The skateboarders you knew were the kids who saw the world as their playground, who would skip school and spend entire afternoons pushing across town on their decks, kickflipping and skitching, grinding whatever there was to grind, even if it meant the five stair handrail in front of the local police station. They were the kids with the skinned knees and missing teeth, the creative kids with torn jeans who’d customize their boards and lighters with electrical tape, who’d rock different colored shoelaces on each foot while they were testing out their parent’s cameras and spray paint before the so-called “artists” of school even knew where to start. These kids you knew, they were the ones who’d sit in their rooms with skate videos scattered across the floor, speaking their secret language of skate spots and tricks while on the TV Flip’s Sorry made everyone want to go back into the shit and attempt the impossible. They were the kids who’d pass around old copies of TransWorld SKATEboarding Magazine and read aloud each month’s “TONER” column, as if it’s writer Kevin Wilkins were an older brother they never had, the kind that would slap them in the back of their head if they even thought about using scissors to carve boardslide scars into their decks. “Because skateboarding isn’t about what other people think,” they’d imagine Wilkins saying, “and definitely not about pretending to be something you’re not.” He was the writer that you and these skateboarder friends looked up to, who you followed when he became an editor for The Skateboard Mag, who seemed, along with the rest of the magazine’s talented staff, to always have a finger on the pulse of what skateboarding truly was, even when the world seemed determined to appropriate and cheapen it at every turn. Because even though you’re older and most of the skateboarders you knew have traded in their boards for jobs and this thing called “adult responsibility,” their descendants still exist. They aren’t the perfectly groomed tweens you see on TV, all porcelain teeth and hair gel, riding around the local skatepark repping the latest flavor of Yoplait. They are the shadow youths who know that when the world collapses and there is nothing left but an uninterrupted sea of concrete and metal, the streets, this world that for so long tried to define what it didn’t understand, has always been theirs.
2013 A.D.
Who was your biggest creative influence growing up?
WILKINS
Mofo [aka Mörizen Föche] was a photographer and writer for Thrasher Magazine right when it started [in the early 80’s], and he was a huge influence on me. I later found out that his big influences were some of the same ones I picked up on later in life; he was reading stuff like Charles Bukowski, Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson. I got hurt skating when I was younger, so I started shooting photos. When I got the opportunity to start writing and allow skateboarding to sort of move me around California, it was [Mofo] that I tried to emulate.
2013 A.D.
Where are you from originally?
WILKINS
I’m from Lincoln, Nebraska. I grew up here and live here now. I moved back, let’s see…My son is thirteen now, and he was born when we moved back to Lincoln.
2013 A.D.
And skating has always been a passion of yours?
WILKINS
Oh yeah. And it still is. I try to skate as much as I can. It ends up being a couple days a week, maybe three if I’m lucky. It’s something that…I’ve never thought of myself as a writer. I’m a skateboarder first, and then whatever else I can do after that. I’m sure you know that skateboarding kind of lends itself to creativity and trying to figure stuff out yourself. So skateboarding is a huge part of my life. It’s kind of the rudder that steers me around family, friends and other experiences. I love it.
2013 A.D.
I read somewhere that you have a college degree, but the article wasn’t specific. At what point did you decide to go to school? Did you study journalism?
WILKINS
I don’t have a degree in journalism. I took one journalism class and it seemed like a lot of rules and jumping through hoops just to get something across. Now I wish I had taken those journalism classes, though; there’re a lot of really good methods they teach for collecting information and presenting information correctly. I have an English degree. I went to school for almost four years, and then I quit to work on skateboarding magazines. I did that for a few years, and then when my wife and I got married, we moved from California back to Nebraska. So that’s when I finished up school at The University of Nebraska. That’s when I decided I should get an English degree. As you probably know, in all those college literature courses, you’re writing just as much as you would be if you were just taking journalism courses. So those felt real natural to me and they felt good to be a part of. And once you get out of those first two years of school, teachers are pretty open to whatever you want to do. So I really dug it. It seemed a lot like what I’d been doing while writing for skateboard magazines.
2013 A.D.
At what point did you start creating your own ‘zines?
