This week I got to learn some fun new things about my friend Everett Patterson. Everett is a very talented comic writer/drawer (i dont know what you call that!haha) who shared some really interesting bits from his life story in Portland. Thanks Everett! 
1) How long have you lived in Portland? I'm originally from New Orleans, LA. In the spring of 2009 migrated to the Pacific Northwest because I really wanted to get into organic farming. I interviewed at a bunch of farms throughout Washington, Oregon and NoCal, and finally faked my way into an internship at Local Roots Farm in the Seattle area. But it was February and I still had two and a half months to kill before growing season really began. Even if I had wanted to wait out that time back in New Orleans, I couldn't have, because my craigslist rideshare had totaled my car on the way up here. So I used the insurance money to "camp out" in Portland, a city whose too-good-to-be-true reputation I had derived almost entirely from zines. (I used to work in a socialist/anarchist bookstore in Brooklyn, and all the zines we sold were bursting with praises for Portland. In fact a lot of them were published in Portland, through the Independent Publishing Resource Center.) By the end of April, I was completely smitten with the city and vowed to return.
Farming in Washington was terrific and unforgettable, but towards the end of the season rural life was making me stir crazy. It was dark from 4:30pm until like 9 in the morning, and all I was doing was sitting in my cold trailer drawing comics. I had to get back to Portland somehow! So I applied to be an intern at Periscope Studio, a workspace downtown shared by freelance comic-book professionals. By some miracle I was accepted yet again into an internship for which I was really unqualified and for three months in the spring of '10 I fetched coffee and made photocopies for "the grandest collective of comic book professionals in the western hemisphere." In return they critiqued my art, improving it immeasurably. Really, if I'm any sort of artist today, I have them to thank.
After my second spring in Portland, I knew I couldn't go anywhere else. Katy Ellis O'Brien, one of the editors of Stumptown Underground, an anthology zine to which I had been submitting comics, told me about an opening in her huge house in the NE Portland's Hollywood District. For almost two years now I've lived in that house with five other people, including Katy, and two cats, Aki and Javier.2) What fills up your days (or nights) in Portland?
It happened so gradually I didn't notice until it was too late: my entire life has come to be centered around imaginary people drawn inside of rectangular boxes, a.k.a. comics, a.k.a. baby stories for illiterate morons. By day I work as an assistant editor at Dark Horse Comics, the third largest comics publisher in the country, headquartered just upriver in Milwaukie, OR. On the nights and weekends I draw my own comics. I published my first "graphic novel" last October. It's a punk-rock UFO-conspiracy adventure called Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchantment and you can read it here: www.savagenobles.com. Cartoonists and zinesters, who make up probably 25% of my friends, are always dropping in and out of our house. We host an "Artists Anonymous" support group for depressed cartoonists on alternate Tuesdays.
I do actually do many things outside of comics. I sing tenor in Cantores in Ecclesia, a choir that performs Gregorian chant and sacred music from the Renaissance - choral polyphonic works of the 16th century are both brilliant and beautiful! We sing Latin mass almost every Saturday evening at St. Stephen's Catholic Church, on SE 41st just offa Hawthorne. I'm also quite involved with my own church, Door of Hope, which is similarly just offa Hawthorne, but whose musical repertoire is decidedly more contemporary.
3) Where are
some of your favorite place to go and things to do in Portland? Due to an aforementioned craigslist rideshare incident, I have not had a car for years, so I bicycle everywhere. Biking counts as going somewhere, even if you're just biking to work. Portland is a city that benefits from being viewed at the ground level, either walking or biking. All the little surface details, the communal gardens with chicken coops and compost bins, the porches decorated with bonzai trees and welded sculpture for Burning Man, the murals and mosaics, the ghost bikes... if you're just whizzing by in a car, you'll miss them. Seattle, by way of counterexample, looks better from far away. It's a city with many sweeping vistas of lakes and mountains and skyscrapers, but from up close its all stucco and aluminum windows. You want to have a car so you can drive past all that crap and round the corner for the next sweeping vista.
I like to play hackey-sack in Laurelhurst Park or Colonel Summers Park, or on the PSU campus, or sometimes on the bricks in Pioneer Courthouse square. You will meet a lot of cool people that way, though you will also meet a lot of stoned people that way. I like to hang out at Three Friends Coffeehouse on SE 12th - so comfortable, I could never leave.
My favorite place to go at the moment is the Willamette River. There's a place in Milwaukie, right near Dark Horse, where I can just shinny down some rocks and sit right by the river to eat my sandwich, watch the boats and the geese, read, or pray. I was baptized in the Willamette last August, so that questionable brown water holds a lot of significance for me. The lapping on the shore is so peaceful, and it always reminds me of my baptism, and of John baptizing in the Jordan thousands of years ago.
4) What are some different things about Portland that make it Portland? For whatever reason, Portland has the most beautiful women anywhere! Now I'm a 27-year-old straight male, so my opinion on these matters is probably worthless. But I've lived in other cities too, and they simply do not compare! A random gal bombing it down Belmont outclasses the beauty queen of any other state, no question. Portland women are just so independent and fiery, I love it. Also, maybe it's all the bookstores, but Portland women are all smart as hell. Sometimes just making eye-contact with them feels like getting beaten in Scrabble. In a sexy way. Of course this is wonderful, but it's also kind of annoying. It means there's literally nowhere I can go where I can just relax and not worry about some gorgeous lady sneaking up on me while I've got spinach in my teeth. I remember once, when I first moved to the Hollywood district and was working as a junk-mail distributor for Domino's, I was coming home dirty and sweaty and limping from having walked for five hours carrying all this junk-mail. Because I'd been looking at advertisements for pizza all day, I really wanted some pizza, so I stopped in the Hollywood Whole Foods to buy a frozen vegan pizza. The cashier was this beautiful dreadlocked girl and I felt like such an ogre with all my cutaneous grime. But whatever, I said, that's Portland. Immediately after that I went to the bank next door to register my change of address. And the banker was a beautiful girl! Then I went to the Dept. of Health and Human Services to sign up for food stamps, and not only was the waiting room full of babes, but the social workers were babes too! It was like some trippy dream sequence, or like a Hollywood movie where even the extras are aspiring actresses! Maybe that's why I go down to the river: to get away from the babes. Knowing Portland though, there will probably be really smart, sarcastic mermaids with tattoos and black-framed glasses waiting there, silently judging my choice of literature.
I think I'll stay in Portland for a loooong time, maybe forever. For the first time in my "professional" life, I'm in a job where there's some hope for advancement. After five years or so at Dark Horse, I could theoretically be an associate editor, then later on an editor, and eventually I could get promoted to being an actual superhero. I've never really thought in such long terms before, content to hop from barista gig to barista gig, and so the phrase "five years" actually terrifies me.
But even without the job, I'd still want to stay in Portland. I've got such a great community here - more friends than I've ever had in my life. Plus I feel like Portland is a place where things could really happen. Yes, we're really laid back and we do a lot of pointless bohemian stunts like biking around naked or whatever, but there's a true, furious potential here too. I'm not just talking about last year's Occupy protest, though that was huge. What I mean is, you get all these educated, idealistic, artistic young people into one place, and then make sure that half of them don't have jobs... it's like the environment is pulsing with nervous electiricty, and something is bound to emerge from that. My church Door of Hope is right in the thick of it too, as more and more kids start to ask tough questions, to challenge the worldview they've been presented with since the 90s (I'm one of those kids). So I'll stay here, if only because I'd feel really stupid if the Revolution starts in Portland and I miss it because I moved back to Louisiana to play video games.
