With roots in both Van Buren, Maine and South Boston, Massachusetts, Matthew George Lally currently lives in Cambridge, Mass. He graduated from Norwood (MA) Senior High School and from the University of Notre Dame (IN) with a degree in English.

In his 2002 essay, "Practicing the (Almost) Lost Art," Stephen King declares the short story to be nearing "the lip of the drop into extinction's pit" and asks "how long publishers can be expected to publish books of a type [short story collections] that doesn't interest readers very much." (King, Stephen; Everything's Eventual: 14 Dark Tales; Scribner: New York, 2002.)

Five years later, King describes having to go "to my knees like a school janitor trying to scrape a particularly stubborn wad of gum off the gym floor" to look at short story magazines in his local bookstore. In this 2007 essay, "What Ails the Short Story," King invites us to "consider what the bottom shelf does to writers who still care ... about the short story."

Stephen King, of course, has forgotten more about the fiction marketplace than I'll ever know, and his relentless concern for the continued viability of the American short story troubles me. Because I'm an English dork, I grew up idolizing short-story writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Flannery O'Connor — pithy, didactic stories evidently appealed to me.

(I did eventually get over the whole moral-tale thing, but if you've never read Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," you should probably drop what you're doing and read it right now. It won't take you more than 45 minutes, about the time it takes to watch a TV drama on DVD.)

Stephen King's not wrong: the short story, as a literary medium, is becoming less and less relevant, and many short stories that get published are garbage. Still, it's encouraging that Jhumpa Lahiri can win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with a collection of short stories (Interpreter of Maladies in 2000).

And so, my goal with MattLally.com is to provide a small measure of additional encouragement; hopefully, my own stories aren't garbage, and at the very least, the site links you to other sites that also strive to return the short story to the forefront of the collective American consciousness.

Because, at the end of the day, "there are few pleasures so excellent," King says, "as sitting in my favorite chair on a cold night with a hot cup of tea, listening to the wind outside and reading a good story which I can complete in a single sitting."

Agreed. Enjoy the site. Send me your feedback.