Heather: I sent you “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” from Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son before we started our interview. I just felt like you would like it, and obviously there’s a car crash at the very start of your book.
Maya: I loved that short story. I was like, Who is this? I need to read more.
Heather: In the story, the woman is experiencing her husband dying. “She shrieked as I imagined an eagle would shriek… I’ve gone looking for that feeling everywhere.” There’s another story in Jesus’ Son where these two characters are on a bender and they come to this clearing and one of them is like, Oh my God, look at these angels out here. And it turns out it’s a drive-in movie. They’re seeing this transcendence in this weird and tacky and abject American scenario. And instead of being like, this is horrible, I need to seclude myself or find a way out, they find it beautiful. Which I feel like is something that I see in your work a lot.
Maya: Yeah. It sounds really corny to say, but there is like beauty all around us. Even when it is just a parking lot. People are like, this city used to be a forest. The city is a forest. We were kind of just born into what we were given. I know global warming is real and the Everglades should be staying the Everglades. They shouldn’t be becoming a prison or a casino, but when you grow up hanging out in a parking lot your whole life, you are like, this is beautiful to me. Through no circumstances of my own I just was given this world.
Heather: We might not get a whole forest. We have the parking lot. Like in “Hole Play.” We have to jump into the sinkhole in the parking lot.
My favorite play of yours is “God Sized.” The character named “Eager” is in an unpleasant situation. She has to repeat these man’s words with a cock in her mouth. But she also feels the sunlight. She’s warm, it’s genuine. She’s finding the sunlight in this hotel on the Upper East Side, as opposed to being like, this is a nightmare, I wish I was in the forest instead.
Maya: I think that’s really interesting that you think she isn’t comfortable. And maybe it is a compromising position, but also the words that are being exchanged between these two people are what everyone wants to hear. Deep confessions of love and wanting and like limerence. I would love for someone to say all this to me. And this is what I want to say to someone. Maybe those conditions actually don’t even exist. The conditions for those words to be said maybe are just not even real. And like, the conditions for those words to be said would be like the conditions in which I wrote the piece.
Heather: It’s performance! There’s a certain way I sometimes feel where it’s like, performance is the only way we can actually get any sort of genuine feeling, because there’s no such thing as genuine feeling. Pascal said something like, if you don’t believe in god, you gotta get down on your knees and pray, then you’ll get faith if you just keep doing the action.
I’m reminded of this early transition trans woman who was recently asking me for advice. She was really doubtful of her authentic feeling of womanhood. And I was like, woman is a verb. It’s a thing that you do. And then you just are that eventually. And even if that woman-ing comes from sexual trauma or some sort of psychic contortion that happens inside you, it doesn’t matter. You have to do the act, and then, it will exist in the most real way anything can really exist.
Maya: About that piece, and my book as a whole: wanting is a performance. I don’t know if being genuine exists. I don’t think authenticity will win the authenticity wars. I saw that on someone’s Instagram story about a play they were writing—I think it was Gideon Jacobs—said there is no true sense of self. And I think we accumulate, or we start to understand the figure of our being through wanting, which is a performance.
Everything you’ve been taught to want, you’ve first watched somebody else perform the wanting. And then you said, oh, I want what they have or I want to be like them. You know what I mean?
Heather: You want the desire as opposed to actually the thing itself.
Maya: Yeah, I feel like this past year I’ve been on a journey of understanding why when you think you want something, and then you get what you want, it’s never actually what you want. You move on to wanting the next thing. We just live in a world of want, want, want, which is fine. There’s nothing wrong with wanting, but I think in “God Sized,” both people are performing wanting. And it’s like that’s all we can do.
You think you want something and most of the time it’s just for security. You just want to feel secure about your future or your place in the world or your finances, but I don’t really know anyone who ever feels secure in anything.
Heather: Do you identify as mainly a poet or a performer?
Maya: Poetry is the way I get to perform. And I love performing. There’s stuff I’ve written that is just poetry. Then there’s stuff I write where I’m like, I want to perform this. I don’t know which one is winning. I think it just depends on the day.
Heather: Some of the people who you’ve said you’re influenced by, a lot of New York downtown theater people, were dilettantes. Like Cookie Mueller. She was a writer, she was also an actress, and she was also just like the girl you needed to have at the party. And all of those things are equally important for her, but she wasn’t only one of them.
