Mathias Dubilier

I spent my childhood in Manhattan, my adolescence in Germany, and have lived in Vermont ever since. For three years I sailed from Vermont to Turkey where I lived for four months and saw the first wave of refugees fleeing Syria, which is a minor thread in the novel. I took fiction courses in college and spent 15 years in journalism. At a workshop with Dani Shapiro, she urged me to attend Sirenland in 2016 and 2017. While there, Ithaca was workshopped with Jim Shepard and Richard Russo. Russo encouraged me to quit my seasonal job and devote myself fully to being a writer. I'm trying to live up to that encouragement. My novel's first pages won Honorable Mention in the Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition.

Ithaca

The mere thought of a huge sailboat on land, propped up on stilts, was so unnatural that as hard as Felix tried to suppress revulsion, he couldn’t help but feel it rise.
He was fourteen and the only times he had seen sailboats were years earlier when they lived in America and he was in the backseat as his parents drove along the Hudson or within glimpsing distance of Long Island Sound. They were birds, that’s what sailboats were. Birds skimming the ripples of water. Complete unto themselves. Untethered. Free.
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