A Diasporic Dialogue of Craft, Sexuality, Memory, and Metamorphosis
A people survives not by monuments,
but by the voices they keep answering.
Some interviews register as documents, and others unfurl like books. However, this torrential exchange between Vamberto Freitas and Carlo Matos does something rarer still: it opens a hidden chamber in the architecture of the diaspora. What begins as conversation becomes a hybrid volume—part memoir, part poetics, part political meditation, part diasporic manifesto—until the word interview feels wholly inadequate. What unfolds is a polyphonic self-portrait of a writer whose life and imagination refuse containment: Portuguese-American, bi+/poly, working-class, academic, fighter, maker of poems, knives, and identities, a being shaped as much by the gym as by the archive. Freitas is not an interrogator but an accoucheuse of ideas and conversation; he coaxes forth a philosophy of being, a cartography of identity, an atlas of memory, resilience, and restless invention. Their exchange becomes an inquiry into class and queerness, craft and ancestry, exile and belonging, the metaphysical weight of carrying the Azorean-American condition across landscapes that are never merely geographical but spiritual and historical—territories where time bends, the self-fragments and recomposes, and the diasporic imagination becomes both compass and vessel.
Published first in Gávea-Brown—the legendary journal founded over four decades ago by the visionary Onésimo Teontónio Almeida—this dialogue reverberates within a lineage of intellectual daring that has long shaped Portuguese and Azorean studies in the United States. Onésimo’s project was never merely academic; it has been a lighthouse in the American night, a place where theory, creativity, and diaspora meet without borders, where the scattered archipelago of our communities can recognize itself in the mirrors of language and imagination. From that long corridor of light emerges the constellation that makes this interview possible. Filamentos, our platform and digital journal of arts and letters in the Azorean Diaspora, part of the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute at California State University, Fresno, was born under the paired radiance of Onésimo’s visionary scholarship and Vamberto Freitas’s critical brilliance. One built the lighthouse; the other kept the lamp burning. Together, they formed the horizon from which Bruma Publications at Fresno State draws its courage—its desire to be not merely a publisher, but a cultural gesture, a bridge between islands and continents, between memory and the future. Filamentos is, at its core, a single bright thread of their shared illumination: a filament of continuity stretching across oceans, carrying forward the work they began, and opening new geographies of meaning.
It is from that lineage—from that long and luminous corridor opened by Onésimo—that Vamberto Freitas enters this conversation with Carlo Matos. My dear friend, brother in the true vernacular of the word Vamberto Freitas, sharp as a scalpel and tender as a memory, brings to the interview the fullness of his literary intelligence: the critic who knows the terrain of diaspora better than anyone, the reader who hears the subterranean music beneath every line, the cultural steward whose dedication has carved a place for Azorean letters in the American literary landscape. Under his hand, the exchange does not proceed as a simple question and answer but as a choreography of thought—measured, expansive, intimate, and unafraid.
Vamberto Freitas, as interviewer, understands this from the outset. His questions are not prompts for brief answers but invitations to narrative. He opens with family and the Azores—the recent trip to São Miguel with Carlo’s son Alex—knowing that, for this diasporic writer, origin and return are never neutral themes. What Matos does with that invitation sets the tone for the entire piece: he doesn’t merely talk about a vacation; he converts memory into a theory of time.
He describes fatherhood as a perpetual temporal dislocation: “I am constantly living slightly out of time… seeing myself as an older man remembering the moment I am currently standing in.” This “temporal distortion” becomes one of the central metaphors of the interview, quietly underpinning much of his work: diasporic life, insomnia, the time loop of routine, speculative futures—everything here is haunted by the sense of living in several temporalities at once. Even the encounter that Vamberto recalls—hours talking as the sun sets over the Atlantic—becomes, in Matos’s telling, a scene already scripted into the memory of his future self.
The Azores, in this narrative, are not a postcard origin but a space of mythic authenticity and creative tension. The contrast he draws between Mosteiros and American suburbia is telling: Fall River is “alive, even in its entrapment,” while suburbia appears as “pre-chewed,” a place of “quiet desperation” in which the living only “look alive.” São Miguel, by contrast, becomes a terrain where myth is possible, where cagarros and basaltic rocks mark the landscape of a child’s imagination and later a poet’s symbolic vocabulary. The Atlantic, for Matos, is not a backdrop but a bridge and a wound, the medium that connects the two halves of his existence and the two geographies of A School for Fishermen.
