I met Nadine Maestas at her and Emalee's home in Cap Hill. She made a really bitchin cheese spread. Apparently one of her exes was really into cheese, and taught her the intricacies. And we had a giant conversation. I love Nadine's writing. I love her as a performer. As a younger chicanx artist, I really value her support and friendship. I see her as a mentor, and someone who I can connect with as a latinx artist in Seattle.
This interview is the start of a project that I might keep doing. I want to try and document Seattle's poetry history. The idea for this project comes from an event I helped curate for La Sala last year. It was a Dia De Los Muertos event at Hugo House, and the idea was to have modern poets respond to Seattle writers that had passed on. I wanted to find people I had never heard of, which led me through some crazy Google wormholes, and into the UW Archives building. I had never thought about Seattle's creative history before. Or it's actual history. I invited Nadine to read, and after we got to talking, I realized Nadine had so much of this history, had been a node of this communal network for a while.
I think the idea sparked when I started Unpoetry at the Frye. Anna (Frye Public Engagement) gave me a book that was a collection of writers co-curated by Rebecca Brown. They had done a project featuring some readings that was similar to what Unpoetry at the Frye would be. It was probably the first time I realized that Unpoetry was part of a large lineage. I never thought Unpoetry was solely unique, but I never asked the question of what came before.
I've been thinking a lot about disappearing history and stories. I never even really did the research for my home town in El Paso. I'm a little too disconnected from that space now. I've also been on a journey of understanding my lineage over the last few years. The La Sala project came at a perfect time. As did this conversation with Nadine. This interview starts the project that I continued in the Chum News Dining & Writing section with Jeanne Heuving.
How did you get to Seattle?
I moved here from San Francisco. I did my undergrad at UC Santa Cruz. I studied with Peter Gizzi. Then I moved to New York City for about a year. I moved with some poets that I knew in graduate school. They all were in graduate programs. I got waitlisted everywhere I applied my first year.
Initially I almost ended up in the fire department. I was struggling to find a job. One disparate day I was sitting on the stoop just saying 'Fuck. I can't find a job. This is so hard.' I looked up and there was a police station across the way with a sign saying 'now hiring.' And was like should I join the police department? I really need a job. But I was like I don't think I can do that. I'm probably going to smoke weed at some point and get kicked off the force. And then I was like maybe I should try the fire department. I looked into it and I ended up signing up. I went through the on paper training. The class and everything. It was like this huge class at NYU with 500 people there, like 3 women and 497 men. I passed that and was about to be shipped off to training in Virginia. And then I got a job in publishing.
I did that for a year. And in that time I reapplied to graduate school. I applied again to an MFA program at Brown and the University of Michigan. I didn't really want to, but my undergraduate professor really encouraged me to. He said they had a lot of funding. He really worked on my friends to make sure I went to this orientation at Santa Cruz. They tricked me by telling me we were going to go get pizza. There was pizza there but it was an orientation to the MFA program at Michigan.
I ended up getting into Michigan. I didn't even know where Ann Arbor was. That's where I met Emalee. I hated Michigan so much. I never lived anywhere so racist or homophobic. After that I needed some healing so I moved to San Francisco. It was really great to be involved in the poetry scene there, same with Manhattan.
When I applied to school again, Emalee and I strategically applied to schools that either had a program for both of us at the same university or a school in the same city or region that we could each go to. We got into two schools. Well – she got in almost everywhere, she's a superstar but we both got into two places : U-Penn and UW. U-Penn is top dog in my field, and UW is top in her field. And we were trying to decide and I was like honestly there's really only one question to ask ourselves to know the answer to this – do you want to be gay in Philly or do you want to be gay in Seattle?
What was the time frame around all that ?
