Surrealistic Zillow – Style Weekly

Every Richmonder knows how steeped in history this city is.

You see it when you drive around, or when you walk or ride your bike; the city has a whopping 105 historical highway markers. Famed Monument Avenue still has a statue of tennis great Arthur Ashe swatting children away with his racket. And even the now vacant plinths can feel like monuments to a better, liberatory future history. Also, not every city this size has a full-fledged homage to itself like the Valentine Museum.

Some might feel suffocated by all this history, others might find comfort in having it acknowledged. Poet Mathias Svalina’s series of Surrealist History Walking-Tours of Richmond Neighborhoods feels like it embraces both those perspectives.

Svalina has written eight books of poetry, is invited to read his work all over the country, and regularly leads writing workshops at places like Seattle’s Hugo House and the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop. He was born in Chicago, raised in Slidell, Louisiana and Fairfax, Virginia, and first came to Richmond to earn a master of fine arts in poetry at Virginia Commonwealth University. Since then he’s been a bit nomadic, setting up home bases in Nebraska, Denver, and Brooklyn but he’s always returned to Richmond.

“I lived in Richmond and then I didn’t live here, and then I lived here again, and I didn’t live here,” he says. “Then almost 20 years went by before I moved back a year-and-a-half ago. It’s the only place I’ve ever been that feels like home to me.”

Besides his poetry, he’s known for his Dream Delivery Service, a nomadic subscription service where every morning, subscribers receive a dream written by Svalina and hand-delivered to their doorstep. The dreams are imaginative, surreal prose poems that feel transcribed directly from your subconscious. They have a perfect mix of dailiness and way-out weirdness that happens in dreams—when you read one in the morning, it starts making connections to your life, it feels like reading your horoscope.

Over the past eight years, he’s delivered dreams in roughly 45 cities. He estimates that he’s biked at least 20,000 miles and delivered 35,000 poems. In November, he will be delivering dreams in Richmond again, in addition to offering the walking-tours.

I’ve been a subscriber, and so has Snailmer, my family’s pet snail (R.I.P.).

“I’ve been doing the dream delivery service for a decade,” Svalina tells my son and me while we walk around the lakes at Byrd Park. “These walking tours are an extension of that. It’s a way of finding and unearthing the surreal in our everyday lives.”

How to take a fake tour of RVA

The surreal tours work like this: You show up at the appropriate time and place and look for a man with a bullhorn. “Because I’m a man who owns a bullhorn now,” Svalina says. “[Then] I’ll point to buildings and lie about them for 90 minutes.”

“At the end of it, we’re all done,” he adds.

Svalina has conducted these types of tours in Tucson, Seattle, Portland, Milwaukee and a few other places. In Richmond, he’s created four different tours for four neighborhoods: Oregon Hill, Manchester, Church Hill and Brookland Park.

If you’re a history buff, you may wonder why Svalina enjoys this endeavor.

“I’m particularly interested in civic history because of the ways that cities use, rewrite, and often weaponize their histories as promotional agents, or as ways of ignoring populations,” he explains. “So, I like the idea of inventing histories that could not have ever existed.”

He characterizes the tours has having “little roots in facts [that] grow into unfactual strawberry bushes,” he says. This seems true of all the history we’ve ever been told. Even those historical highway markers are just one part of one story, one event or building chosen over another. So how does Svalina choose his?

“I choose some locally iconic buildings, some locally ignorable spots, and things that are important to me and my friends on a personal level,” he says. “It’s a little bit trying to connect with the actual history of the neighborhoods and a little bit unearthing stuff from what people walk by and don’t look at.”  And it’s a little bit emo, he says.

“I have a lot of feelings about Richmond buildings.”

Gather ‘round the salsa fountain

While I’m familiar with the art world’s definition of surrealism, I’m curious what the word means to Svalina.

“I think the closer and more intently you look at something, the more surreal it gets,” he says. “Your mind starts to play with it, and you start to imagine all the possibilities that you’re not seeing.”

He defines surrealism as when the internal experience of imagination doesn’t match up with the expected external rules of the world; or when there is “a mismatch between the personal experience and the publicly required experience that one has to have to get through the day,” he says.

“It could also be called the uncanny, or the fantastic, or the fabulous—or mystic even.”

As we walk, we pass the leftovers of a picnic, discarded chips and salsa in the grass, which is where Svalina begins his impromptu tour.

“That’s a little spring of salsa and chips. Back in the old days everyone in Richmond used that,” he says. “They’d bring their bowls over here on Sunday mornings and collect the salsa. Before they invented Safeways and Krogers, the family would gather around the salsa fountain. It’s where William Byrd got his salsa.”

We’ve stopped now. All three of us a little bit dreamy, imagining the family, the spring’s grey stone basin like the ones we’ve seen all over Richmond, the family’s mason jars filling with fresh salsa. Yes, it’s totally nuts, but for a precious few seconds, grocery shopping ceases to be auto-piloting through a giant, air-conditioned box filled with pre-packaged food.

Svalina has turned a sad pile of garbage into a jewel.

Surrealist History Walking Tour Dates

If you want to join Svalina on a surrealist history walking tour, be prepared to walk for one to two miles, rain or shine. No registration is required, just show up and look for a guy with a bullhorn. The tours are pay-what-you-wish.

Oregon Hill Tour

Saturday Nov. 2 from 2-4 p.m. Meet at the Overlook

Manchester Tour

Saturday Nov. 9 from 2-4 p.m. Meet at the Floodwall Park

Church Hill Tour

Saturday Nov. 16, 2-4 p.m. Meet at Jefferson Park

Brookland Park Tour

Saturday Dec. 7, 2-4 p.m. Meet at North Central Park