WILKINS
Two years in a row, a big group of people from Independent Trucks, Thrasher Magazine and a lot of the other skateboard companies that were around in the 80’s came to my hometown and held a pro contest in my friend’s backyard. At the time, skateboarding and punk rock were tied together very tightly. A lot of those folks were, like you said, doing things themselves. So they were making ‘zines. They were in bands. They were traveling the country and building ramps. Pretty much making stuff from scratch. Where something hadn’t existed before, they were making it. I was maybe fourteen or fifteen, and that was the first time I saw people making stuff without training or accreditation. I didn’t realize I was being influenced by it until later; it just seemed fun and something to be a part of. All of my friends and friends of my friends were a part of this thing, so I was absorbed into it. Gladly, you know? And through reading magazines like Thrasher and then later TransWorld SKATEboarding Magazine, I saw that there was a whole group of people across the country making ‘zines and trading them. So three or four of us here in town started doing that, too. If we’d get hurt skating, we’d be down for a month or two, so it was like, “Maybe I can borrow my parent’s camera.” Or go to the photocopy store, you know? That’s really how I started doing it.
2013 A.D.
When did you start working on magazines professionally?
WILKINS
A friend of mine named Bernie McMinn and myself both worked at a record store in Lincoln, and we were both making ‘zines, shooting photos and then mailing them out to people. One group of people that we’d been mailing them out to, they worked at a publishing company called Wizard Publications, which made a couple BMX magazines and another that was sort of a catch-all called Homeboy Magazine. It had a lot of skateboarding, a lot of music, a little BMX, art, whatever. Andy Jenkins, who is now the art director at Girl Skateboards, was a co-editor and hired Bernie to be a photographer and darkroom tech. So Bernie went out to California and joined the magazine, and I thought it just sounded like a great idea. I kind of bugged those guys until they told me I should come out, too, and I started doing editorial work for them. Maybe a month or two months later, they decided to shut the magazine down that we were working on. So I was without a job in Southern California. That was back in ‘89, so I was was 21 or 22. Then we found out they needed people at TransWORLD SKATEboarding Magazine, which was located a hundred miles away from where we were. Everyone I was working with were friends with people at TransWORLD. At the time, that was people like Tod Swank, some of [TransWORLD’s] photographers, Steve Sherman and O [AKA Otis Barthoulameau.] So that was the start of having real, long term jobs in skateboarding.
2013 A.D.
That must have been a mind-blowing experience, to have been so young and in the thick of such a creative group of people in a place where you could skate all year round.
WILKINS
It was great. I was always envious of people who were able to pull that kind of career off. Lots of times it seemed people were able to do it because of geography; they were just in the right place at the right time. I think that’s still the case in skateboarding. Everyone wants to move to where skateboarding is happening. If you’re in a small town in the Midwest, you want to try and get out to one of the coasts. But it always seemed amazing to me, getting up and going to work. You know when you get a new job, and how that first month or so you’re just overwhelmed and excited? Like: “This is great, I’m meeting all these people, I’m doing all this stuff I’ve never done before.” It just stayed like that for years.
2013 A.D.
What ultimately lead to you starting The Skateboard Mag?
WILKINS
I had been writing and freelancing for TransWORLD in the late 90’s, early 2000’s, and living in Nebraska. Two friends of mine, [photographers] Grant Brittain and Dave Swift had been talking to me, saying, “We’re kind of over this. We want to leave TransWORLD and start our own thing. Do you want to be a part of it?” And I said, “Yeah, I’ll do that. For sure. That’d be great.” Atiba Jefferson was shooting photos, and his twin brother Ako–who also worked at TransWORLD–was working at Sole Technology Inc., which at the time was etnies, éS Footwear and Emerica. He said he’d be a part of it, and another friend of ours Mike Mihaly was selling ads and said he’d help us. So that was 2003 when we started talking about it. A year later we were starting to make it a proper magazine.
There was just some stuff at TransWORLD that we weren’t happy about. The magazine had become a commodity for a lot of publishers and it had been bought and sold a handful of times over the course of the decade. So while the staff remained the same, there was always someone coming in from a new ownership standpoint trying to manage it and trying to fix it and trying to improve it. It was just getting old.
2013 A.D.
It sounds like a hotel I worked at for several years. It had the highest turnover rate for managers I’ve ever seen. Every six months there’d be a new manager who wanted to go in the complete opposite direction of the previous one, so there was always this really chaotic work environment.