Maya: She just seems like she was really living her life. And I feel like she just let life take her like wherever it needed her to go. And there’s just something so sweet about that. I really admire it, and hope to live my life that way.
This book is 10 years of writing because I would write something and then need to go live my life. I think identifying as an artist or a writer really scared me for a long time. I wrote Pig and Lamb [“The Play”], and then I feel like I disappeared for a year. And then I came back and I wrote “Hole Play,” and then I felt like I had to disappear again. In terms of my practice or the way I need to make work, I definitely feel like I have to be out having a life.
That’s what I really admire about [Cookie]. I think she probably always had a writing practice and things were happening when she needed them to happen. When she was in New York, she was doing plays, she was writing columns, but then she’d go to Italy for extended vacations. She just let things happen to her and I hope I get to live my life like that.
I hope I keep getting to have really amazing adventures and life experiences and leaning into life.
Heather: There’s a line of hers about having a truly open mind: “It’s so open that at times I can hear the wind whistling through it.” And she said this other thing, “Why does everybody think I'm so wild? I'm not wild. I happen to stumble onto wildness. It gets in my path.”
Maya: I’m not wild. I want to go to bed early. And then I feel like when wild things present themselves to me, I’m like, yes, let’s go, take me.
Heather: Maybe that is wild. That’s just not how a lot of people see it.
Maya: Sometimes I do have to be like, stop. Open yourself to the world. Don’t discount this experience, let yourself have it. It’s really beautiful. It’s nice to just have a relationship with living.
Heather: This book is obviously a collection of plays you’ve performed in some capacity. Do you feel like Theatrics could be read just as a book without seeing the performances, or would something be lost?
Maya: I mean, it is a book, so people better be reading it as a book! [Laughs] I feel like for me it is a book because if you’re reading the stage directions or if you’re reading the settings, that’s a prose poem. I am just someone who’s a little messy with the lines of disciplines. And I do think a poem could be a play and a play is a poem. And I think there’s parts of these plays where the characters just go off into language. And my intention was that this person is performing a poem in the middle of this play, and hopefully she loses her mind so much that she is just speaking in a poem. The prayer for money—that’s a poem, but you’re performing it as a prayer. It’s just wanting, it’s a performance.
Heather: Do you think of this in the tradition of poets theater?
Maya: The people that I was influenced by didn’t even know poets theater was a thing, but I was seeing people do poets theater. Seeing performance artists or poets in Baltimore who were transforming for me—we were all doing something freaky here.
There’s this musician, Bully Fae Collins, who would do these noise sets I’d see around Baltimore and there was no line between poem and music and performance. Jake Dibeler, who directed me in my book launch, did this play and the way he was breaking down language… Everything I saw gave me permission to do everything I did.
Heather: That is what I think any poetry or performance art is about: I want to make something cool with my friends, ultimately.
Maya: I’m in my friends’ movies, and my friends are making all these homemade movies, and I’m in my friends’ plays, and they’re making these homemade plays, and then I’m writing stuff with them. It’s fun to be living your life with your friends. I thank so many people in the back of the book that are just my friends because so much of this is just talking to my friends and playing these games. It’s conversations.
Heather: That’s what was so special about your KGB launch. You and Jake Dibeler have known each other forever. The “God Sized” performance was a much more interesting interpretation than I would have imagined because it was performed by these two people who love each other a lot. And this is how they’re going to act out their friendship on stage.
Maya: I was going to do it myself, but I’ve been doing it so much and my parents were going to be there. I don’t actually want my parents to watch me gag on my own fingers. [Laughs] And I was also like, I don’t need to be the only one performing this. I asked Jake: do you want to just step in there? And he was like, yeah!
Heather: Jake was so good.
Maya: Jake is the GOAT. I feel like just knowing him and knowing his work and being friends with him has taught me so much.
Heather: I first saw him with Macy Rodman. A lot of her performances straddle the line between music, performance, even poetry at times, like yours.
Maya: She’s a genius. She and Jake are besties. When I was younger, those were the people I was looking up to. The people who run Otion Front Studio and The FlucT girls who are now Sigrid and Monica and doing their own thing. With them I’m like, thank you for raising me.
Heather: Macy’s kind of one third of the reason why I'm a platinum blonde. It’s Macy and Courtney Love and Debbie Harry.
Maya: Oh my god, I love that.
Heather: [Laughs] Anyway. So, God comes up a lot in the book. What’s your relationship to that?
