Beacon writer reimagines Aesop’s
If he excelled on the high school certification exams in his native Australia, Matt Eddy planned to become a lawyer. With middling results, he would pursue journalism. A real screw-up might lead to an acting career.
Somehow, Eddy worked all three gigs. After a short stint as a reporter, he graduated from law school and flexed his thespian muscles in court as a criminal defense attorney.
But he burned out and now helms the U.S. branch of a tech startup whose clients are corporate lawyers.
To accommodate the creative bent, he turned to fiction, jazzing up Aesop’s Fables. At 7:30 p.m. on Saturday (Nov. 2), he will read from a new collection, Vices & Virtues: Animal Stories for Adults, at the Howland Cultural Center with actor Amy White.
The characters in Vices & Virtues include a gambling badger, a raccoon with a drug problem and a dog stuck in a loveless marriage, each of whom confronts moral and existential quandaries. In a YouTube video in which Eddy reads “The Rat & the Squirrel,” his hands augment a debonair, deadpan delivery.
When mellow mood music kicks in, Eddy pours a three-olive martini without missing a beat. Though 37, his persona, dapper dress and the setting evoke 1930s Art Deco.
The online magazine The World’s Faire first published “The Badger,” which centers on a poker game at an independent living facility. After drinking bootleg grappa, the group discusses ethical lapses.
Coyote stole clothes, money and canned goods from a church to allay his family’s poverty. Fox, a storeowner who worked with cash, never paid taxes. A contractor, Wolf, huffed, puffed and blew up a building to receive an insurance payment so his wife could be treated for a debilitating illness.
The melancholy tale ends with Badger, a widower, lying in bed as a paint chip breaks free from the ceiling and drifts down, “spinning and falling gracefully in its final dance.” After “feeling its soft tickle on his cheek,” Badger let it “lay alongside him, rejected and alone.”
In “The Crow,” which appears on the website Half and One, the hep cats dig instrumental improvisation and wear zoot suits. Raccoon is a trumpet player addicted to heroin and “living the jazz life,” though he gets clean and walks away from the scene.
Crow, Raccoon’s bass player, is a junior lawyer bored by “the three Fs: filing, fetching and photocopying.” Reflections on rehab, a character’s “breath smelling like vomit” and a musician who “leaned on the microphone stand like a crutch” add an edge.
The author met his wife, Andrea Bombino, in a West Village dive bar. They lived in Australia before moving to Jersey City but disliked the concrete confines. “In Melbourne, we’re 20 minutes to the beach, 30 minutes to the mountains and 40 minutes to wine country,” Eddy says. “Sometimes it took a half-hour to get through the Holland Tunnel.”
They knew Beacon from road trips, but during one visit, Bombino discovered Notions & Potions on Main Street and he found Max’s on Main, where he watched the Green Bay Packers while their daughter doodled.
“We figured, ‘We can live here,’ ” he recalls.
They moved in 2023, and on Oct. 6, a son joined the family. Bombino still views Australia as an escape hatch.
“The active shooter drill at our 4-year-old’s school freaked her out,” Eddy says. “But the clock is ticking [on immigration matters], and we’re leaning toward Beacon.” He discovered a local writers’ group, fell in with the LitLit open mic and gravitated into the orbit of old souls under 40.
“I’ve redefined myself, turning to fiction and live readings,” he says. “I can’t resist the urge, so who knows where it goes?”
The Howland Cultural Center is located at 477 Main St. in Beacon. Tickets are $20 ($25 door) or $40 for VIP at dub.sh/matt-eddy-howland. Eddy’s readings will be posted on YouTube and Spotify on Nov. 2.
