I have followed Erica’s writing online for a couple of years now. Since I first found her blog and was lit up by something she’d put out into the world, we’ve written email after email, usually late at night and always rambly (in my case, at least). She has encouraged and inspired me in ways that would be sort of awkward to get into in an interview intro (although this is kind of that). Anyhow, for her interview we decided that we’d take our exchange to paper, via snail mail, because why not?

I got her letter (interview responses!) after a very long day and read them on the couch, a little drunk and very grateful. Here they are.

ERICA:

For years I blogged mostly about travel. I sat at these refurbished, dusty Dells in developing cities and wrote in a physical and mental vacuum about what I was experiencing and thinking and it was all just very one-sided. I hung it out on a little shingle and my friends and family offered biased praise from the motherland in ten words or less. It offered such a false security—left so much latent potential.

The thing I have come to love about Tumblr is that it’s not just writing in community. It’s reading and thinking and inspiring discipline and teaching in community. Some of the best things I’ve read anywhere have been on Tumblr by people I can email later that night. And correspondingly, I think some of the better things I’ve written this year were fleshed out and finished and offered up publicly because I know that would mean something to a community of not just friends but writers. I knew I would receive thoughtful feedback (when the writing warranted it) and might even prime the pump for someone else—returning the favor they’d done me with their piece I couldn’t stop reading the month before. And if my writing is flat—contrived or lazy or some flimsy imitation—well, I’ll know that through them too.

Writing in this community is life-giving and adds a fuel and urgency I haven’t felt in more static, one-dimensional platforms.

The book itself is a community of a different sort. Sometimes I envision it as a lit up apartment building, and I am standing across the street at night. I live across the hall from these people, quite literally, our stories are housed together but I don’t know most of these people yet. There’s a bundle of kinetic excitement I drag into each new story I read. A bundle of anticipation of new stories I’ll hear from writers I already love and all the moments I’ll meet from people I am related to but not in relation with.

ERICA:

When I reread this intimate little story, it’s not necessarily the transparency that gives me pause. It’s the fact that this is vulnerability and honesty as a snapshot, a still unfolding situation paralyzed in time and offered up for judgment. That’s daunting.

Oh, and yes, I do consider what people will think when they read it. The subjects of the story and the man that follows. But I don’t regret opening the blinds and showing a story—a process—that means as much to me now as it did then. There is something heavy in sharing it now as both a memory and one still tender. I think about friends and more accomplished writers scanning the paragraphs and the people I email at night, with the graphic portions open next to their laptop. And I wonder how some of them will see me differently—of course I do. But that is not a bad thing. It’s a thought without value judgment right now.

More so, I feel a little thrill…like the beginning of a relationship and those first emails you send in which you begin to make admissions and tell secrets and you are waiting with antsy fingers and a rumbling heart for him to respond. This is my life, this is my experience pulled out and pressed down like clover for you to consider; these are my basest feelings on love and sex and loss and climbing back under it all, all over again. And maybe this is a contribution to erasing the yoke of dignified conversation and what we are not allowed to talk about. Now, for better or worse, you have more of me, unrefined. Through the book, I will have more of a few of you. And maybe in the months ahead, through your own writing outlet, I’ll have more of all of you. This too remains thrilling.

Maria Diaz is a writer, professional tv watcher and tv blogger — a lady of many sharp charms and talents, and someone I met because I asked twitter for her. Turns out she lived in the same city, also spent all day on her laptop (this was San Francisco in 2008), and we knew the same internet. Though Maria is not vegan, she has had sex with vegans. That is what her story and this interview is about (and stay ‘til the end for her love poem to you all).