What is striking is that none of this is treated as pure nostalgia or folkloric décor. Matos is acutely aware of the danger of “favas and fado” writing—first-generation ethnic literature stuck forever in food and sentiment. By invoking Pessoa’s heteronyms, Richard Zenith’s translations, and his own shift into persona poems, he positions his early diasporic work within a sophisticated modernist lineage rather than a narrow ethnographic frame. A School for Fishermen becomes, as he notes, “the kind of poetry book a playwright might write”: polyphonic, staged, structurally conscious. João Filipe, the stonemason of the opening poem, is not simply an avatar of the immigrant father; he is a constructed voice, capable of building an “entire metaphysics around the building and destroying of walls.”
This is one of the great strengths of the interview: it shows, with unusual clarity, how a diasporic writer moves from autobiography to structure, from family anecdote—his father’s failed attempt at fishing—to a complex poetics involving esoteric knowledge, Freemasonry, and Pessoa’s modernist universe. Freitas’s earlier review of A School for Fishermen is folded into the conversation, and Matos effectively responds not only to a question but to a critical reading, deepening it with origin stories and craft reflections. The literary review and the interview merge.
If Fishermen is powered by the tension between Azores and America, Counting Sheep till Doomsday emerges, in Matos’s account, from solitude, weather, and pop culture. The winter residency at Centrum, the iron-gray water of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and the absence of Wi-Fi creates the atmospheric conditions for a book obsessed with apocalypse—and its ironic refusal. Here, Matos reveals another crucial aspect of his aesthetic: a distrust of “conflict dramaturgy” as the only engine of narrative. He argues against a world view in which life is reduced to a series of conflicts to be overcome, insisting instead on “the open space where the individual must create every moment of meaning.”
That resistance to inherited forms—conflict, apocalypse, capitalist productivity—feeds directly into his formal choices: the prose poem, the shrinking and then expanding lengths, the experimental derangement of “Insomniac’s Cookbook.” His comparison to Joyce is not egoistic but technical: like Joyce, he wants language to be difficult without being random, demanding without being meaningless. The interview lets us see a writer who distrusts the cult of “difficulty” but also refuses to flatten his work to match an increasingly distracted culture.
One of the most powerful segments of the conversation is the movement from poetics to identity, from form to the openly biographical revelation of being a bi+/poly writer. Matos is candid and unsentimental about his bisexuality and polyamory, refusing both pathologizing and simplification. What matters, he insists, is not the label but the complexity of lived experience, the “irreducible constellation” that each life represents. As Malcriadas and We Prefer the Damned do not function as manifestos so much as narrative laboratories where these complexities can exist without having to justify themselves.
Here, the diasporic dimension takes on another layer. Suppose the first liminality is between the Azores and America. In that case, the second is between working-class immigrant background and academic/literary life, and the third is between heteronormative culture and queer existence. Matos, with characteristic bluntness, describes himself as forever “outside,” a barbarian with his face pressed against the glass of various worlds—Somerset, Amherst, graduate seminars, dinner parties, readings. That sense of permanent non-belonging is, in many ways, the secret engine of his creativity; it also gives the interview an emotional charge that goes beyond literary gossip. You can feel, underneath the erudition and humor, the ache of class and cultural dislocation.
This ache is particularly evident when he talks about his parents and their reactions to his work. The anecdote about them not “taking his literary career seriously” until Vamberto mentions him on RTP is hilarious and heartbreaking at once. It dramatizes exactly how transatlantic recognition, in Portuguese and on Azorean television, can mean more to immigrant parents than any American prize—a reminder of the deep asymmetry between cultural capital in the U.S. and symbolic capital back in the islands. The canceled UConn reading, with the family arriving as a surprise, only to find him absent due to vertigo, adds another layer to this complex, tender, occasionally painful family narrative.
Another of the interview’s surprising and invigorating threads is Matos’s meditation on “containment,” drawn from his theatrical background. He explains how black-box theaters, single-room plays, and the inability of characters to escape their space create a pressure cooker that cinema often dilutes. He then wonders whether poetry readings could ever achieve that kind of intensity, admitting that most readings—even his own—feel “beside the point” compared to the experience of seeing the poem on the page. This is a rare moment of artistic self-critique in an interview format: a poet confessing the limitations of his own performative medium while trying to imagine hybrid forms like The Book of Tongues that might bridge theater and poetry.