Maya: I don’t think God is one thing. In my chapbooks previous to this, I would do some sort of writing to understand God. When the subway is packed, that’s the pulse of God. When you’re surrounded by people in New York City, you are all together being like the heartbeat of God. I remember being at this rave with my friend and he said there is a golden string attached to the top of your scalp connected to God that would just carry me through. It’s really loosey-goosey. I’m kind of like a hippie with it.
My understanding of God is like when I read a Samuel R. Delany book. When I read a really good book, written by someone I feel really in lineage with. I feel like there’s so much God in literature. Delany, who is just one of my literary idols, wrote this book, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, where the main character is reading Spinoza’s ethics over and over again and he’s living in this community of gay men in the south and there’s all these breakdowns of power dynamics and there’s no shame. The two main characters are talking throughout the book about the Ethics. There’s one singular apple, but then there’s the bunch of apples and the bunch cannot exist without the singular. The bunch of apples is connected to nature and history and we’re all connected through the lineage of time. They both fuck other people, and when they fuck other people they’re fucking each other because they are one of the bunch and everybody’s connected through time and nature and that’s just another understanding of the systems of the world and time and energy and spirit. When I read that, I was like, oh, that’s God. That’s the message I need to better understand the world around me.
Heather: America’s just so lonely. There’s so much atomization so even if you're religious, you're still doing it in this way that’s very individualistic. Thinking about God in this different way is sort of like an antidote to that. It’s your friends together doing these crazy things and it creates this kind of collective effervescence, and that is God.
Maya: I have been in a place before of self-inflicted loneliness, but I’ve actually never been alone. But I don’t have to be a diva. I do think people feel lonely and have anxiety and feel separated from everyone, but something that really keeps me connected to not being lonely is knowing we live in time. Again, we are in lineage with everyone that came before us and every feeling I’ve had somebody else felt before and got through it.
Heather: I feel like you have a really good Instagram. I think people often see Instagram and social media as a societal ill that’s making us all lonely and horrible. But it doesn’t seem to feel that way for you.
Maya: I just really do like to have fun with it. And I do see it as a way to have fun with other people. I love making other people laugh and it is just another way for me to perform. I have to keep my Instagram private. It’s just been so funny having this book come out because people are like, Don’t you want to make your Instagram public and so people can see what you’re doing? The reason I can act the way I act on Instagram is because like 2,000 to 3,000 people follow me. I don’t want to be an ad for myself.
Half the time I’m posting on Instagram, I’m posting for three other people that I know are going to laugh at it. I love language and I love playing with language. That is like, I love drinking too much iced coffee and like singing on Instagram and like getting to play with language and like I am a performer. So like Instagram is where I can perform every day. But sometimes I’m just like, you know you guys are just logging into Zuckerberg’s codependent casino.
Heather: What’s next for you?
Maya: My tour, I’m about to be gone for a month and I’m like, woo! I love performing my work in random ass places. I want to do a house show in Tallahassee. I’m going to do a show in some tunnel in Richmond. You know, I love New York. We’re so lucky to be writers in New York and there’s so much here that we just get to have that so many people don’t. We get to be around a real literary community with all these different niches and all these different worlds and outlets and all these different presses. The Poetry Project on New Year’s Day. That’s one of the most cool things.
Heather: It’s my favorite day of the year.
Maya: I just can’t believe we get to enjoy this. You could go to a poetry event every night of the week, and it’s free.
Heather: I have one more question that’s kind of a gag question. What does your soul want?
Maya: Oh my god, what does my soul want? Peace on earth.
Heather: Peace on earth!
Maya: Peace on earth. I want all the hungry to be fed. I want all the poor to be taken care of. You know, no billionaires. Death to fascism. I want Palestine to be free. I kind of want what everyone else wants. I think all our souls want that. What else could I want? What can I want other than that?
Heather: A waterfall, like Lamb in “The Play.”
Maya: I want to go to the beach. I’m gonna do that tomorrow. I want to always find parking and never get a parking ticket. I want a lot of things to be free. I want everyone to have an easier time. Maybe some UBI, universal basic income?
Heather: Those are all good answers.
Maya: I’m very lucky. I know I got a book. I eat steak sometimes. I go to the beach when I want. I have a very lucky life. I don’t have a nine-to-five life.
Heather: That’s the fab life.
Maya: Maybe things will change, but right now I’m chilling.
