“If you don’t tell the story someone else might, and they’ll change the facts”: José Vadi and Mensah Demary in Conversation

José Vadi’s work for Catapult magazine was unlike anything I’d encountered before. His essays are embodied and imbued with musicality, experimentation, play, and risk. After editing and publishing his essay “Getting to Suzy’s,” an on-the-ground examination of life in San Francisco amid rampant gentrification, I invited José to submit more work. And after publishing two […]

José Vadi’s work for Catapult magazine was unlike anything I’d encountered before. His essays are embodied and imbued with musicality, experimentation, play, and risk. After editing and publishing his essay “Getting to Suzy’s,” an on-the-ground examination of life in San Francisco amid rampant gentrification, I invited José to submit more work. And after publishing two more essays—one on the band The Mars Volta, the other a dispatch from a day in the life of a Bay Area commuter—we discussed the idea of a collection, even though we had no idea what that might look like.

Following years of covertly working together on this project in our laboratory of Google Docs, Track Changes, and emails, Inter State, a debut collection of poetic, linked essays that investigate the past and present state of California, is published now under Soft Skull Press.

On the eve of publication, I sat down with José to discuss Inter State, our working relationship as editor and writer, and this incredible, collaborative, long-distance journey creating a book I am proud to have on the Soft Skull list.

Mensah Demary: You’re not just an essayist; you’re a playwright, a poet, a filmmaker, a skateboarder, and more—can you talk about what led you to writing the pieces that eventually became Inter State?

José Vadi: My approach to writing Inter State was to use California to encapsulate different interests deeply rooted in a place that has been the hosting grounds for my life and my curiosities. The challenge was to write these essays as if I were across from you at a table, crafting a very embracing dialogue. In terms of being a playwright and poet, I wanted the language to move throughout the state as much as the prose. It was fun to play around with form—some essays are more stressed than others, some are wandering.

MD: This was a long process, with a lot of workshopping and talking through pieces as if we were in the same room, when in actuality it was mostly over the phone or in Track Changes and Google Docs. I think we found a good rapport, figuring out what was going to really make this collection work. Your form was literally taking shape piece by piece—it was interesting and fascinating trying to keep up with that without screwing with the process too much.

Speaking of process, what was it like for you to work together over years secretly assembling and revising this book?

JV: I was looking for an opportunity to be recognized as a writer, submitting essays and poetry prose pretty heavily around. You and I met through a magazine you previously edited that I would submit to and receive very kind rejections from with encouraging comments. When you started working with Catapult magazine and accepting essays, I was already intrigued by adopting poetic prose into the essay form. Writing for Catapult enabled me to step into becoming an essayist in a really true sense that honored the voice I was trying to create. Other editorial feedback truncated my style and didn’t understand what I was trying to do, but you very much did. You let me know that I could submit essays any time, which is when the idea of a manuscript really began gestating. This was summer of 2017, and we weren’t necessarily working on a book to sell, which was kind of liberating because it allowed me to focus on the prose in curious, intuitive and experimental ways.

This project stretched from those original essays like “Getting to Suzy’s.” “Daddy’s Home” and “Spot Check” were pieces I wrote in 2017-18. When I submitted initial versions of “Inter State” the essay in Spring 2019, I think we both discovered a North Star for the project. So then we went back to the other essays that were already published and started getting them up to that standard. What followed was a couple of years of me at the grindstone and our back-and-forth, getting feedback, building this manuscript.

I lost a lot of my writing community coming out of my MFA program at Mills College and the fleeting scene of poetry in the Bay area. People move away, people stop writing, people get jobs, people just don’t want to do it anymore—they get interested in visual arts or become book artists, whatever—so our relationship was critical because it was the basis of me becoming an author. A back-and-forth relationship with someone who understands what you’re trying to get at, the larger goals, and isn’t intimidated by experimental language is invaluable as a writer, and I took your feedback with zero grains of salt. You had a vision for these pieces and were very encouraging around creating the book I wanted to create, not just a type of manuscript that would sell.