We moved here in 2005. It's very time consuming to be in a PhD program, so I didn't get involved in the poetry community at all. I did make myself a promise that I would stop reading fiction and immerse myself in poetry. I had this professor in my graduate program Thylias Moss. She was a very eccentric short woman with a lot of personality. She told me one day, Nadine ! I just learned how to read poetry. And I was like What? You're in the midst of a McArthur Genius Award, you're a tenured professor, what do you mean? She said I could read poetry before but I just really learned how to read poetry. I couldn't understand what she was talking about.
That really stuck in my head so I decided I would immerse myself so deeply in poetry that it would become second nature to read it. I stopped reading fiction and started writing my dissertation in poetry. I didn't care what century or what culture it was from as long as it was poetry. After that I didn't read fiction until maybe my kids were born.
You got involved in the poetry scene in Seattle after you graduated then?
Yeah, maybe three or four years after I had been here. I felt weird and isolated and kind of lost and confused about what I was doing. I felt disconnected from people and community. The University is it's own community but you don't really get to be in the community. The type of poetry that came to the University – some of it is good, a lot of it is quite good – but it just had this vibe – kind of a quiet austerity that I was so tired of. I was exhausted by it. I wasn't excited and I wasn't inspired.
There wasn't a lot going on in Seattle. I think the best reading at the time was Jeanne Heuving and Robert Mittenthall and that group of people who were running The Subtext reading series. And they were really the only people that were bringing really excited writers, like experimental writers who would try crazier stuff.
Is there any performer or reader that you remember, who was there ?
At the time, when I went, there were some Language poets. They weren't the most exciting bunch of poets, but it was better than most of the stuff I was encountering in Seattle.
One day I saw a workshop with Nate Mackey. I think Maged (Zaher) was in that workshop. It was run through Paul (Nelson) from the Cascadia Poetics Lab, which at the time was called Spoken Word Lab, SPLAB and eventually it became the Seattle Poetics Lab, and then eventually it became the Casacadia Poetics Lab. I actually engineered that name change, and the rebranding of it.
Paul Nelson moved up here from Auburn right around that time. I think he moved up a year before. There were several poets that moved out here from Philly and started different events, and that seemed like a change in the trajectory of the Seattle poetry scene. Then there were all of a sudden several poetry things.
How do the Philly people fit into this?
Paul started these drop-in workshops and it was a pretty cool format for a community – you could just drop in, throw $5 in a hat, or not, and engage with poets and learn about new poets through books or poems people present. There would be a different presenter every week.
I think – Greg Bem, Jeremy Springsteed, Alex Bleecker – they met in one of Paul's workshops and started the BreadLine series. Which was amazing. The format of (Breadline) was awesome. I feel like a lot of the reading series in Seattle now follow – it had an open mic drop-in and three featured performers. There was always a writer, usually a poet, then there was sometimes like a musician or an experimental – not quite sound artist – but sometimes – and then there was often something unexpected.
One of my favorite things (at Breadline) was someone had an animated film that they had done about all these scientists that had died but doing cool shit – like Marie Curie was doing this cool research and she died, this person was doing this cool research on whales and then they died – and somehow they died in relation to the research they were doing. It was both humorous and educational. And it was really awesome.
The way they structured (Breadline) was good at bringing an audience in. A lot of people seem to be doing a similar style now – a few featured readers and then a drop in list – Speak Out Seattle is doing that.
Breadline was a good time because there wasn't a huge poetry scene in Seattle yet. I think Seattle was pretty hungry, it was growing, as it always seems to be fuckin growing. BreadLine was super popular. It was packed. It was at Vermillion. It was pretty consistent. That was somewhere between 2008-2011. They had a really good run. There was kind of a vacancy in the Seattle poetry scene when they stopped.
Were you reading in all these things? How active were you?
I started reading at events that Paul would set up. He was actually a really big force in the scene. Between the Cascadia Poetry Festival that he led. The drop-in reading series. Sometimes he would do events in South Seattle, like it wasn't a consistently named series, there would be a reading at a weird shop selling various things – stickers, candles, baby shirts – you know, one of those tiny shops. There were pop ups here and there. He would also do a Ginsberg marathon every year. It would go all night and then we would read "Howl" at dawn.
