By Michelle Tea

PETER PLATE'S FICTION is an authentic, street-based, high-integrity documenting of the reality of being poor in San Francisco. Corrupt cops share streets with strung-out snitches, petty thieves, drug dealers, Latino teenagers, SRO residents – all snagged in one another's orbits, scurrying in a dog-eat-dog tango. Plate performs his work from memory, in the Russian declamatory tradition, delivering whole chapters in riveting, dramatic recitations. His latest novel, Fogtown, explores the lives of a handful of characters on a fast track to death or jail, whose destinies shift with the crashing of a Brinks truck and the liberation of sacks of cash. San Francisco is the star of the tale, as is Plate's darkly dynamic prose, a hard-boiled dialect that rings both old-fashioned and brand-new, fashioning a fresh mythology of San Francisco street life much the way Francesca Lia Block's language in Weetzie Bat evoked a fantastical Los Angeles. In Plate's San Francisco, fog "murders" the streets, the sun lurks behind "mackerel" clouds, and Tenderloin pigeons with low self-esteem receive cash gifts from dreadlocked old ladies in touch with God.

Bay Guardian: You taught yourself to write while squatting in an abandoned building in San Francisco. How did that come about?

Peter Plate: I was evicted in an owner move-in eviction from San Carlos Street in the city's Mission District in the summer of 1985. I'd been engaging in squatting activism with an organization named Squatters Anonymous. And lo and behold, once I became evicted, it became my turn to squat. There was an abandoned building at 21st and Folsom, and I seized it in broad daylight. I was very desperate, and afraid of homelessness, which is always a good motive to seize abandoned property.

Once I had this building in my possession, I decided I wanted to archive what I saw in the streets of the city and what was happening in those streets – what I call the semiotics of the streets. This was the beginning of creating a fictitious history from the bottom up. Having the building gave me the time to reinvent my life.

My family has an avid 19th-century love of literature and literacy. My grandfather, when I was eight years old, told me to grow up and read Mayakovsky and Pushkin, and be like them. Thus in that abandoned building I began a return to childhood dreams, with literature as the vehicle.

BG: Being introduced to Mayakovsky while young must have given you an early understanding of literature as rebellion, as a way to fuck things up.

PP: Not to "fuck things up" but to forge the impossible future. For me it was the legacy of Mayakovsky in my family, a sense of predestination and therefore the return to childhood dreams. In emotional terms, I was born on the soil of early 20th-century Russian revolutionary literature as espoused by Mayakovsky.

BG: So you had the space to write, and you didn't have to pay rent. Did squatting give you a better quality of life?

PP: In material conditions, yes and no. The stress of being a squatter was daily and absolute, as there were no devices to protect one from the police or the absent landlord. So there was a dialectical sensibility of what it meant to inaugurate the process of becoming a writer in an inner-city neighborhood. The conditions were rough, but there was a freedom.

BG: Why did you leave your squat?

PP: I was served an eviction notice, and I spent one year with no legal rights whatsoever defending myself in court. There are no property rights for the dispossessed in California.

BG: Did you have any legal knowledge?

PP: I knew enough law as a tenant-union organizer. I was well-versed enough to put up a battle against what I knew would ultimately be my defeat.

BG: If you knew you would lose, why did you fight?

PP: It's a philosophical equation: knowing you have no power or chance of victory, you must act as though you have every chance of victory over impossible odds. Because defeat is inevitable, one must act as though victory is imminent. It's taking the contradictions and antagonisms that one faces and making them work for you.

BG: How long does it take you to memorize a chapter?

PP: It takes me an hour a page to get it under control, and then in order to do a 10-minute recitation, it might take me 30 hours of practice.

BG: I wondered about your use of the noir genre. Is it a deliberate choice, or does your writing naturally take to that style?

PP: It comes organic, the use of the idiom. But noir fiction is an excellent philosophical vehicle for describing the social conditions of our troubled nation. It has its origin in the metaphysical writings of the French philosophers from, say, the 17th century. It's trying to understand the frailties and the foibles of the human condition without judgment.

BG: I was struck with how present San Francisco is in Fogtown. It's like a main character of the book.

PP: In One Foot off the Gutter I took an abandoned house and tried to breathe life into it as if it had human characteristics; in this novel, Fogtown, beginning with the title itself, there is a deliberate attempt to make the city a living organism. In both novels I am attempting writing through the lenses of psycho-geography.

BG: In Fogtown one of the central characters, Stiv, has a series of hallucinations that allow you to tell the story of Jose Reyna, an outlaw from San Francisco's past. Why did you introduce this story line to the narrative?

PP: Because of my development as a writer in the Mission District, to understand the history of this neighborhood I've had to walk with ghosts. I've had to look at hallucinations – mine and others' – as a social reality. Ghosts walk the streets of the Mission District. I've simply tried to breathe life into them on the printed page. What I mean by the term psycho-geography are the emotions inherent in the architecture around us. Every building has emotions stored inside them. As humans, we experience that geography.

BG: So you're saying that we're literally haunted by events that have taken place around us in the past?

PP: At 16th and Valencia there is a low-income housing project, the Maria Alicia apartments. This building stands on the grave of an SRO that was arsoned in December 1975. Twelve people died and 17 more were never found. Their ghosts are still at that corner. And if you are a writer in that community, you are going to hear their voices. That's what I mean by psycho-geography.

BG: How do you first conceive of the story you want to tell?

PP: I try to invent an ensemble of characters. With that in mind, a chorus of voices erupts from my imagination. It is a deliberate technique to speak from many different voices about the same place and time.

The beginning of the narrative starts with the invention of an incident. The incidents generally take place in the streets. Then I invent a cast of characters to propel the narrative forward. The characters then tell me where the narrative goes. I live vicariously through characters when writing the plot of a novel.

BG: So you don't sketch out the plot beforehand?

PP: Never. Never. That is a deliberate aesthetic risk – to believe in the characters and to believe they will find themselves to the truth in the narrative.

BG: How do you lift your own experiences into your fiction?

PP: I live in an SRO hotel. Fogtown is about the cosmology of an SRO on Market Street. I've been living on and off in SRO hotels since I was 11 years old. I'm a method writer – I write what I live and live what I write, and Fogtown is an invocation of that. And it is not autobiographical at all.

BG: How were you first published?

PP: I first got published by Edinburgh University Press in Scotland. And that was the result of touring with bands. By utilizing a form that wasn't literary, I was able to open the door for myself into the literary economy.

BG: What about the literary scene in San Francisco would you like to see change?

PP: I would like to see the literary economy in San Francisco become more democratic. There are a lot of ghetto kids whose writing needs to see the light of day, but in order for that to happen, they need to be brought in from the cold, from society's margins. More kids need to become writers; less kids need to go to jail.

BG: What do you imagine your life would be like if you hadn't started to write?

PP: I'd be dead or in prison. 'Cause that's what my destination was. All the men in my family have done hard time, and the only reason why I haven't is because I embraced literature. I was born to write, and if I don't write, I die. I think that equation applies to every writer in this country who is battling illiteracy. We either write or die.