“I hope that Inter State enables anyone to realize that they’re an active participant in the history around them, and they can document these histories at any time.”

MD: It’s been an interesting journey from an editor’s perspective. I took a leap of faith at the beginning of this process, and I was upfront with you, José, about there being no promises or guarantees regarding the end result. I took the leap because I saw a writer with a poet’s sensibility translating that prose into essays, which demonstrated to me an opportunity for an essay collection that hadn’t yet existed. I had to learn, as an editor, what would make an essay collection work, how to create one—I didn’t have an answer to that question, I just knew that you were a gifted writer who could pull off something, and I suspected you had the determination to work through some of the kinks in this process, as well as the willingness to build the process as we went along. It was risky, but I was also motivated by my commitment to not selling you short. This book was a top-secret mission. No one in the office (Soft Skull, Counterpoint, or Catapult) knew I was doing this, and I wanted to keep it that way because I didn’t know how this would work, and I found it liberating to work in that kind of laboratory setting.

Through our relationship, I’ve found that editing is far more collaborative than I’d ever recognized. I couldn’t have edited these pieces in this way without being able to talk to you as an artist and trying to understand the context of why you were doing what you were doing, not making assumptions. When you have an intuitive relationship with a writer like this, that’s half the battle. The other half is to ask pointed questions. A lot of these pieces were revised five times or more, and some essays didn’t even make it into the collection. It was a lot of work and a lot of thought, and I learned not just about editing on the line level, but creating a book.

JV: After our work together for the magazine, the idea of this project being published elsewhere was pretty ridiculous. Early on, Mensah, you expressed wanting to bring somebody up from the bottom to a publication-ready level, and that was amazing to know. This entire process has been a two-way street where iron sharpens iron. We strengthened each other’s skill sets over time and it’s crazy to think about a relationship developing that way. When we finally met in San Francisco for the first time, it was such a trip because the screen divide was gone.

MD: And it was fortuitous because I thought Inter State could fit on the Soft Skull list, but I had no foresight into what would happen one year later. I didn’t know I would become Editor-In-Chief of the list that you had a personal connection to. This book is my first Soft Skull title, and we couldn’t have predicted that this is how things would align. This is the perfect book for Soft Skull’s evolution while shepherding a new list.

Our working relationship taught me a lot about what it means to take risks and protect an author’s voice. Writers, if they’re allowed to write the way they want, break rules and disregard grammar and style. Rules and conventions can squeeze on writers when they should merely be constraints that allow the writer to operate and make more space. This risk-taking style of writing and editing is what I hope to continue to bring to Soft Skull as we evolve. Working on Inter State opened my mind to new possibilities.

How did you come up with the title for the collection? Why two words? Has the title changed or expanded in meaning since you originally wrote these essays?

JV: Growing up in Southern California, freeways are your backbone, they’re literally your initial world view. I started thinking about Highway 101, I-5, road trips with the family in the early ’90s. I was hesitant to call it anything related to a freeway or a road, but spent time looking at the word and studying the definition—seeing how it was related to interring and burying; recognizing the connection that had with my grandfather, who passed in 2011 and was the catalyst of this book—and thinking about the relationship with earth itself: the ground, unearthing, soil. A lot of those questions and associations start the essay “Inter State,” but are also seen throughout the book. It’s all related to these ideas of space and the histories that are buried within these areas, within these regions.

That’s the first half of the title. The second half has to do with the conflicting relationship I have with the state. LA pulled me for a while, and now I’ve completely uprooted myself to Sacramento, where I just moved six weeks ago. California holds different worlds. If LA is a series of villages connected by freeways, California is that on steroids. There are many places I cross in this book and a lot I don’t even touch, which are unrepresented but still a part of the state’s story and history. It was your idea to make the subtitle Essays From California, which really wrapped up and expanded the meaning of the title, because California’s history is ongoing and my relationship to it changes every day.