WILKINS
Yeah, and you’re never sure what’s happening. It makes morale low and makes you unsure of what you’re doing. Even if you’re the most positive person in the world, it’s gonna affect you. You’re gonna be unsure and a little timid. Then if bad stuff happens to your co-workers, you kinda wonder if that’s gonna happen to you. But whatever. It’s not a new story; everyone goes through it. It just seemed like because we’d grown up skating, we owned skateboarding. Every skateboarder feels like they own it, and when someone comes in who’s not a skateboarder and they start tinkering with it and saying weird stuff, you’re like, “Well, you don’t really know what you’re talking about.” And eventually you realize you can do it yourself. Whether or not we knew what we were doing or whether we had the skillset to do it is another argument. But we felt like we did, so we just gave it a shot. Pretty much like how those dudes I mentioned did anything. It’s like, I can try and figure this camera out. I can try and write a few paragraphs and see what comes out of it. That’s just the skateboarder’s mindset, I think. They’re just willing to fail.
2013 A.D.
You said in an interview once that The Skateboard Mag doesn’t use a standard Associated Press Stylebook. So who developed the rules of usage for the magazine, and do all skateboard magazines use a similar style?
WILKINS
I assume all skateboarding magazines have their own stylebook, just like any publication does. But Dave Swift and I started working at TransWORLD about the same time in ’89, and there was a copy editor there who was older than us and not a skateboarder. But [she] really had a good handle on the language and was kinda steering us around. Then she left and another woman came in named Sharon Harrison, and between those two, Dave Swift and I and a couple other editorial people, we just started trying to get a set of rules down on paper. So this was late 80’s/early 90’s, where there were trick names spelled differently in every publication. We started trying to standardize that stuff. For example, there’re all kinds of weird spellings of names of people in skateboarding, so we started compiling that list. And it was like, holy shit, you know? Sharon kind of took it upon herself to develop some of the style rules that we still use today, things as mundane as numbers and when to switch from using numerals to words, or how we hyphenate certain things or whatever. So we just kind of carried that over to The Skateboard Mag when we left TransWORLD and have continued on. And it keeps developing. There’s been a turnover of a lot of rules, but we haven’t changed too many. There’s just so much in terms of writing that you have to get down [on paper] to keep track of. But with that said, a lot of it is based on the tones of other styles, like The Chicago Manual, The New York Times and Strunk and White. All those texts.
2013 A.D.
You can see that influence, but then there are certain rules such as not capitalizing specific nouns on purpose, in an attempt to devalue the word’s meanings. For example, “Internet” is always spelled “internet” in your magazine.
WILKINS
That’s exactly right. The word “internet” is just a noun. When the internet came out–the “world wide web” or whatever–it just seemed like this giant entity. Now it’s just a part of all our lives.
2013 A.D.
I feel like the skateboarder’s mentality comes through with punctuation choices like that. “Internet” is addressed passively when written in a lower case, as if you all decided, “What’s the point in giving it that extra power by capitalizing it?” You’ve all made a conscious decision to go against the standard punctuation because it’s not how the skateboarding community sees the word or the world.
WILKINS
Sure, and there are a bunch of other things that we think are really important, like having “skateboard” be one word. I don’t know why we think that’s important. If you see it in The New York Times, it’ll be two words. Or “skateshop.” We think that’s one thing and spell it with no breaks in it. But at the same time, we try not to be too serious about it. Which is funny, because with the mistakes we ask contributors to fix or pay attention to, I’m sure a lot of them say to themselves, “Oh man, these guys are real sticklers and really bring the hammer down if there’s a misspelling.” But in the whole world view, we’re pretty lax. I guess it’s all a matter of perspective. But I agree with you. That’s how skateboarders do things. They interpret things themselves, and they know what they understand, if that makes sense. They know the world they live in and what matters within it. So it’s always going to be a little different.
2013 A.D.
I feel like the collective writing voice or style of the magazine really represents that. Your writing voice in particular was very influential to me back in the days when you were writing “TONER” pieces for TransWORLD. How would you describe that style?
