BIOGRAPHY

Fredric Matteson  attended the writing program at San Francisco State University. His teachers were the authors William Dickey and Stan Rice. He is currently working on a book related to his years growing up in the government milieu in Washington, D.C.  He works as a therapist in an inpatient program primarily for suicidal clients. For the past ten years, he has helped create an educational approach called: Contextual-Conceptual Therapy: Guiding the Suicidal Person in Managed Care. The approach draws upon his unique experience as a poet to use “Maps, Models, & Metaphors” to help the suicidal client bypass their logic and find a way to “escape” the pain that is causing them to be suicidal. He has a completed book and article awaiting publication that detail the model and the success he has had with this approach. He has presented this model at the Aeschi Conference, a biennial gathering of international suicidologists, in Aeschi, Switzerland; at The American Association of Suicidology Conference in Seattle, Washington; at the biennial conference of the International Society for Theoretical Psychology at York University, Toronto, Canada. Most recent appearances: the 12th European Symposium on Suicide and Suicidal Behavior (ESSSB12) in Glasgow, Scotland;  an all-day presentation of the CCT model in Essex, England sponsored by the National Health Service (NHS) Trust and the University of Essex (Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies).

For the past 23 years he has been working as a psychotherapist on an "acute" 10-bed mental health unit within the medical setting of a major public hospital. It is directly from his inductive experience with thousands of suicidal inpatients that he created Contextual-Conceptual Therapy, an educational model using "maps, models, and metaphors" to help the suicidal person to be able to process (connect with) new information within their own context, their own frame of reference.

Fredric Matteson's role as an educator in the field of suicide prevention is to help others:

1. •to understand the context of suicide before the “problem” can be addressed
   

2. •to help teach others about the phenomenon of suicide (and its phenomena)
   

3. •and to offer and help implement an educational program derived from the suicidal persons' own unique language and voices, their uncovered patterns (algorithms) and common themes.
   

PUBLICATIONS

Fredric's poetry has been accepted by/published by numerous magazines throughout the U.S., Canada, and England. Some of these include: Harper’s Magazine, Paris Review, Chicago Review, Partisan Review, Northwest Review, Poetry Northwest, Epoch (Cornell University), College English, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Boston University Journal, Pacific Northwest (The Seattle Times), The Malahat Review, The New York Quarterly, New Letters, The University of Windsor Review, The Florida Quarterly, Carolina Quarterly, The Little Magazine, Northwest Poets & Artists Calendar (accepted twice), others.

HONORS

1. •The Joseph Henry Jackson Award
   

One of the first writing fellowships ever given by the National Endowment for the Arts. A prestigious award for literature (his winning genre, poetry) sponsored by the San Francisco Foundation: the judges were novelists Alice Adams and  Evan Connell, and the historian Ferol Eagan.

1. •The New Writers Award
   

First place in a literary award open nationally, sponsored by The Carolina Quarterly (University of North Carolina).