A girl walks out of Party City in central Florida with an angel and a devil costume in her bag. Next to her car is the biggest sinkhole she’s ever seen. What does it mean? Is she witnessing the end of times? And, most importantly, is the Halloween party still on?

A pig and a lamb sit on a stoop and pass a joint back and forth as they slowly each descend into individualised psychoses—the pig begs for love, the lamb clamours for artistic recognition—while not really, quite listening to each other.

A gorgeous girl drives, blissfully listening to musical sensation Tomorrow, when a sudden car crash makes her muse, bloodied and gasping, whether she’s living life right or wrong, and by consequence what kind of life is truly worth living.

All of these scenes and more are all inside Maya Martinez’s brilliant, genre-bending book Theatrics out with Wonder Press in collaboration with Metalabel. Maya has a knack for elevating the absurd mundanity of everyday life—shopping for Halloween costumes, smoking a doobie with your best friend—into profound reflections on hugely life-affirming concepts such as humility, mortality, pain, love and friendship. What reels you in with a chuckle, will be tugging at your heartstrings with the thrum of self-reflection. Sitting at the cusp of poetry, theatre and performance art, I’d never read a book quite like it.

I had first come across her work through photos of her performances, intriguing images of her blood-smeared face, or saliva-ed pictures of a microphone next to her mouth which had her whole fist inside. I was compelled by the body-mind blur that I was witnessing—the involvement of the body on the words written on the page. I needed to know more about the writer and performer behind these insane, ambitious and deeply moving pieces. So I sat down with her over zoom and grilled her for a little under an hour.

Arcadia Molinas: Hey Maya. How are you?

Maya Martinez: I’m good, I just woke up. I was at Ben [Fama]'s house last night mailing all the pre-orders.

Exciting. I finished Theatrics two days ago and I loved it, congratulations.

The plays have appeared in different mediums throughout the past couple of years—inside different journals or as live performances. How did all that work lead up to its publication?

I started writing these plays in like 2017. A lot of them came from small poems. I write in all types of different ways and at a certain point I started to think, what if this poem was a play?

The process has been beautiful and sweet. I’m turning 30 this month so in a way it feels like a yearbook of the past 10 years of my life. It feels like everything happened the way it needed to happen—in this really divine way. It feels like a lot to be turning thirty and have your first book come out.

It is! Can you recall a specific moment when you were like oh, these poems could be performed, or was performance already part of your practice?

I’ve been writing my whole life. When I lived in Tallahassee, I wrote, but it was when I transferred to an art school in Baltimore, which has this community of poets, performance artists, bands, and noise musicians, that I was really opened up to the possibilities of writing. There was a big crossover where you could go out and see everything and anything.

When I was there, I sat down with my friend Anna Crooks one day, and she said, sculpture can be a poem. I was going to school for sculpture, so hearing that made me start to think about things in a different kind of practice. As a sculpture major, I sometimes would not make sculptures and want to turn in a performance or a poem and read poems as my assignment for the week. I would make a body of sculpture based on a series of writings I had done. If I could read a poem for my assignment, then how do I take it to the next level and make it interact with the sculptures? How could I turn a small poem into a piece of prose and then the prose into a short story and then the short story into a play?

Wow, I love that. The biggest takeaway from performing my own writing has been about the physicality that comes from being present in the body while you're reading your words. You’re fleshing out the words.

Yes, totally. I like to have fun with my mouth and my whole body when I perform. I love screaming. When I write I am always thinking about how can I deliver this in an interesting way that's fun for my mouth and my body?

When you get people to laugh, you can get people to learn. You can insert a new idea, and you can ask a question that brings the audience in, and gets them thinking, wondering and resonating.

I first came to your writing through God Sized in Amygdala Journal. I love that journal; it publishes such great stuff. What is your relationship to small presses and online journals and how have they influenced your writing career?

Small presses are amazing. I love Amygdala Journal. I love Other Weapons Press, which published my first chapbook. I love Wonder Press, I'm so grateful they’ve published Theatrics. It’s exciting to see people hyped about poetry and literature and short stories and getting out there.

