Living Fiction

Matthew
Breit

The stories we tell become the world we live in.

Matthew Breit is a cross-genre writer and multimedia artist based in Kent, Ohio. He teaches writing at Kent State University. His poem “Someday I’ll Love Raphael Arevalo” won the 2024 Academy of American Poets Prize through the NEOMFA, and his fiction appears in Crayfish Magazine.

Writing

“Someday I’ll Love Raphael Arevalo” Poetry — Academy of American Poets Prize, NEOMFA Prize
“A Garden of Edens” Short fiction — Crayfish Magazine, 2026

Projects

As a true sci-fi lover, how can I not mess around with AI? I’ve been reading about it since I was a kid. I’m working with Claude and other AI tools to build interactive sites that trace how the stories we tell become the world we live in. To wit, the AI disruption we’re experiencing and the way we story it in our culture.

Lineage Our historical moment isn’t a total shock. Many artists, working across film, art, music, and theater, went before us and imagined the future. This project uses AI to make an argument about the stories that lead to, and can help us navigate, the (often dystopian) sci-fi reality we find ourselves in. AI Frame Problem The truth of story’s reality-making function is tangible in the current AI debates. This site maps the competing narratives shaping how people think about AI and AGI. I hope a general audience can start to see how part of our current crisis is the way stories compete to shape how we think, perceive, and finally act. Metamodern Canon What comes next? Stories can help us develop the capacities we need to navigate our historical moment. This site starts curating media that might be a kind of curriculum in metamodernity. Why? We need more people to move past the shortcomings of postmodernism and into the next stage of development.