Matthew Stadler

Conversation with writer Matthew Sadler over dinner prepared by chefs Corina Weibel and David Thorne.

Dinner and discussion of “City of Wool”, a short story by Matthew Stadler. It is strongly recommended that all participants read “City of Wool” prior to sitting down to eat and converse.

"City of Wool" concerns a Sufi dervish who arrives in Astoria, Oregon in July of 1914 to set up a store, which he calls "City of Wool." Like most of Stadler's fiction, the setting and particulars of the story are all factual, but the central characters are made up. Astoria, the oldest US city west of the Rockies, was a very cosmopolitan place that mixed Sufi with Finn, Sikh, German, Chinese, Sandwich Islanders, and Dutch. It was an old port city with a booming economy, the future metropolis of the region. "City of Wool" depicts a reality that would not have been surprising to Astorians in 1914.

Matthew Stadler is the author of four novels, including Landscape: Memory, The Sex Offender, and Allan Stein. He lectures widely on the history of cities, principally the younger cities of the North American West Coast. Matthew is a past contributor to Frieze Magazine, Arcade, The New York Times, Art Forum, Domus, Dwell, and Volume, and co-founder of the small, independent publisher, Clear Cut Press. He got his B.A. in political theory at Oberlin College and an M.F.A. in fiction writing at Columbia University, and he studied epistemology in the philosophy program at the London School of Economics. Among many other prizes, he has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Writers Award, the Hinda Rosenthal Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and, last year, a United States Artists Fellowship, for his fiction.

Corina Weibel is the chef at the new and well-reviewed Canele Restaurant in Atwater Village. David Thorne is an artist who also cooks on the line at Canele.