Sauthors: Matthew Dickman

Matthew Dickman works with food for a living. It isn't Chef Dickman nor does he have desires to be the next Food Network star, but for the time being, you can get a slice of pizza or a sandwich from Matthew in downtown Portland. While he might not have Foodist aspirations, he is the only one on the clock at Whole Foods who can inscribe a book he authored while you wait for your order. Matthew's first book, All-American Poem is a body of work that was written and complied during his time spent as a Michener Fellow at the University of Texas. After completing his M.F.A. in Austin, Matthew wandered around the US before eventually ending up back in Oregon, his homeland and current residence.

As the winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, Matthew was able to publish All-American Poem through Copper Canyon Press. His work has appeared in numerous journals and most notably in an actual magazine, The New Yorker.

Matthew grew up in the Lents area of Portland. Every city of any size has an area similar to Lents - closer to the airport than museums, it is the part of town where people go to get used tires, reconditioned car batteries, buckets of fried chicken, meth and/or prostitutes. It is a bleak area; made up of low-slung, post-war housing, often inhabited by less than blue-collar wage earners. The local commerce is a mix of the last outposts of once popular franchises interspersed with small businesses and dollar stores. The neighborhood could easily be the backdrop for a gritty independent film called The Land Before Gentrification.

I have known Matthew since his last days in Lents, the joy of a 14 year friendship is the degree of casualness in conversation – the downside to that familiarity is our interactions can be rough, profane and full of non sequiturs. And that is just asking how each other's family is doing. I asked Matthew if he thought it was odd having his graduate education financed by the infinitely readable and popular work of James Michener, while poetry; occasionally obtuse and is always the opposite of popular. A two-word response preceded a less than gentle chastising, as Matthew correctly pointed out that I should at least read some of his book before categorically dismissing it.

We started talking about food - by talking about what we loved to eat as children. When asked about kind of food was cooked in his house when he was growing up, Matthew responded, "A real staple was macaroni and cheese. My Mom added hot dogs and that would be dinner for a couple days" after naming a few other household staple of the crock pot variety, Matthew added "there were a lot of breakfasts for dinners – pancakes for dinner, waffles for dinner. Bisquick was inexpensive and filling.

"Part of it was economic necessity and part of it was energy. My mom worked all day and had three kids to deal with…[meals] were a lot of starchy, cheap-at-the-store foods. Not a lot of vegetables and salad."

In an election year where eating cheese steaks is a prerequisite on the campaign trail and arugula=elitism; Matthew and I spent some time discussing the point of pandering to the lowest level - wondering between ourselves what was the purpose of education, travel and reading if not to make your world, perspective and experience larger. I asked Matthew how leaving Lents/Portland had changed his diet.

At first he spoke generally about meeting different people outside of your community who eat differently and getting exposed to new foods, before confessing how a special someone got him to try a food she loved, "I had sushi for the first time at the age of 22. I thought it was amazing.

"Then, in Texas, there was going to Tex-Mex places but also getting to eat real Mexican Food; real tacos, not a bunch of meat in a crunchy shell smothered in cheese with iceberg lettuce but these small tastes of stewed meat, like braised tongue, sprinkled with radishes on fresh tortillas."

Lest one thinks Matthew has gone native - eating with chopsticks in one hand as he Twitters haiku to his dozens of fans on his iphone with the other, the food of his youth still has a powerful hold on him. "If I am having a really bad day - work, life, relationships; it is still mac and cheese. Granted it is an upgrade - Stouffer's microwavable, the family sized one, I mean I am having a bad day, you know. Stouffer's, a can of coca-cola and one package of rolos: It might not turn my day around but in my own way, I am eating biblically."

Even with an adulthood anchored by the comfort food of youth, there is another remnant of childhood meals that inspires happy memories, eating out. The dinner out, which after years of self-imposed hardship in graduate school is still a bit of a luxury but the act of treating oneself as an adult pales compared to the thrill of going to a restaurant as a child, especially when going out was BIG DEAL. Matthew explains, "For a middle-level triumph, it was The Artic Circle". A small dying food chain that could be kindly described as a low-rent Dairy Queen, "but" Matthew continued, "for important occasions it was the Monte Carlo (1), that was clip-on tie time, that was a luxury."

At the end of the night, Matthew responded to my less than gentle teasing about needing to find a job in a poetry factory with a rather reasonable explanation, "Listen, if you are in love with food, you don't need to run a restaurant. Same is true for poetry, I don't need an exact exchange between the art I do and the job I have, you have to do the things that move you."

For those in Portland who don't need lunch from Whole Foods, you can see/hear Matthew at Wordstock on the Mountain Writer's Stage #1- He will be reading with another Saucyman interviewee, writer Michael McGriff at 3.30 pm, Sunday, November 9.

1 - Before the Monte Carlo burned down, it was briefly a dance/Gentleman’s club, but before that incarnation, before the days of Olive Garden, the Monte Carlo was THE middlebrow Italian Restaurant, which fittingly produced burlesque versions of Italian food - over the top tomato/pasta/cheese dishes served on checkered tablecloths with a few other flourishes like candles in wicker Chianti bottles that would make the Italian stereotypes in Lady and the Tramp blush in shame.





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