WILKINS
For me, lots of times it’s just talking shit, sitting down and having a little conversation with myself. Or I imagine one other person there in the room. I think that like any human being who has self-esteem issues or shortcomings, I try to stay aware of those things, and I think that’s what the writing is–me shit talking myself. So I’m always trying to get something out without being too weird or serious about it. There’s a tradition in skateboarding of that, for sure. We have a lot of good writers for the magazine, people like Dave Carnie, Chris Nieratko, Mike Munzenrider and Paul Zitzer. In the last fifteen years, the photographers themselves have also had to step up and do things like learn how to write. The reason is literally because we don’t have the budget to send a writer along on trips. So lots of times we’re getting photographers to step up. What’s cool is that if there were one thing to define the “style” of the magazine across the board, it’s that all these guys are skateboarders first, but figured out how to do all this other shit.
2013 A.D.
And it all sort of gels together.
WILKINS
I think it does, and I kind of mentioned it earlier, and it might sound like a cliché, but skateboarders aren’t as worried as the rest of the world with failing. They’ll jump in with both feet into a project, not really thinking about the mess that could happen. You see that in the physical act of skateboarding, with dudes jumping off of big stuff or riding these big handrails. I think they’re maybe conscious of it, but they’re not thinking, “I’m gonna slam my forehead and be in the hospital for a week!” I think that’s the farthest thing from their mind at that point. If anything defines our style of writing or creativity, I think it’s that.
2013 A.D.
Do you only accept submissions from skateboarders for the magazine?
WILKINS
Yeah, we do. I couldn’t tell you if we’ve ever published something in the magazine from someone who wasn’t tied to skateboarding. Most of the time, if the writing is about interviewing someone from a shop or covering an event, we never thought that there was someone outside of skateboarding who could speak to the readers. And there’s never been a shortage of people in skateboarding who won’t step up and do it, so we’ve never had a problem with that. We’ve never searched for anyone outside of skateboarding to do the work that skateboarders should be doing themselves.
2013 A.D.
Do you think that’s something unique to skateboarding? For example, I know a lot of music journalists who don’t know how to play instruments. I myself have had to write music reviews, and I’ve never really felt right about it, for the same reason that I wouldn’t take a musician seriously if they were to publish a book review and have no idea how to close read the thing.
WILKINS
I think it’s unique to skating. Part of it is because, depending on who you ask, skateboarding is only sixty years old. The sport of baseball is over 180 or 190 years old, and I think the further away you get from your genesis, the greater the likelihood you’re going to have people outside of it who aren’t active participants commenting on it and speaking to an audience about it. I’m talking sports here, but I think you see that in broadcasting a lot, too. You have a broadcaster who grows up in a family of journalists, and they become broadcasters and are just looking for stuff to broadcast. Skateboarding isn’t old enough to have that [sort of commentary], which I think is really good, actually. It allows us to develop it ourselves and steer the culture the way we want.
2013 A.D.
As I was saying before, reading the “TONER” series you did for TransWorld really affected me in middle school and high school. I liked how it was so in-your-face, as if you were talking to the reader. That was the first time I remember reading something like that, even before I read things like The Catcher in the Rye or Fight Club.
WILKINS
I guess with you saying that, J.D. Salinger was also a huge inspiration and influence locally here in Nebraska for me and my friends in high school. We had already been skateboarding, and then having someone introduce that book to us was like, “Oh my God.” So much so that my friend started a record label named Caulfield, and then meeting all these friends and finding out that book was this thing that we all shared in common… that was really cool. That’s a real good insight right there.
2013 A.D.
Something that I also appreciated back when you were writing for TransWORLD and that I’ve now seen carried over to The Skateboard Mag is the combative nature of the writing itself. I think you could pick up any issue at random, and inside the pages, in-between the lines, there’s always this sense of the contributors protecting skateboarding from “outside forces.”
WILKINS
Sure. And I’ve been talking about it a little, but since skateboarding’s inception, it’s sort of been this Lord of the Flies thing anyway. The kids are running the program. As bigger companies start using skateboarding as a tool for selling what they’re trying to sell, I think skateboarders aren’t afraid to call “bullshit” on it if they see it. The combative thing I think stems from that. Through the 70’s, when skateboarding sort of boomed and then disappeared, the only people left were the kids and the younger adults who were running companies. So you saw this exodus of people running companies just abandoning it, and that stuck with the younger generation. So that’s just been built into the culture. Skateboarding isn’t scared of clearing house, somehow, every once in awhile, for the sake of staying real. I don’t think anyone would celebrate a company going out of business, but it does come down to survival of the fittest. If the motivation of a company isn’t necessarily the act of skateboarding, it suffers and fails because of it. And there’s not a lot of tears shed over that.
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