What is the story boys and men are told about how to be fathers and husbands, and how does it change when they’ve made big human mistakes? How, in the aftermath of crises—whether it’s addiction, depression, or infidelity—do men reimagine masculine identities that allow them to move more comfortably, peacefully, and safely in the world? 

We, poet Matthew Nienow and memoirist Wayne Scott, are both husbands, fathers, and psychotherapists. Both of us had books published in early 2025. 

Nienow’s book of poetry, If Nothing (Alice James Press, 2025), tackles his struggle with addiction, mental health, and shame through poems that build a new vision of how to be a man moving into accountability. Scott’s memoir, The Maps They Gave Us: One Marriage Reimagined (Black Lawrence Press, 2025), follows a married couple, a straight feminist woman and a queer, bisexual man, with school aged children, as they move down the path toward divorce, only to surprise themselves by falling in love again, creating an unconventional template for their marriage. 

Both of us are trying to form new, evolved narratives around masculinity that break up the patriarchal templates we inherited as boys growing up. Given the resonances and commonalities in our work, we had a recent conversation on Zoom to explore the questions: What does it mean to reimagine masculinity in an era where toxic manhood is glaringly, aggressively dominant across Western cultures? How does shame become a portal to new ways of being? And how are narrative-building and healing connected?

I didn’t know how to be

a friend or a father I didn’t
know what a lover was I stopped

pretending the world was to blame

I was inside with no story
to save me from myself.

Matthew Nienow, If Nothing

In the conventions of marriage, there are good husbands and bad husbands; keepers and exiles; mensches and schmucks. I have been pretending to be a good husband. But because I accept the dark anti-order of things, the way things unravel; because we are married, and I have strayed: I left and now we must divorce.
Because I am a deadbeat. 
Because I am nobody.
I am supposed to leave.

Wayne Scott, The Maps They Gave Us

Wayne Scott: Our books explore vulnerable, emotional aspects of our struggles as men on healing journeys. I’m curious, since your book launched, what have dinner parties been like? Social events with your friends?

Matthew Nienow: For the most part, we don’t talk about my writing. When it comes up, I tend to deflect. Occasionally, there is room to talk about the confusing and uncomfortable parts of publishing deeply personal work.

WS: I get that. With my friends who are writers, folks in critique groups, we talk about it all the time, but with extended family, other friends, neighbors, they don’t know what to do with me. 

MN: I live in a small town. The majority of people in my life know me through other contexts aside from writing. Some of these folks lived through the parts of my life that ended up in the book. Other people are more removed. Sometimes I wonder when running into different people from my past: “Is this person not saying something to me right now, because they feel awkward about what they know from the book?”

WS: Right? Writing my memoir, I worked through a lot of the shame that attached to the experiences in my marriage—like I was trying to spin gold out of these hard experiences. But then if I give the book to someone who asks for it and the next time I see them they don’t make eye contact, the shame comes back full force. “They must feel judgmental about me. It’s too awkward for them to say anything.” Actually, it’s more likely that they just didn’t get around to reading it! 

MN: Exactly.

WS: I reread If Nothing four times. It’s wise and vulnerable. You’re covering ground that feels like forbidden territory, something people are not going to be comfortable with: the unrelentingness of addictions, the ways it hurts family and children. I love this line: “Fuck up / in the most beautiful way possible– / every error a mirror / revealing something you may have been / unwilling to see”. That could have been the epigram for my memoir. We both wrote books about fucking up that we also clearly wanted to make beautiful. What’s beautiful about fucking up?

MN: There’s a risky temptation, especially when you’re talking about ugly or uncomfortable parts of the human experience—shame, betrayal, all kinds of harm—to make something too beautiful, too neat. While in my poetry I’m striving for a certain kind of presentation on the page, I had to work against that impulse at times in order to be true to the messy life underneath the poem.

WS: It’s important not to prettify it.

MN: You don’t want to make it too beautiful which would be somehow false or inauthentic. There is a need for the music to be there, for the beauty to be there, even when looking at off-putting and off-limits topics. For a time, I was a total fuck up, and I caused so much pain. Over the years, I wrestled and stayed with this discomfort and it became the core of the book. An essential element of the human experience, especially if we’re talking about growing and changing and transforming, is to acknowledge the places that we fuck up in our lives, to like really get in there and not just gloss over them: That’s the mirror.