1:04 PM
Maria: yes, let’s do this!
mgg: wheep!
so! maria!
1:05 PM we lost you to the cold midwest. but oberlin is one of my favorite places. i have the diary i hauled all over campus when i was a ‘prospie’ sitting right on my desk right now.
have you told people there about C&C?
Maria: not yet!
mgg: it feels ‘very oberlin’ as a project
Maria: omg it’s SO oberlin
1:06 PM in my creative writing class yesterday, we had to tell an anecdote and the one thing one guy decided to tell was about very violent sex
this was the first day of class, mind you
so i think this is the right crowd for it!
mgg: i definitely got laid in the arb so.
i concur!
1:07 PM Maria: ha! the arb!
mgg: and one of our very first backers is a guy who used to have a performance art project where he blasted industrial music in the kitchen at harkness while standing in a huge tofu mixer, pouring soy milk over his body, clad only in a black apron
without oberlin, we’d be nothing!
are there hella vegans?
Maria: yes!
1:08 PM mgg: is there a vegansexual movement?
Maria: but i don’t know if the vegansexuals have a group yet
maybe it’s the “animal rights” group
and vegansexuality is their true agenda
mgg: i wonder where their agenda falls on honey
1:09 PM or on lube
Maria: only okay in oral sex?
there are vegan lubes!
mgg: i mean, i know there is vegan lube.
Maria: jinxxx!
mgg: JINX
so you are fighting fire with fire in your story
1:10 PM the subject is a guy who wrote a vegansexual manifesto
which he showed you after sex?
has he seen your piece?
Maria: he showed me after the sex, the morning after
he was very proud of his writing
1:11 PM he showed me several clips, like he was pitching me, almost
mgg: HA
BLOGGER!
Maria: EXACTLY! always be closing!
mgg: /dies
Maria: he has seen my piece because this anonymous dude who reads my blog sent it to him
trying to start a fight
mgg: oh of COURSE
Maria: but he has never contacted me
1:12 PM i thought he would since his words are so precious to him
mgg: i’m not sure what’s more wounding — the description of his sexual skillessness, or the dis on his writing
1:13 PM actually
Maria: both are bad, but his lack of skills were what did it
mgg: it’s sort of yelpy
to advance the food theme for a sex
*sec
like, the san francisco cult of yelp, which i can’t read this story without imagining
like, the way they would be all up on a restaurant (like the one where the story starts) opening w/o a liquor license
1:14 PM and the drama of that
Maria: or a place that serves foie gras
mgg: exactly
so why not review his plating technique, as it were
Maria: well, that’s part of what made me so pissed. like how dare he say that shit to me when he wasn’t even any good!?
mgg: writers!
Maria: you must avoid them
1:15 PM mgg: because you never know
san francisco was so good for providing opportunities for memoir that way
1:16 PM Maria: oh man, yes.
there’s a type you can only find there
i think this guy has moved onto an animal sanctuary
mgg: and the local writing scene was a little more brazen about how essentially you were all just reporting back on fucking one another
Maria: where he can be pure and avoid animal product cemeteries like me
1:17 PM mgg: i am sure his helio gets perfect service there
Maria: or his motorola Razr
let’s be real!
mgg: was that a bonus for you, in doing the piece? that he might see it?
1:18 PM stephen elliott tried to say that he’d never fuck someone just to write about it
i’m not in that camp, not really
but then that you can make up for awful sex by bringing a story out from it —
1:19 PM Maria: yeah, kind of
just so he could learn something?
i just didn’t want to participate in any earnest email discussions about his moral beliefs
mgg: But what about you?
Did you get anything out of it — as a lady, as a writer?
1:20 PM Maria: yes! it’s a great story, and i’m kind of in your camp, that out of any awful situation, you can at least get a story out of it
and in thinking where i was mentally that night, it was proving to myself that i could want something and get it, even if the result wasn’t amazing
sometimes a lady needs to do that
1:21 PM mgg: which most people would say is so unladylike
1:22 PM but this where i look back to patti smith and joan didion and propose, once you write at all as a woman, whether it’s about sex or not, you are taking a willful step outside of polite society
1:23 PM which is better than being in a workshop when it’s nice out?
do you have writing project plans while out there?
1:24 PM Maria: yes, i’m taking this great class called “concepts of scene” which is all about story telling
so i’ll have a lot of writing to do, just for that
this place lends itself well to writing, because there is literally nothing else to do but that, drink cheap beer and eat tofu
1:26 PM mgg: or drive to Cleveland to buy porn
thank god some college towns have a sense of history about them!
maria, where can people find you on the internet right now?
(outside of gchat)
Maria: my tumblr! which is at onesharpbroad but gchat is where i take visitors
1:27 PM like a lady does
mgg: i will pass that along.
and thank you for the story — i’m editing it now (with a submission we got that i can’t believe we got, which has phrases like “went down” and “cum” in quotes, with all sincerity.)