Kinetic California
José Vadi’s essays find shape and space on a skateboard
In the essay “Spot Check” from José Vadi’s collection “Inter State,” the Sacramento-based writer weaves together scenes from Northern and Southern California, pulling together moments from his life along with thoughts on architecture, music, photography and authority. And he links it all together with his skateboard.
“Skateboarding is a catalyst for a lot of what I do,” says the essayist and poet, whose work has appeared in the publications Catapult, McSweeney’s and Los Angeles Review of Books. “I don’t think that I would be writing without skateboarding.”
Of the skateboard itself, he adds, “It’s a toy, but it’s also a key to an entirely new perspective of space, your relationship to space and how space can change through your own movements and interactions with it.”
Vadi — who grew up in Pomona, spent much of his adult life in the Bay Area and moved to Sacramento about a week before this interview — points to the array of culture associated with skateboards. Over the decades, the skateboarding world has interacted with photography, zines and music scenes, all of which also have impacted Vadi’s work.
“Growing up in Southern California in the mid- to late ’90s, I very much embraced being a skateboarder,” Vadi says. Yet, he explains, while writing the essays that would form “Inter State,” he noticed that skateboarding appeared as “cameos” in his work. “Spot Check,” he says, was his way of “fully embracing” the skater side of himself.
“Also, I wanted to present skateboarding to, shall we say, a secular audience, an audience that may not understand the nuances of a ledge or a handrail or the various maneuvers that have been done on it,” he adds. “It was fun to test myself as a writer, and a skateboarder too, to present skateboarding in that light.”
The genesis of “Inter State,” which arrives in stores Tuesday, begins with Vadi’s relationship with Soft Skull Press editor-inchief Mensah Demary. “When I met him, I was submitting poems to a website that he managed called Specter Magazine out in New York, and he would kindly reject me with very encouraging notes,” Vadi recalls.
When Demary moved to Catapult magazine, he invited Vadi to submit work. That resulted in two essays that got published and would go on to appear in “Inter State”: “Getting to Suzy’s” and “Standing in the Shadow of Brands: San Francisco at Dawn.” Vadi recalls Demary suggesting that he write a collection of essays about California. Vadi began focusing on the collection in earnest by 2018 and the following year wrote the title essay, an exploration of his family history.
“I think that’s when we really felt that this collection took on a very defined form,” he says.
The essays here draw from Vadi’s experiences in both Southern and Northern California. “I think, first and foremost, living in both Southern California and Northern California has allowed me to see the state as a state, as opposed to just Los Angeles or San Francisco. There’s a larger, encompassing culture that extends from those metropolitan areas,” he says.
“Growing up in the San Gabriel Valley, bordering with the Inland Empire, out in Pomona, you know what it’s like being close to the metropolitan area, but to be very much removed from it. You see that replicating across different parts of the state in a lot of different ways.”
Throughout “Inter State,” Vadi crisscrosses the state with a street-level eye for details that perhaps reflect his history with skateboarding. He presents a view of California as seen by someone who has spent a lot of time absorbing his physical surroundings. They’re reflective pieces based on getting out of the home and moving through the outside world.
With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic came two more essays for the collection, “14th and Jackson” and “Post: An Afterworld.” At the time, Vadi was still juggling full-time work during the day with writing in the early morning and at night. “The pandemic actually exposed how isolated from the world I already was because of writing the book,” he says.
“It already increased my already insular experience with writing, but at the same time there’s so much movement in the book, so much taking trains or going on car rides, movement, that not being able to do that anymore was very painful,” Vadi says of the pandemic. He relied on social media, virtual events and driving to stay connected with the outside world, and some of those moments appear in the book as well.
“It’s quite telling that one of the few trips that I took to the city ended up being in the book,” he says. “It’s a banal trip to the dentist that ends up being very much a goodbye to this era of the city for me, of San Francisco.”