I’m remembering early on in your memoir, after you’ve been kicked out of your home. You’re up late and you can’t sleep and you keep thinking about politicians who are unfaithful: 

“They follow a formula. There is an affair, often conducted via the internet, that dark highway of the collective unconscious. Maybe there is an ugly dick pic. The news spills out, often because of sloppy computer use or misunderstanding about the public record of the exchanges. At first the man responds defensively, shocked, testing to see if he can still hide. When facts emerge, he shifts to a more contrite stance. He apologizes. He admits he is human. He asks for forgiveness, A minister stands nearby.”

There’s a recognition that the formula of pat contrition is too simple. There’s no real redemption. There’s no real change. And that was definitely not going to allow me to exist in the kind of life I wanted to live.

WS: It doesn’t reveal anything new or get at any deeper, more complex truth. The idea of errors as mirrors compels us to look at something we don’t want to see. For me, that’s where the fuck up becomes beautiful. It reveals something deeper, truer and messier than what we might want to acknowledge.

MN: That formula isn’t serving our world. 

WS: Closely related to fucking up is talking about shame. I love the last poem in your book, “And Then.” I first saw it in The Missouri Review. “Beneath my shame, / the body / was a raw red thing / untrained in acceptance.” Do we ever transcend the shame?

MN: That was the very last poem I wrote for the collection, after I thought the book was done and had already been accepted. It was one of those gift poems—I had no idea where it came from—and it tied things together in a way that made everything more coherent, more potent. 

There are parts of my past where the shame doesn’t go away because I acted so out of alignment with my values. I never stop feeling bad about it. But because of the way that I show up and have shown up for years and years now, the impact of that shame is smaller, not because it’s less significant, but because my capacity to be with the discomfort is greater. I know who I’ve become, and yet, I keep looking at those parts of myself and my past that I will never be okay with. I don’t know if it’s something you ever transcend, but to continue looking at it is a part of what makes something greater possible, and may allow for people to know us in more complex ways, and to still love us right for all the flaws.

WS: I am reading a book with some other therapists about shame. The writer, Pat DeYoung, refers to “ethical shame.” There’s a type of shame that is part of being human, living in community, that is actually okay. It’s okay for us to feel a certain amount of dissonance when our actions don’t line up with how we want to be. She talks a lot about how it applies to whiteness, white supremacist culture, things that are kind of embedded in us, as white men. If we confront it truly, we will feel what is called an ethical shame. And that’s okay.

This is different from a more chronic shame that causes anxiety and depression and interferes with having healthy relationships. 

MN: I agree with that. The ethical shame is when we’ve acted out of alignment with our beliefs. 

But there is also a destructive shame that comes from a story that our culture supplies us, that tells us there’s something wrong with us. It makes me curious about your relationship with shame. A lot of your memoir explores your challenges to speak to your full identity in a culture that’s constrained by either/or, gay/straight binaries. For your gay friends, during the AIDS pandemic, it feels like a betrayal when you’re in a relationship with a woman and getting married. 

WS: A lot of the queer writers I was reading when I wrote the memoir—Oscar Wilde and James Baldwin, for example—are preoccupied with prisons. The preoccupation with shame and wrong-doing and condemnation is endemic to the queer experience, like a genetic thread of intergenerational trauma. In my experience, growing up, there was a lot of shame before I even got to my marriage, because I did not fit the mold that my brothers fit. I was the Misfit Gay Kid. You had to be quiet and hide if you were going to survive.

MN: You also address the idea of monogamy versus consensual non-monogamy. There’s still a binary there, as in marriage or no marriage, right? Those limitations in language inform the spaces we inhabit in the world, as you consider in your book, noting that certain labels lead to feeling smaller and smaller. I feel like that’s one of the impulses that shame leads to—this feeling of worthlessness and hiding. 

Writing about those experiences runs counter to the shame.

WS: I was talking about this with another therapist who’s really smart about shame. She told me, as soon as we speak about the shameful experience, it’s not shame anymore. We’re in the process of translating it into something else. The visceral, emotional condition of shame is wordless, voiceless, and immobilizing. Shame is actually part of our nervous system’s freeze response. It’s that part of our bodies that helps us shut down when we’re getting close to death. Writing about it—in poetry or memoir—is what breaks it up.

MN: You mentioned when you were sharing parts of the memoir with your partner, you would fall back into the same arguments that were referenced in the text. In recreating or preserving these moments of betrayal or regret, do you have any momentary re-experiencing of that original shame? Even if you think you’ve transformed it, you go back in? 

WS: I don’t think I’ll ever feel good about the betrayal in my marriage. It was very injurious. I have tried to make amends with my honesty and the way I show up for the relationship today. We’ve also kind of collaboratively reconstructed our marriage so that it doesn’t require lying, or hiding or secrecy, or anything like that. 

