: the mic checks, the small talk at the top and tail, finding the right place to let the conversation begin. There were things in here that required judgment calls, and judgment calls require time and care and tools I hadn't fully learned yet.
So I learned them. Final Cut Pro's caption transcription. Searching caption text by keyword to navigate the timeline without scrubbing. Using an AI assistant not to make the decisions, but to think them through with me.
That process changed something. This episode, the hardest one to start, became the one that gave me the clearest workflow I've had in 49 episodes.
These show notes are my writing. Built on a template shaped with an AI assistant. The editing decisions were mine. The judgment was mine.
The tools just helped me get there.
Forty-nine episodes in, and I'm still learning what this show is becoming. Four more in the bank. Hint hint.
Matthew reached out to me on Medium. That's still one of my favorite ways to find guests. Not through a pitch. Not through a publicist. Through the writing itself.
He grew up in Coconut Grove in the 1970s. His book, Coconut Grove Chronicles, is a work of autofiction. Stories from his childhood that are wild, specific, hilarious, and deeply human. The Miami New Times called it Florida Man, ten times over. That line opens our conversation and sets the tone for everything that follows.
Matthew has been working on these stories for 25 years. He published an early version on Amazon, pulled it down, revised it, republished it, pulled it down again. He learned about IngramSpark, the platform that actually gets books into independent bookstores. He bought his own ISBN, because if Amazon gives you one, it belongs to them. He worked his way into Books and Books in Coconut Grove and Coral Gables, and into the Helen Muir Archives of the Miami-Dade Public Library System.
He didn't want the money, though the money is nice. He wanted the history documented.
From there, the conversation wanders the way good conversations do. We talk about autofiction, the blurry, beautiful line between memoir, autobiography, and fiction. I offer the image of a painter painting a self-portrait. It doesn't have to be photorealistic to show you someone's soul. Matthew agrees, then takes it further. Nothing from 50 years ago is truly nonfiction, he says. You have to make things up. So you might as well make them up well.
He walks me through some of the chapters. The Kinsava, a fictional mashup of a bar mitzvah and a quinceañera. Third Grade Tales, in which young Matthew breaks into the teacher's filing cabinet and grades his own report card. Trouble with Girls, the most-read story on Medium, in which his father writes on the back of a report card: please move Matthew's seat away from the girls.
He also talks about his mother. An astrologer, a writer, a woman who published a short story in a nudie magazine in the 1960s alongside work that won Best College Stories of 1963 and was published by Random House.
Florida Man. Ten times over.
The conversation closes on the thing that ties all of it together: persistence. Get to know editors. Submit again and again. Hear no, and go back anyway. If they respond, that's your cue to keep diving in.
We didn't formally play The Whole Mind Game in this episode. The conversation went where it went. And where it went was good.
But the tension was there underneath everything Matthew shared.
Share Early <> Wait Until It's Ready
Matthew published a book that wasn't ready. He pulled it down. Fixed it. Published it again. Each time, the work got better. Each time, the audience got a little closer.
On one side is the familiar fear. It's not ready. Someone will see the mistakes. I'll embarrass myself. On the other side is the less familiar truth. The feedback you need can only come from the work being out there.
The best of both sides is not recklessness, and it is not paralysis.
It might be:
Courageous Iteration
Share the work. Get the feedback. Fix what needs fixing. Share it again. Never stop.
That's the 25-year version of what Matthew did. It worked.
Matthew Bamberg is 70 years old, and he is having the time of his life.
Not despite the late start. Because of it.
He says this without apology, without regret, and without self-consciousness. Then he moves on to the next story.
Real life doesn't resolve cleanly. It wanders. It goes places you didn't plan to go. An Authbition guest guide exists. The show scaffolding is up. Four parts, a straw-person structure, a framework. And sometimes the conversation sets all of that on the table and goes somewhere else entirely.
Forty-nine episodes in, I'm still learning to trust that. Matthew helped.
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Thanks to Matthew Bamberg for reaching out, for showing up fully, and for following through. True to his word, Matthew sent along links to his work and recent press after we recorded. Find everything below.
Matthew's Book
Coconut Grove Chronicles, available on Amazon, IngramSpark, and at independent bookstores including Books and Books in Coconut Grove and Coral Gables.
https://www.matthewbamberg.com/
Press & Editorial Reviews
Miami New Times Review
Matthew Bamberg's Debut Novel Chronicles a Coconut Grove Lost to Time
Editorial Review by Dr Mehmet Yildiz (ILLUMINATION)
A Literary Journey into the Strange and Colorful World of Coconut Grove
Essays & Excerpts on Medium
The Hypnotist
Counter Arts
How Do Your Parents Influence You?
The Memoirist
Gender Bender: A Florida Baby Who Was Supposed to Be a Girl
Prism & Pen
Thanks to everyone following along with Authbition as this show continues to grow into what it's becoming.