Last night at Powell’s on Hawthorne (where upon moving to Portland in 2018 I worked as a register jockey during the holiday season) Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore gave another stupendous reading. She never reads for very long, preferring the dynamic back and forth with the audience that comes after, although I could listen to her read her work for hours, and I hope one day someone makes an effort to record her reading at least a few of her books. Her reading voice is sing-songy, questioning, and humorous, and she often falls into a pattern of joking with the audience before quickly pivoting to moments of intense grief, and yet her tone stays the same. It’s hard to describe. I still remember when I first heard her read from her work aloud after having only read it on paper for a number of years. It was a completely different experience which should be preserved if we want to retain all the layers of this writer’s body of work for future generations of queer weirdos.
Readings at Powell’s bastard child in southeast Portland are an awkward affair. The whole place only seems to possess ten folding chairs, which was nowhere near enough to seat the large crowd who turned out on a chilly January night. Mattilda was warm and open and limber as usual, encouraging the audience to do what they needed to do to care for themselves, move around, stretch, although as usual, she was the only one who took up the invitation. You don’t really want to break the spell when you’re listening to Mattilda read. Leni Zumas interlocuted and asked a few thoughtful questions, including one about public and private space in her new novel Terry Dactyl. It’s true that Mattilda’s work manages to always keep gentrification and the deterioration of radically public space at its center without being didactic, though it can be hard to pin Mattilda down in conversation about specifics. Her speech is elliptical, her thoughts never moving straight from a question to an answer, which is part of the appeal—something I learned when interviewing her for smoke and mold about The Freezer Door in 2020. (Could that really have been 2020 that we met up and walked around Seattle’s Cap Hill neighborhood with masks on? We met on the lawn in front of the Museum of Asian Art in Volunteer Park, where she said I would find her sunbathing on an unseasonably warm November day.) You go where Mattilda takes you, and you enjoy the ride.
The last question asked by an audience member was about Mattilda’s syntactical pattern of making a statement, then contradicting that statement, then landing somewhere in between, usually all in the same sentence. (I’d include an example here, but of course, as soon as I go looking for one I can’t seem to find it.) It’s one of the hallmarks of her writing that people tend to love or can’t stand. As a lover of it myself, it can get tiring at times. I don’t think every statement can stand up to this kind of inversion; sometimes the sentence fails in the face of such strain, like a credit card being bent in half over and over again until it snaps. But last night I realized that this failure is also the point, and that this construction is a perfect example of a kind of expansive gender experimentation that so many of us experiment with: I am this—no, I’m actually that—no wait, maybe I’m somewhere in between or none of it at all. There is no shortcut to the final rest, and in fact, there really isn’t any rest at all, when you get down to it. This constant motion, this “disorientation that opens the mind” is what I continue to return to Mattilda’s work for, and it never disappoints.
(quoted from Mattilda’s 2023 book Touching the Art)