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Malachi Mata
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
As a child, Malachi was too shy to speak to anyone except his sister. In order to communicate with others, he would whisper in his sister's ear and she would answer for him.
"Wh...view moreABOUT THE AUTHOR
As a child, Malachi was too shy to speak to anyone except his sister. In order to communicate with others, he would whisper in his sister's ear and she would answer for him.
"What do you want to drink, honey?" his mother asked.
"He'll take milk now, Mommy," answered his sister.
Malachi didn't begin to break out of his shell until he entered his first year of college where he accidentally performed onstage for one of the most prestigious drama departments in the country, the drama department of Southern Oregon State University (then Southern Oregon State College) in the southern Oregon town of Ashland, Oregon, famous for its Shakespearean festival.
Malachi was visiting a friend at the time, a drama student, when he decided to look around the prestigious theater. He wandered out onto the main stage. The two men sitting in the middle of the empty theater stopped talking, looked up from their clipboards, and stared in disbelief. Was Malachi trespassing or something?
After several tense moments of silence, Malachi blocked the stage light that was blinding him to get a better look at the men and spoke. "Hello?"
“Do you believe in serendipity?” the director said in a half-whisper.
“What does serendipity mean?”
Malachi was 18 years old and had a lot to learn about life, and a lot to learn about the English language. It wouldn't be until he became an ESL teacher that he would gain an appreciation for the English language.
“It’s the belief that things happen for a reason,” the kind, older-gentleman explained.
It turns out that at the moment Malachi wandered out onto the dust-filled stage, the two directors were in the middle of discussing what to do about an actor who had just quit. The part was for an Australian aboriginal watching the boats come in and the European new comers disembarked and set up their town in Australia in the stage play, "Our Country’s Good."
Enter Malachi stage right, the closest thing that school had to an aboriginal.
The director and co-director exchanged looks, like they were talking to each other telepathically. “Should we do this? Yes, let’s do this.”
Still crushingly shy, and despite the great couching of the director, Malachi did not have a stage voice. His lines we dubbed by a real actor and played over speakers while Malachi stood there on stage, like they were his thoughts, like they were his sister speaking for him at dinner.
"He'll have milk now, Mommy."
Malachi transferred to Oberlin College in Ohio and changed his major from art to politics. After graduation in 1999, he returned back to his home town of Portland Oregon, but ever the middle child, Malachi ran away again, this time to a place much farther away. He moved to South Korea to become an English teacher. There he met a woman and got married and after more than 15 years of teaching English, Malachi returned with his wife and son to settle down in Portland Oregon.
Although Malachi has always loved to read, his favorite author being Steven King, he never imagined in his wildest dreams that he would write his own story. When he first started studying books on story making, he had only intended to use the knowledge to improve his YouTube channel videos - a series of webisodes that followed the hardships of raising his son, and in the tradition of magic realism, his son's strange and mystifying powers. But as he studied in preparation for season two, a sinister thought wormed its way into his head. A novelist, unlike a video maker, doesn’t have to be in front of a camera or try to coerce others into performing for him. Nor is a novelist constrained to limit his ideas to things physically possible in the real world. Perhaps he could finally release the imaginings he had kept caged inside his head and find his artistic expression. Maybe, through writing, Malachi could find his voice.
So Malachi wrote a novel. He is now working on the sequel to this novel, and he hopes to have it out soon.view less
Books by Malachi Mata
The Dominion The Portal:Science Fiction Meets Fantasy in this Action Adventure Novel (Book One) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings