DIY publisher and poet Tommy Pico is a striking presence on a Williamsburg street at night: tall, blonde, with a beautiful face that looks slightly otherworldly. Of course, the last part of that description plays right into the cliché exoticism the 25-year-old son of an American Indian tribal chairman disdains: as a writer and as publisher of Birdsong, a compendium of work by talented pals, Pico is always striving for the new. Form, content, identity, experience - in true DIY fashion, “Teebs” (as he’s called) slivers them and mixes the pieces together to create deeply veined mash-ups all his own. Add to his credits poetry editor for the L Magazine and master book printer and you’ve got a major envy generator - although bless him for thinking he’s nobody’s type! How cute, and erroneous.

Portraits and video portrait of Tommy Pico shot for EVB by Jessica Yatrofsky
Poetry reading videos shot for EVB by Joe Eardly
Birdsong Collective group portrait shot for EVB by MZ

Tommy Pico: This is fun. I haven’t done an interview that wasn’t for a job before.

Sean Kennedy: So I’m deflowering you!

TP: Yeah. I’m ready and willing.

SK: Good, that’s what I like to hear. I’m gonna make you feel real good, don’t worry. Last night was your friends Max Steele and Jess Paps birthday parties, both members of your Birdsong Collective. They had a dual affair. How was it?

TP: It was at Jess’s apartment in Greenpoint and they were born on the same day, so twin Leo power. They usually have a joint birthday party every year since we’ve lived here. It was really nice. I made face cake with my friend Julia, who’s the other woman in the band Paps. Our friend Chantelle baked it and Julia and I decorated it and drew Max’s and Jess’s faces on it. When we get together as a group a lot of really great stuff happens. We come up with ideas. Someone will say something and someone will build on that and all of a sudden we have a script that we want to shoot for a video.

SK: Did that happen last night?

TP: I would have to check Twitter. [Laughs] Because everyone does their Twitter updates with all the things we say to each other. That would be a nice undertaking, to take Twitter and all the people from Birdsong who Twitter and try to build something cohesive out of that.

SK: Twitter is one of my obsessions. How has it factored into Birdsong’s creative process?

TP: We kind of feed potent witticisms back and forth. We play word games. Recently a friend started saying “doi” again, like “a-doi.” So we just started putting “doi” in the place of anything that rhymes with it, like “the doi of cooking,” or “the doi’s mine,” or “my doi-friend’s back.” At the end of the day you have a whole thing.

SK: What’s “a-doi”? Or, I suppose, “a-doy”?

TP: Something you said in middle school. Like, “no duh.” It means “of course.”
SK: Most of Birdsong’s contributors are friends of yours from Sarah Lawrence College. Did it start when you were at school?

TP: No, it started in April of last year. What happened was, in February, I saw Sherman Alexie, who’s like my all-time favorite author. When I was in middle school, my dad gave me The Summer of Black Widows, a book of poetry of his. I’m from a reservation - I read this and was like, wow, there are other Indian people like me who are doing things besides living and dying on the rez. No one I knew ever did anything more. Most people I knew didn’t even graduate from high school. So it was really important for me to see other Indian people succeeding. And when I got the book, I had just started writing poetry myself. It was 7th grade and I was writing a lot of haiku. It was easy to do.

SK: So you saw Sherman Alexie at a reading…

TP: And I got him to sign a book, and I told him, “I’m an Indian person in the city, I’m a poet, you’re a poet…” - an entire flood of brain vomit at him! But I felt like I squandered the opportunity because I didn’t have any of my writing to give him. I didn’t have enough to make a book myself, so I asked my friends if they would give me some of their work and I would put it together. I didn’t even plan on doing a series - I just planned on doing the one. Knowing Max [Steele], and my friend Lauren Wilkinson, who gave me a short story - and went on to win the L Magazine literary upstart contest that summer - it just jelled. And then I put a reading together at a bar down the street. The name of the zine is actually my [Indian] name: in English it means Birdsong. I couldn’t think of anything else to call it. Even the little details here [pointing to the box-weave folios that dot the corners of each issue of Birdsong], they’re traditional Native American basket design.

(Some of the Birdsong Collective, left to right: Lauren Savitz, Gigi Swift, Isabelle Rancier, Julia Norton, Roy Pérez, Lauren Wilkinson, Tommy Pico, Max Steele, Jess Paps, Diego Medina, Tatyana Kagamas, Daniel Portland and Paul D’Agostino)

SK: Why do a zine? Are you a queer punk?

TP: I don’t really know what that means. I guess it applies to me if a Chelsea boy came to Williamsburg - he would probably think I was a queer punk. I know people who were more or less in the punk scene and I wasn’t really. But it’s definitely a tradition I grew out of - riot grrrl in particular, having been exposed to that in high school: bands like Bikini Kill and Huggy Bear, Witchy Poo, Bratmobile. A lot of them did zines, and I would read them. It was just a really attractive idea because what else was I going to do? [Laughs]

SK: But in the age of blogs, why do a zine? You have a Birdsong website and Twitter feed - why a zine? Because you wanted a tactile object?

TP: I really like holding. One of the parts that’s so precious about zine-making is that you have an object in your hands that somebody actually made. I sew every single one of them, or we do nights where we’ll have a bunch of people over and we all sew them. So it’s something that we can do together. When people open it, I hope that some of that affection is transmitted. Physically turning the pages, you can feel the stitching. I think that’s magical.

SK: How old are you?

TP: 25.

SK: When’s your birthday?

TP: December 13th. I’m exactly midway through my 20s. [Laughs]

SK: So how old were you during riot grrrl? Because I was a tween at the time of that scene, and I’m several years older than you!

TP: When I started listening to Bikini Kill it was just as Le Tigre was coming out. Riot grrrl was already over.

SK: So how did you get turned on to them then?

TP: When I was a freshman in high school a really good friend turned me on to them. It was a weird time in my life because previous to high school, all of my good friends were my cousins. The school was mostly white and it was really, really racist, and we got bused there from the reservation. Midway through that year, a bunch of my cousins got in a fight with a bunch of neo-Nazi kids, and a lot of people got kicked out of school after that. So when I came back the next year I didn’t have the support of my cousins - the muscle - and people really started laying in, calling me “faggot” and trying to kick my ass. The people who came to my aid were just really strong punky girls - and they listened to the riot grrrls. And that was transmitted to me.
SK: I’ve always wondered why gay boys and riot grrrls got along so well. I think you just explained it.

TP: High school was my one shot of getting out of that town - I knew I had to be spotless - so I didn’t want to get in a fight and get kicked out. My default way of dealing with physically violent people was just to shut off. So my girlfriends would jump to my aid. A guy wouldn’t beat them up - they would just yell at each other for awhile and then walk away. It was a way of passively circumventing that fighting process.

SK: This is San Diego County?

TP: I’m referring in general to East County. San Diego County is pretty conservative, but East County especially is. People have stars and bars on their cars. I knew if I stayed there, I would probably become a suicide statistic. I’m not kidding - that was definitely in the cards.

SK: Did you also experience prejudice because you’re Indian?

TP: Definitely - but it’s not something I think people assume, because I’m very light skinned, especially compared to my father and other people on the reservation. I got more shit for my femininity than I did for my race - but that’s on an immediate level. There are a lot of overarching things that affect an American Indian person that don’t affect other people, like history. Those are issues I’m starting to deal with now. People just being like, “What are you?”, “Are you a boy or girl?”, “Are you Asian or Italian?”

SK: I want to see some pictures of you when you were in high school!

TP: I don’t know if I have any. I was also really fat back then, at least for the first couple of years: I was tipping the scales at 230. [Laughs] I was a big boy!

SK: You had a lot of things going on!

TP: Yeah, I had braces and glasses and I was fat and had pimples, and I was gay as hell! [Laughs]

SK: Are you interested in publishing in the established literary journals?

TP: I tried. I don’t do it anymore. I tried to submit all the time. I used to put my rejection letters on my fridge.

SK: What magazines?

TP: Tin House, Open City, Fence - all these literary magazines that I read and I liked. I just got rejection letters and rejection letters and rejection letters. I understood that was part of it, but still, at the end of the day it’s a rejection letter: I don’t have my poem in anything, so I’m left with not very much to show for myself. But I can’t wait for anybody else to legitimize me: I have to legitimize myself. That’s the power of DIY culture, being able to say, “No, I don’t care what the mainstream thinks, I don’t care if this poem is published in Jubilat magazine. I’m going to do it myself because I believe it has worth, and my friends believe it has worth.” Just because I’m not being published doesn’t mean I’m worthless.

SK: So Birdsong is in part a reaction to the literati?

TP: It was just something that I thought was right. I thought that’s when I’m a writer, when I’m starting to be published in these journals - when really, I write every day. I would never ever call myself a quote unquote “writer,” because it’s not something that I necessarily aspire to - it’s just something that I do. I want to do a lot of things. I want to make music, and movies. And, like, I don’t know - greeting cards? [Laughs]

SK: Did you end up sending Sherman anything? Copies of Birdsong? Your unpublished writing?

TP: I sent him an email. He never got back to me. I didn’t expect him to, because he’s a really famous writer and he’s busy. Sending the email was a symbol to me that this is what I’m going to do. It didn’t matter if it happened in a year or ten years - eventually I’d have a book too and people might compare the two of us. I’m trying to build off the American Indian cultural revolution that happened in the 1960s and ’70s, and I’m building somewhat off of him too. They laid the foundation, he built the frame, and I’m furnishing the house. I’m living in it.

SK: How much of a double consciousness do you have?

TP: Oh, it’s huge, it’s huge. Because whenever you’re writing from the perspective of somebody in a minority group, you become people’s only cultural reference. You have to very careful about what you say.

SK: The burden of representation!

TP: Exactly. I haven’t always been comfortable. For a long time all I wrote about was having sex in New York and being a Brooklyn hipster or whatever. I never wanted to write about being Indian. I didn’t want to do my personal Indian canon any disservice. If I were writing about Grandfather Eagle and the river, people wouldn’t take it seriously. I wrote this story about when my mother found out her ex-husband was cheating on her and she cut off her ponytail and socked him in the face. Somebody in the class was like, “Oh, this woman is symbolically scalping herself!” Well, first of all, my mother’s white. Second of all, she cut off her hair ’cause she was pissed off. I didn’t stay in that workshop much longer after that.

SK: Tell me how you met Max Steele, your close friend and collaborator (and fellow East Village Boys subject and contributor).

TP: We were freshman year roommates in college. I guess he researched my name online and he saw that I was in San Diego riot grrrl - they had a webpage with the things that we liked to do and our favorite bands and stuff. Max, of course, was in the San Francisco gay punk scene, and he hung up a Sleater-Kinney poster in our room. I was like, “That’ll do.”

SK: Are you seeing anyone right now?

TP: No, never. I’m perennially single.

SK: By choice?

TP: Not necessarily - I wouldn’t poo-poo something that came around, but I think I’m a very specific kind of person.

SK: Do guys exoticize you?

TP: In a piece called “Combustible” I go into that a little bit with a date that I had. The conversation was, “So tell me about the rez. It sounds so magical when you say it.” I was just like, Ugh. I never mean to mention that on a first date, or a second date, because that becomes the topic. I know when I’m with someone who’s genuine, they let me talk about it when I’m ready to talk about it. When they ask about it too heavily, that’s the thing they’re attracted to, that really gets them off.

SK: What do you mean that you’re a very specific kind of person? That you’re not immediately apprehensible to most guys?

TP: Sort of. There’s the kind of guy that everyone’s attracted to: what his body looks like, how tall he is - there’s a certain Details magazine type, and I’m not that at all. I don’t want to sound self-deprecating, because that’s not what it is, but not a lot of people are not all that sexually attracted to somebody like me.

SK: I think you’re cute! And you have nice style!

TP: Thank you! I think so. But I don’t get too many gentleman callers, let’s put it that way.

SK: What kind of guy are you attracted to?

TP: I really like tall guys - I think because I felt really vulnerable for a long time. If I’m in a dark alleyway somewhere, I don’t want to be the one to have to defend the both of us!

Tommy will be hosting BIRDSONG 9, a zine reading, art and music show, with The Birdsong Collective, music by Paps, and guest reader Rebecca Wolff. It’s $FREE!
SATURDAY OCT 24, 8PM, at HiChristina, 632 Grand Street (at Leonard) in Williamsburg.

Last 5 posts by Sean Kennedy

• STEPHEN PETRONIO - April 29th, 2009
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