MD: One meaning I took away once we’d compiled the manuscript and settled on that title was the embodied nature of the essays themselves. Their interiority had to have a kinetic movement that wasn’t first-person omniscient, or navel-gazing work; it had to be that on the ground: feeling the asphalt, hearing bits of conversation, or seeing details like shoes on a sleeping man on a 6 a.m. train, details that harken back to the inter state of being. I was happy to see all the essays retain this throughline of being in a place and having that place envelop you in a way that animates everything and takes readers into another dimension. The book is fast, not because it’s short or easy to read, but it moves and breathes and has a real musical quality.

Can you speak to the subtle but incredible throughline of skateboarding and skate culture that weave in and out of this book?

JV: A lot of writing this book was allowing my mind to wander and trying to articulate those wanderings. Non-skateboarders—citizens or secular members of society—aren’t converted to this completely new world view that’s created by street skating, in particular, where you start seeing your spots not just as the potential for skateboarding but the history of what came before you, especially in some more famous spots. I wanted to embrace my thoughts in place, experiencing the thing that I’m writing about, and so skateboarding had to be there because I’m always thinking about skateboarding and it was a challenge to write about it, especially for a predominantly secular audience that doesn’t have this obsession. When you run into other skaters, in new places, you already have a shared cerebral map, and I wanted to express that.

Growing up in the San Gabriel Valley, if you don’t have a car you’re kind of screwed, so having a skateboard is a huge, liberating form of transportation. I’m realizing in my mid-to-late-thirties (depending on who you ask) that skateboarding informs how you navigate, the streets or alleys you do or don’t take, the negative spaces of urban environments. Skateboarders are willing to take risks with their navigation, and that curiosity and willingness to be present with a space, knowing that it can go away or leave you at any time, is so much of what I think Inter State is about as a person, let alone a skateboarder or Californian. I don’t take skateboarding for granted, and that’s why I imbued these essays with that theme.

MD: I’m one of those civilians, I’ve never skateboarded, but I think there’s something deeply Californian and personal and cultural about skateboarding detectable in your work that’s also connected to the throughline of an embodied narrative as expressed through different modes of transportation, from the board to the back seat of the car to public transit. The skateboard being an important vehicle with which to be in a changing landscape that’s here today, gone tomorrow, like the board itself, or the person on the board. With a state as vast as California, you need to be open and willing to inhabit multiple perspectives. A skateboard is a personal device that you have to prepare and take care of and take chances with.

What do you hope readers will take away from your book, both regionally and more widely?

JV: I really hope that Inter State enables anyone to realize that they’re an active participant in their own history and the history around them, and that they can document these histories at any time. I hope this book encourages you to document the people, places, and things in your life that mean something to you, and to experience them while they’re here. I’m hoping to write more about skateboarding, as well as more of California’s history that I found while researching this book. I’m encouraged to continue to explore and be curious.

MD: Personally, I hope readers will take away a vision of how California came to be and where it’s going to go, and hear the stories from people who are being pushed out, not to mention the ecological or existential threats that mean losing home and environment. There’s something foreboding about the essays that speaks to those who worked hard to make something like a California, but are the last to reap the benefits. I hope readers take away that it’s crucial to document where you are, because memories and people fade, and if you don’t tell the story someone else might and they’ll change the facts.

How, if at all, has this project changed your writing/life? And what’s next?

JV: This project has been our top-secret mission for years, and to have it finally come out and acquired by a press I grew up really loving has been great. Skateboarding has a relationship with Soft Skull as well, and to be continuing that legacy has been really cool. I’ve stepped into a new skill set and expanded my voice in ways I couldn’t have if I hadn’t remained committed to this project and honored the trust that you, Mensah, put into me and my work. To have that support really enabled me to trust my gut, write stories that meant a lot to me, and try to write them in a way that honors the people in the stories. I wrote this book not assuming there would be a book number two. I wrote it hoping to create a personal, ethnographic monument that I’m really privileged to have authored.