Parallel to this is his exploration of multiplicity in life practices: MMA, knife-making, long-distance motorcycling, teaching, and forging. What could easily become a macho résumé of exploits is instead reframed as an ethics of non-procrastination and a commitment to “living inside something”—inside the process, not the spectacle. His long reflection on work, vocation, and the “wrong dreams” (with Willie Loman as a cautionary figure) ties physical discipline in the gym to artistic discipline on the page. Crucially, he rejects the idea that pursuing multiple passions dilutes excellence; for him, each practice feeds the others, offering contrast and replenishment rather than distraction.
In strictly literary-historical terms, one of the interview’s most important contributions is its mapping of the contemporary Portuguese-American and Portuguese-Canadian field. Matos lists the anthologies—Gávea-Brown, Memória, Writers of the Portuguese Diaspora, Behind the Stars, More Stars, Here & Elsewhere—and highlights the crucial work of figures like Millicent Borges Accardi, Paula Neves, Amy Sayre Baptista, Irene Marques, Humberto Da Silva, Katherine Vaz, Frank Gaspar, Darrell Kastin, and others.
For readers outside this milieu, the interview functions as an introduction to a rich, still under-recognized corpus. For those within it, it is a kind of cartography of affinities and debts. Matos is generous in his praise, especially of Darrell Kastin’s The Undiscovered Island, which he calls the book that most successfully captures the “misty quality” of the Azores he himself has been chasing. The mention of Into the Azorean Sea and its bilingual construction of bridges between island and diaspora (and the explicit shout-out to the interviewer) underlines the collaborative, ecosystemic nature of this literary landscape.
The final movement of the interview shifts from the literary field to the broader catastrophe of American politics. Matos’s diagnosis is unsparing: he sees the U.S. sliding into fascism, its democratic mythos exposed as thin icing over racism, class warfare, and white supremacy. His speculative novel In the Alien Field emerges as both a coping mechanism and a utopian revenge fantasy: a world where humans are no longer at the center, where a non-hierarchical, polyamorous, bisexual vampire community—the bruxa—live the life he wishes existed, and where alien gardeners repair what humanity has destroyed.
This is not escapist; it is a brutally honest admission of how exhausted he is with dystopias that always leave room for human redemption. His solution, as he notes with dark humor, is almost unspeakable: a better world that can only exist after humanity’s near-extinction. That the bruxa originates in the Azores, founding Mosteiros, is no accident; once again, the islands become a laboratory of possible futures, not only pastoral origins.
The closing political reflections, on work, AI, the stolen promises of mechanization, and the absurdity of our overworked, under-imagined societies, resonate strongly with his earlier critiques of conflict dramaturgy and impoverished notions of success. Taken together, the interview reveals a coherent worldview: against a culture that worships productivity, simplification, and spectacle, Matos sets poetics of complexity, play, polyphony, and refusal—refusal of easy narratives, monogamous certainties, class destinies, and national myths.
As a literary document, this conversation is extraordinary not because it flatters the interviewer or the interviewee, but because it dramatizes—in real time—the very processes by which a diasporic, queer, working-class kid from Fall River turns into a sophisticated, formally adventurous, relentlessly self-questioning writer in Chicago. It shows us the scaffolding behind the books—A School for Fishermen, Counting Sheep till Doomsday, The Quitters, As Malcriadas, We Prefer the Damned, the forthcoming In the Alien Field, and Turbulence—without reducing any of them to simple “content” explained by biography.
The interview also stands as one of the most powerful articulations yet of the Portuguese-American and Azorean-American literary experience. Its concerns—hybridity, exile, working-class realities, artistic legitimacy, cultural erasure, bilingual lives, mythic memory—speak to a community in perpetual negotiation with itself. Matos’s reflections on class, for instance, are searing. His critique of American anti-intellectualism, his deep empathy for working-class lives, his insistence that creativity is not the birthright of the privileged—all of it forms a kind of ars poetica for writers of the diaspora. Suppose interviews are, at their best, acts of listening that make thinking visible. In that case, Vamberto Freitas has done something rare with this one: he has created the conditions for Carlo Matos not only to answer questions, but to think on the page in a way that is literature itself. This is why the piece feels so “astonishing”—because, by the end, we have not simply learned about books; we have watched a mind, diasporic and polyamorous in every sense, mapping its own interior archipelago,
By Diniz Borges
If you want to read the entire interview with Vamberto Freitas (and we highly recommend it), please do so either on Gávea-Brown or here on Filamentos.
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