nonpunk.

Non Punk Interviews Nick Mattos:

What did you eat for breakfast this morning and are you happy that you ate it?… 

"This morning, my friend Erika took me out for breakfast at this funny little breakfast place, Junior’s — I had a ham, brie, and caramelized leek breakfast sandwich and way too much coffee. I am happy anytime that I 1) get to eat for free 2) get to have breakfast with a friend 3) get to eat cheese, so I’m thrilled.”

Nice. So, what the hell do you do?

"Mostly, I’m a writer. I’m a founding staff writer and editorial board member for PQ Monthly (www.PQMonthly.com), a LGBTQ newspaper here in Portland; we’ve been going for almost two years now, and it’s been nothing but amazing, especially considering that we’ve actually thrived in an era when print journalism is struggling. My creative nonfiction column 'Everything is Connected' appears in PQ; my previous column, Remember to Breathe, ran for over four years continuously in another regional publication before that. I’m hoping to have a book collecting my old Remember to Breathe columns out by early next year. I do a fair amount of freelancing for a bunch of other publications, too. Finally, I’m working on a novel these days. So, yeah, I keep busy!”

What can you say about the novel so far?

"Well, it’s a work in progress, so all of this is subject to change. The working title is The Place We Were Promised, and it’s fundamentally about faith — how people develop faith in religions, relationships, one another, and themselves, and how that faith can be tested and fall apart. It’s also very much about the idea of a “promised land,” and Californian identity. I grew up in Northern California, right near the coast, and I think that growing up out there in the finishing point for Manifest Destiny does something to you — it reinforces this idea that whatever you’re doing, it’s imperative that you make it work, because there’s nowhere else to go. The Place We Were Promised also draws a lot from Mormon history, the Mormon Trail in particular, as well as the strange, decadent culture of the San Francisco Bay Area right at the burst of the dot com bubble in the late 1990’s. I’ve been collecting ideas and themes for it for quite some time, so it’s really thrilling to watch how all of these themes that inspire me crystallize into a story!”

Okay, so, what does a typical day-in-the life for Nick Mattos entail?

"I get up, pray, drink way too much coffee, and write blog posts for PQ — sometimes it’s a music post, other times it’s a news story. I answer a ton of emails and dick around on Facebook for a bit, then crack down on writing articles. I think that some people, when they think of journalism, visualize something like the Watergate scandals, lots of intrigue and secret sources and chainsmoking at your typewriter. In reality, though, a lot of it is wrangling vastly less glamorous sources, discerning what they said would actually sound good in print, and then later dealing with the public reaction to your work when it comes out. However, for me at least, there’s still chain-smoking! After all that, I have a little side gig of teaching hot yoga at a studio here in SE Portland; I run up there, make people sweat for an hour, and then come home. I eat some dinner — I love cooking for other people, but I am so damn basic when cooking for myself — and then buckle down to work on the novel for a half hour. Then, I pray again and climb into bed, and intend to read in bed, but instead pass out on top of the covers with the book open on my chest.”

Hot yoga, eh? Have you ever thought about what ‘Cold-Yoga’ would be like and would you try it?

"I was on a road trip once and saw this strip mall that had both a hot yoga studio and a frozen yogurt shop; I realized in that moment that I’d totally do frozen yoga, but I’d probably reject hot yogurt.”

Do you or did you listen to punk?

"I grew up in this little tiny town called Sebastopol, in a house on the side of Highway 116. As a weird, isolated queer kid, somehow I had the miraculous fortune of falling into the Riot Grrrl zine scene. It was common at that time to do trades of mixtapes for people’s zines, so when I started making my own, my musical horizons expanded dramatically. That was where I first got exposed to Bikini Kill, Pansy Division, X, Sleater-Kinney, Emily’s Sassy Lime, Fugazi — basically, I got my head bust open.When I was a freshman in high school, I finally made my first punk friend. Her name was Marisa, and holy fuck, I thought she was the coolest girl in school — she drove this huge ancient Duster, wore a hoodie covered with homemade band patches, had a big gorgeous toothy smile and Doc Martens with steel toes. To me, she was like a character from a Francesca Lia Block novel, randomly dropped into this weird little town, and I was in love. We’d smoke clove cigarettes in her Duster and go to the Phoenix Theatre in Petaluma, where we’d see bands like the Groovy Ghoulies, the Donnas, and Soda Pop Fuck You.I drifted away from punk (and sadly, from Marisa) into a weird haze of poetry, drugs, and the late-Nineties rave scene. Then, I moved to Olympia, WA to attend the Evergreen State College; I was really excited to move to the place where Riot Grrrl had its start, and was surprised to find that the scene had pretty much diffused. Luckily, though, I had friends who turned me back on to punk: Lindsay in her ripped fishnets and vintage slips, Micah with his Bad Brains tattoos, Spenser who was so fucking Oakland and Emma who was quietly punker than any of us could ever be. Collectively, they forced me to stop listening to shitty trance music and embrace Joy Division, and thank God for that. Olympia’s a weird town, though, and it’s so small — you’d see the Gossip play at the roller skating rink and then be behind Beth Ditto in line at the bagel shop the next morning, or realize that you were sitting next to Calvin Johnson at the bar, and you’d have to remind yourself over and over that the city itself was not really that pervasively cool, and nor were you; there were just so few places to go that you’d invariably be in everyone else’s company. I remember dating this guy for a little while and then realizing that his housemates were Slim Moon and Portia Sabin, and being absolutely mortified that these Kill Rock Stars people that I basically idolized as a teenager had undoubtedly heard me having sex. That really has a way of killing a sacred cow, you know?Nowadays, honestly, I very seldom listen to anything that could be considered punk unless I’m making a party playlist that demands something that’ll make people jump around a bit. Even so, I don’t think I’d be where I am today if it wasn’t for the random woman who sent me a mixtape with Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl” on it when I was in sixth grade, and for that, I can never thank her enough, wherever and whoever she is.”

What do you like to listen to now?

"One of my favorites is an LA band called AKW — they recently put out an EP, Last Lines, that is just wonderful. Portland trio Beautiful Eulogy is excellent, too; they’re this brilliant mix of hip-hop, gospel, and folk. Another Portland act I really like is Grouper, particularly the album Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill. X Ambassadors! Go get their E.P. Love Songs Drug Songs right now. Finally, Dirty Beaches — my best friend Ryan says that it sounds like 'Elvis trapped at the bottom of a well,' and somehow that is the perfect description.”

If you were to say one person who was a punk, who would it be?

"I by no means am any sort of expert on punk — I mean, shit, look at the folks I identified as punk bands above, I clearly have an extremely liberal and perhaps flawed concept of what the fuck constitutes “punk.” However, I’m a also a total dork, and furthermore a journalist, so I googled the etymology of “punk” and discovered that back in the 1500’s, the term meant “prostitute” or “strumpet,” then came to mean ‘homosexual,’ and then became the term for a young, worthless person before its adoption as the name of a subculture and aesthetic. I know a few sex workers, and a metric shit-ton of homosexuals, but I tend to force worthless folks out of my life, you know?”  

That’s a fucking cop-out, Nick. Who’s a punk?

"Thomas Edison was a punk!"

How about someone who is NOT a punk?

"This is perhaps unsurprisingly a weird answer, but lately I’ve been all about Theodore Roosevelt. Theodore Roosevelt is not a punk.”

Are you sure about that?

"Fairly certain, yes."