I was doing that. I would get recommendations for other things. I got offered to be a feature at Bread Line, and then I was invited to join open mic a few times.
I started being less snobby about where I was going to read and how I was going to engage with people because of this writer I went to school with in Michigan, Brent Armendinger and he asked me to go to this reading series at this place called the Pink Elephant in San Francisco. I was like 'I don't want to go to that – it's just like lame gay poetry – like I know we're gay Brent but it feels like identity poetry – it's not very good.' He looked at me and he said, 'Nadine if people like us don't go it's going to stay mediocre and bad. This is our community and if we don't bring better poetry to it it's not going to get better.' And he was right. If people like us don't go it's never going to get better.
Breadline dissolves into many different things, that's around 2008 - 2011. Was there a consistent event series that came out of that?
I feel like there have been a lot of reading series that people pop up and do their thing and then disappear. There were some spoken word things around and that feels so different from a poetry reading series – it's more a performance.
Greg did some weird poetry festival, a tiny one, affiliated with stuff in Ballard. He asked me to do it, and we read at like Bank of America. It's still one of the weirdest places I've ever read.
Jeremy started doing events. This guy Gyles was doing an event at an underground comic book shop in Ballard. Kelle Grace Gaddis was running events for a while at this gallery space on capital hill.
When Timothy opened up CAM (Common Area Maintenance) that was really interesting. It was originally going to be a visual art space, and I don't know how he linked up with the writers. To see people keep using that space is awesome. Amy (Hirayama) has invited me to read for a couple things she's curated there as well.
Margin Shift starts up not too long after (Breadline ends). It wasn't Deborah Woodard curating yet. It was my friend Gregory Laynor. He was one of the first organizers of Margin Shift. It was Gregoy and Maged and Jane Wong was an organizer for a while, but it wasn't at the same time.
Every time Margin Shift would change curators it would change the vibe. By changing curators it had this capacity to re-expand and bring new energy into it. I think to get new readers and audience into a reading series you have to structure something about it to bring that new energy in. When we get entrenched in our poetry communities it's easy to forget how to engage with things outside. It's almost easy – it's almost the goal – to cultivate that community. But it can also feel exclusionary to people. Trying to make a dent and find your way in can feel very difficult.
Margin Shift has been around for a while now. It really does have a different vibe. It's always interesting to see them in different spaces. Margin Shift was at CAM for a while. That seemed like a really great match. I was sad to see them move back to the Hugo House.
As great as the Hugo House is, there's something that really kills the fun vibe of audiences. Something about (Hugo House) – it's wonderful but it almost has this quieting factor – it quiets the energy of literature – poetry in particular. Even before when it was in its older spaces. They wanted to produce an austere space. It's like you're having this event and it's lively and wild and people are chattering in the background and you'd get chastised.
The UW MFA program had a reading series called Castalia – they used to have on campus and at some point it moved to the Hugo House. I think it was around 2015. It was in that post Bread Line window.
It was really good for that reading series to get off campus and engage with the community. As much as the University is promising public humanities programming and saying they really want to engage the public, they don't ever engage the public. I think that Castalia was kind of trapped in that. They moved out and they were able to engage with a more public audience, and suddenly they were appearing in The Stranger.
Kris Hall (aka Barracuda Guarisco) was curating events. He is kind of a mini chaotic tornado of beauty. His reading series and events pop up and then they disappear. The first he did was at a clothing shop – a gothy boutique clothing shop on Capital Hill. And it was called "La Merde" and had a rat on the poster. That was cool. That's what I thought was cool about Kris's events. They were all over the place. You kind of never know what you're going to get with a Kris Hall event.
