by Writing Workshops Staff
8 hours ago
“He wanted Los Angeles. I wanted New York.” — the premise of Matt Gerlach’s new essay in the Los Angeles Times
Two cities. Two people who love each other. One coast that can only hold one answer at a time. That’s the quiet tension at the heart of Matt Gerlach’s new L.A. Affairs essay in the Los Angeles Times, and if you’ve ever loved someone enough to renegotiate the map of your own life, you already know the stakes.
Matt is a writer, coach, and mentor in Los Angeles, where he landed after seven years in New York and a cross-country move with his partner, David. Long before his byline reached the Times, he’d built a life, and a following, around a single, hard-won conviction: that honesty, especially the uncomfortable kind, is where the real story lives. On his website, he writes that in his hardest year he had “no idea who I was, what I needed, or what I even wanted.” The years since have been a study in finding out, in public, on the page. In a 2024 conversation with Voyage LA, he called vulnerability his “superpower.” His new essay is that superpower on the page.
Landing in L.A. Affairs is no small thing. The Los Angeles Times’s long-running first-person column is one of the most-read homes for the personal essay in American newspapers and the West Coast cousin of Modern Love. Getting in means telling a true, intimate story with enough craft and nerve to hold a city’s attention. Matt’s piece does exactly that, turning a decision every couple eventually faces — whose dream, whose city, whose turn — into something tender, specific, and entirely his.
Somewhere along the way, we were a brief stop on that road. A couple of years back, Matt spent six weeks in Sarah Herrington’s Writing the New York Times Essay nonfiction workshop, a room built around taking these newspaper personal essays apart to see how they actually work: the arc of change, the balance of showing and telling, the moment a private story becomes something a stranger needs to read.
What makes Matt’s writing land is the same thing that makes his coaching work: he refuses to look away from the hard part. His essays don’t perform healing so much as show the seams of it: the boundaries drawn, the feelings finally felt, the self slowly reassembled. It’s a register the personal essay rewards, and one he’s been practicing, out loud, for years. The Times byline isn’t a departure from that work. It’s the same honesty, finally handed a microphone.
If there’s a lesson in his path for other writers, it’s the one his whole body of work keeps insisting on: the story only you can tell is usually the one you’ve been avoiding. Sit down. Feel it. Write it anyway.
A byline in the Los Angeles Times is a milestone, not a finish line. With a book proposal already underway and a growing mentoring community, Matt is a writer whose best chapters are still landing. You can read more of his work at mattgerlach.com and follow him on Instagram. Congratulations, Matt. We were lucky to share a small stretch of the road.
Every published essay starts as a private one. If you’re ready to shape the story only you can tell, our online creative writing workshops put you in a small room with a working writer for a teacher, a community of people chasing the same thing, and a deadline that finally gets the words out of your head and onto the page. Bring the story you’ve been circling. We’ll help you tell it — and, like so many of our alumni, send it out into the world.
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