There’s an acknowledgement that we had kind of set ourselves up to be in a difficult situation. When we decided to get married, the language was very constrained. The word ‘queer,’ in the expansive sense we use today, or LGBTQ+, did not exist when I was younger. This way that bisexual men feel erased when they partner with people of the opposite sex. You were compelled to choose to be straight when you made a vow to be monogamous, which ultimately wasn’t healthy for me as a bisexual man.

MN: At one point you write, “I don’t know how to tell the story of who we are, because I don’t know how to tell the story of who I am”.

WS: I don’t think my story would have happened if the world hadn’t developed more inclusive, more diverse ways of talking about queerness and intimacy.

MN: At one point in the book—you’ve been kicked out of the house, and you’re laying immobilized on a hard hotel mattress—you start thinking about when your father left your family without explanation when you were a teenager. 

WS: I start the memoir with certain stories about who I am, like my perception that my father rejected me, that part of the reason he left my mother and us was because he couldn’t stand having a misfit gay-acting son. And then as an adult, when I was kicked out of the house, I felt this immobilizing shame. It was so hard to get through the cloud of it, to get back home. I realized, “Oh, maybe him not coming home again had nothing to do with me. Maybe he just fucked up really bad and he was debilitated by the shame. But I don’t have to be debilitated by the shame. Actually, I’m gonna figure out some damn way to get back home. But it’s going to be so painful walking through that door again.”

MN: I want to honor you for that work. For me, that is one of the most powerful parts of the memoir. I’m always looking for people who are going to stay for the hard stuff, to dig in when it feels impossible. We don’t have many good public models of this, because we don’t get to see the inside of people’s lives in the same way. And it’s completely counter to the narrative of your experience with your father, too. 

WS: One of the other thematic overlaps between us is this idea of narrative, whether it’s poetry or memoir, as a kind of rebuilding, restoring or healing. You describe addiction as the absence of a coherent story. “I was inside with no story to save me from myself.”

MN: In order for addiction to continue as long as it did, I had to have a story that I was still functional in my life as an addict. Then it became non-functional. But the story that kept me there was so powerful. As my life around the addiction got worse, the dissonance was too great. It wasn’t a story anymore. It was a jumble of lies. 

WS: I love this question you pose: “All the second chances, / what did they teach me, if not to dream / more wildly toward a kingdom in which the king / was not so cruel?” There’s a different fairy tale we can imagine and inhabit.

MN: Without that imagination, it’s like there is no going forward into something different. I don’t shed all the parts of my past, even though I’m so much healthier than I was. I have to be constantly imagining that kingdom. My willingness to do this is strengthened by continuing to look closely at these places of fucking up.

WS: Like me, you are an artist who is also a therapist. How do those two roles you play influence each other?

MN: It’s probably true that most writers have a different way of listening to other people and a different way of hearing. I used to call my practice of poetry “the long listening.” It requires being open and attentive and curious, noticing and tuning myself to the sounds of a conversation. If we’re good at our work, what we hear isn’t just the specific word we say back, it’s the thread underneath and the subtext.

WS: Some of the best training I got as a therapist actually happened in my MFA program. Therapy really is about helping people find a different story, a more creative story that reaches deep, to describe the things that happened to them.

MN: One last question I want to ask you: What is a safe man in a time when toxic masculinity is lauded? Why is it important to ask this question, as opposed to “what is a good man?”

WS: My friends who are people of color are speaking in my ear right now, reminding me that the best I can do is to be a safer man. I have been too socialized in the ways of white men and their unearned privileges, so I’m always vulnerable to the kinds of toxic masculinity I‘m the first to criticize in other men. I’ll always make mistakes and ruptures, no matter how hard I try. The other day I was doing a workshop with another therapist–she’s Latina and an amazing friend to me–and I said something half-assed without thinking, and she said, “Well, that was some pretty good mansplaining going on right there.” And I realized, Jesus Christ, I did just do that, sometimes it just spills out when I’m tired or not thinking. I’m so glad we have the kind of relationship where she can say something, even tease me about it. Nobody is 100 perfectly intentional in every interaction. And so I think the best I can aim for is to be a safer man.

MN: Agreed! This, for me, goes to the heart of some of what it means to be a safe man: men who are willing to look at the ugliness within themselves, who are willing to be honest about what they see there, and to acknowledge the ways that they hurt others, and then to lean into the work of growing and changing. It’s not a fixed position. It’s not a destination you arrive at, and then you’re done. This is lifelong work.