I don't think it's a bad thing to have a bit of chaos. It allows for space for community building. It is allowing the community to build or decide or cypher through these different kinds of styles, rather than a university or a Hugo House or a Seattle Arts and Lectures kind of curatorial style, "we are an established literary place and we are important and our opinions are important and we are telling what good literature is. This is what good poetry is."
Graham Issac was briefly doing a reading series. At some point him and Kris Hall, or him and someone else linked up with Hex Enduction. And then they were doing reading series in totally random spaces. One I did for them was an archway in Lake City. There was good poetry but the acoustics were terrible. There was a lot of traffic at the time we read. They weren't honking, they were just driving. In some ways this is kind of what poetry is meant to do if you are really going to engage with the public.
There's a lot of reasons I wanted to talk to you, but for this project, I thought you would be perfect because I see you at so many different things, either as an audience, or a performer.
I always have this compulsion to be engaged with the community and it's baffling to me that so many of my "poetry colleagues" -- like intentionally put that in quotes – it feels weird. Even when I was in graduate school I was like why aren't we doing readings, why are we only at the university, why aren't we in the community.
I do love and appreciate the space of the university. There are good poets there. But the vibe changes so completely depending on where you see poets read.
When you're at a bar, or even at Vermillion, you have to compete with the people that are there, not necessarily air time but the space of the chatter. I kind of like that – like if you're in poetry and you can't bring it – that should be a sign – if you need people to tell the audience to be quiet you're not bringing it.
At the same time, some poetry is not meant for loud spaces. It's quiet poetry and it's really great poetry but it's not ever going to be able to compete in a public space with people.
It's interesting to see who will engage in public and who won't. I feel like knowing someone like Jeanne (Heuving). I appreciate her vibe. She's an elder poet now. She's fantastic. You can still get her to read at a space that's not conventional. And not every writer who teaches at universities and colleges does. I love that.
Other poets who I've talked to are like "I don't think that people invite me any more because I'm old now." And you're like forty four. You're talking to someone who is older than you and reads all over town. You think they don't invite you because you're older but really, people don't invite you because you don't engage with the community, and they don't remember you.
The community has a really short memory. If you don't show up they don't remember that you're still in the community. They don't even think you're part of the community because you're entrenched in your university community or your high falutin arts community. I love high falutin arts, as well as low falutin, but people don't remember if you aren't going to show up and engage and participate.
The whole thing about being a poet is you need community. It's such a community based thing.
Even if you're introverted, you at some point have to dip your toe in some social aspect of it. It's hard to be a poet without the community knowing who you are. It's possible. But it's hard.
Poetry is probably one of the last artistic communities that sits outside of capitalism. Because nobody buys poetry, because there's not really much of a living outside of patrons or grants or prizes or universities, and even then, it's not even that common – poetry has this capacity to sit outside of capitalism in a way that a lot of things don't. That means that it requires participation and community to survive and to thrive – and that you need to participate in the community that you want to be seen in.
It's one of those hard balances – your life gets big so it's hard to participate – but if you're not actually going out, being seen, talking, engaging with the art form – you will disappear. Sometimes I think that's a design feature that sucks, but sometimes – we're all trying our hardest to live multiple different lives and this poetry thing we do is not the focus all the time – just to come in and out of it – you're just going to lose it
I also think it's really shitty that people only show up when you invite them.
Or if they are on the lineup. I get we're all busy. In my case, I host too many shows. I'm not holding people up to an impossible standard. But like, if you're not showing up to anyone's events and then you're like "no one invites me to things, or no one thinks of me" maybe you should sit and be an audience member and participate in the art form in which you create. It's hard to do. I get it. We all have lives. I put an immense amount of pressure on myself to go out. Sometimes it's impossible. I miss everybodies things all the time but at least I feel like I'm trying to show up.
I can't go to everything, too. The amount of things I put on the calendar that I don't make. But I still try and go. It's cool to encounter other poets. How do you stay current in the field of the city if you're not going around and checking out new talent.