Poet and writer Arian Katsimbras grew up in the mobile homes of Washoe Valley from the ages of 5 to 15.
“(It was) a very distinct kind of poverty (in the ’90s) that is not necessarily present there anymore,” Katsimbras said. “If you go out there now, all the mobile homes I grew up in are gone. The land has been bought up and parceled out to big investors.”
Katsimbras’ debut poetry collection, The Wonder Years, published in 2023, details his harrowing, lonely, beautiful childhood in Washoe Valley.
“It was a wild, wild place at that time,” he said. “It was free, boundless and endlessly dangerous. … I do see it as beautiful, and I love it for what it’s worth, but it was a lawless place. I imagine all of us kids riding around on our Big Wheels like fucking cowboys on horses.”
The unbridled freedom was a lot of fun for Katsimbras as a kid, but the prevailing sensation of his childhood was a deep and profound loneliness.
“I wasn’t really alone, but I felt a deep absence,” he said. “I know now what that absence was, which is love—the parental love and affection that I craved.”
One Christmas Eve when Katsimbras was in fifth-grade, his life became a nightmare. That night, his mother left, and his stepfather tried to kill himself, leaving Katsimbras to basically raise his 6-month-old brother.
“I grew up fighting a lot; we all did,” Katsimbras said. “Violence became its own form of rhetoric. That’s how you dealt with everything; it’s how you brokered deals, solved disagreements—that’s how you dealt with conflict.”
His family was friends with a Hells Angels family who lived in an old, dilapidated Queen Anne Victorian-style house.
“It happened a couple of times—on a Sunday, we went over there, and the parents got hammered and did speed and barbecued, and they sent us kids out into the dirt lot, and they bet on us to box,” he said. “We had to beat the shit out of each other. It hurt me deeply. And you could see it—I don’t know if the parents could see it—but you could see that neither of us boys wanted to hurt each other. You want to love each other as kids, but we had to fight like men in sixth-grade. We had to make each other bleed.”
In an act of tenderness to counter that forced violence, he would always bring the other boys wildflowers the next day, he said.
Katsimbras was always deeply sensitive—“a sucker for art,” he said, but because of the expectations of rigid masculinity, he grew up with what he called “the devastation of not being able to enact, articulate or embody what felt true to me, which turned me into something deeply hard. Being a man—a boy—in that community, the last thing that you could do is show anything that was remotely effeminate.
“I’ve always been eminently aware of the way that I embody masculinity or embody the male form,” Katsimbras said. “It often surprises people that I love flowers more than anything in the world. People are like, ‘How are you shaped the way that you are, sound the way that you do, present the way that you present, but you’re also delicate in these ways?’”
The Wonder Years is an irreverent title, because on the surface, there’s nothing wonderous. Point blank: This book is brutal. Essentially, it is about two things: “Turning all the otherwise mundane violence into something beautiful, and confronting the masculinity I found so repugnant in my childhood,” Katsimbras said. His poems show that there are other ways to be a man; you can be tender and delicate and loving.
Katsimbras said the loneliness of his childhood created in him a sense of restlessness and a curiosity.
“I always walked around in a sense of wonder,” he said. That sense of wonder seems to be the basis of his artistic sensibilities. “I hold these images in my head of me walking down these unpaved dirt roads in the middle of winter by myself. It was lonely, but it was a good teacher. The valley was a good teacher.”
Washoe Valley, and the landscape of the West in general, are embodied as a character in the book with agency and desires. Life in the Nevada high desert is precarious—the threat of wildfires, droughts and flash floods are ever-present for the people, plants and animals who lurch through the hardscrabble business of survival. Katsimbras captures the quiet magnificence concealed in the stark, muted landscape: “The Black Crowned Night Heron / too, lulled to sleep by a quarter moon, thirsting / Outside the windows, a coyote chews a ghost- / bleached bone in a desert that reaches into nothing.”
Like a flower sprouting out of an endless sea of cruel concrete, Katsimbras’ poems reveal that there is still love, tenderness and wonder to be found even in the most nightmarish of circumstances.
The essence of The Wonder Years, which is a deep desire for love to emerge in that harsh place, is encapsulated in the final poem, “Boyhood With Low Hum From the Burn Field.” Away from the violent patriarchal plight of poverty of the mobile homes, “further out still in a mid-day insomniac sagebrush field,” two boys share a tender moment “where / skin learns how it’s skin,” and “two boys hold a rabbit skull and each other’s / sunlicked ribs, miniatures of their fathers / in cupped hands; both resemble trembling.”
In the poem, Katsimbras steps directly into his boyhood and presents a moment of “proximal hope amidst the calamity and skittery fears that marked the lives of boys raised by men who were raised by hammers.” This moment of tenderness and innocence shared between these boys ends the book with a glint of love in the sea of brutality: “I learned to love amongst bones and wreckage. / I arranged my bones around love and wreckage. / I became wreckage, wreckage, wreckage, on and on.” The love born from the wreckage is a kind of rebirth which gestures to the vistas beyond the valley, to the love and protection to be found, just beyond.
Katsimbras is currently working on his second collection of poetry. “I have a tentative title. … You want to hear it?” he asked with a mischievous smile. “It’s called Bummerville.”
Learn more at www.instagram.com/arian_katsimbras.