Curtis L. (Curt) Mattson studied to be a minister* and serves his local church as deacon and teacher. He has also worked in the business world for more than forty years, employed in printing, graphic design, communications, editorial management, and web content management.
He has been married to the same woman for more than 35 years and has three grown and married, believing children. He’s also a recent grandparent.
Although coming to creative writing late in his career, he has written, edited, designed, printed, and posted the written word for more than thirty years.
Fiction Writing …
The goal of my fiction and religious writing is to present characters who struggle with the Christian faith and the realities of the world. I seek to portray honest struggle, temptation, fear, confusion, conflict, frustration, and doubt.
Most of all, I want the Christian faith to be shown and known as real, honest, and able to stand against a fallen world.
… For Men and Women
I try to write for both genders. I know that Christian publishing has traditionally been oriented toward women, but I deliberately (or you may say inevitably) style my writing to involve and appeal to a male audience as well.
I don’t do this by writing about great sports figures or military heroes, but about men who take their business and family obligations seriously, who love and respect the women in their lives and work to be good fathers and role models. Most of all, they strive to live Christianly in an admittedly nonchristian world.
The goal of my explicitly religious writing is to present a discussion of biblical texts and context in a man-on-the-street style, modeling an approach to the scriptures that is hopefully fresh, unique, and that helps to tie scriptures together, showing — as the Westminster Confession of Faith says it — “… the consent of all the parts, [and] the scope of the whole, which is to give all glory to God.”
The Bible itself is a “grainy” book, that is, it shows the rough underbelly of its characters. My works likewise try not to sugarcoat anything about living life in this fallen world.
Just as I believe being an ‘artist who is a Christian’ has more impact than being a ‘Christian artist,’ I’d rather be a ‘writer who is a Christian’ than a ‘Christian writer.’
*Curtis Mattson holds a Bachelors degree in Philosophy and Bible from Wheaton College and a Master of Divinity degree from Covenant Theological Seminary.