I’m a contributor to the Whitney Review of New Writing, which is a magazine that publishes reviews of books. The current culture of reviews is all about big presses and long reviews and there's a gap where so many small presses are putting out amazing books and nobody's reviewing them. But now they are, in the Whitney Review, and the reviews feel like it’s your friend telling you like oh it was like this, and this, and this is what I liked about it. There's always 70 plus reviews in each issue. It's insane.

It's inspiring, and because small presses don't have as many market forces to obey, there's the opportunity to publish things that are interesting and wacky. There’s a lot more expression and freedom within small presses to take risks.

Yeah, and there's always someone starting a new press. I'm like, go off.

In God Sized, and in most of Theatrics, there’s a very striking mix between crassness and earnestness that I think works really well—the balance between them creates something truly moving. In God Sized, the set-up of the scene, is one of subjugation through the act of oral sex, that you then transform into a beautiful profession of love and emotional dependency as humans on one another. While having sex recently, all I wanted to do was tell this person I loved them. The thought that being tender like that was what was gonna get me off made me think of this tension at work in your play. What is it about crassness that leads to earnestness? What's the relationship between those two?

That’s a good question. I don't know. Maybe they're two sides of the same coin; they’re opposites but go hand in hand. When I wrote that piece, the earnest part of it is this obvious power dynamic in the situation being set up. When I perform it, I perform both parts because that's the gag. I think it's really funny when one person performs two characters.

I have really bad limerence. I just want to fall in love, and I just want to be told you're everything I ever want. I think a lot of people want that. I think a lot of people want to be told like you're everything I want, and the sun shines out of your asshole.

Another part of that was that phonetically, I thought it would be funny to write something where someone has something in their mouth. I love that I’m gagging myself when I perform it. It creates that earnest crassness loop that I feel works.

I like to have fun with my mouth and my whole body when I perform. I love screaming.

It was quite romantic to me.

What makes a good play in your opinion?

Performing long-form media is really hard, so when you can keep an audience's attention for more than 10 minutes that’s a feat on its own. Writing a script that brings people in and gets people engaged and makes them want to stick through the whole thing.

When you get people to laugh, you can get people to learn. You can insert a new idea, and you can ask a question that brings the audience in, and gets them thinking, wondering and resonating. I think a lot happens through laughter and I think it's a magic trick to make someone laugh and then enter a question or a concept or a feeling that you want people to feel.

I think a good play is going to make you feel and it's going to surprise you—it’s going to catch you by surprise.

Who are some of your inspirations?

Jake Diebler had a band called, Bottoms but I saw a play he did called Kevin The End in the summer 2016 in Brooklyn, and he was incredibly captivating. It was earnest and it was crass, and it was endearing and sharp. I think good art gives you permission to make the art you want to make and that was that moment for me. I recently saw this play in New York called Bad Stars. It's an adaptation of a Sam Shepard play by Amanda Horowitz and both times I've seen it, I left the theater weeping. There’s slapstick, there's all these experimental things happening, boundaries disintegrating, like two of the main characters come on stage wiggling like worms and then by the end, there's an emotional truth that you're hit with. The language is so poetic.

My other influences are people who play with performance like Ryan Trecartin, Jason Musson. My friend Suzie Doogan was someone who really, really influenced me early on. My friends are a big inspiration. Playing with my friends is everything. A lot of that work would not exist if I didn't have friends and if I wasn't experiencing my life with my friends.

I was in Molly Soda's play last summer and that was amazing. I love being in other people's work, and playing in their world, seeing how they like to use language. We would do ad breaks in the play, and we had to memorize these lines from ads. There’s so much poetry in found language.

I like playing around with truth. Part of Hole Play is inspired by an old radio show Coast to Coast. There’s an episode called Mel's Hole and it had incredible storytelling. This guy is like we found a hole in my property and for at least two episodes people are calling and talking about the hole and the whole thing ends up being a hoax, the guy was lying, but in the context of storytelling, it's almost like a fable or a parable.

I think good art gives you permission to make the art you want to make.

In Theatrics, your characters are often faced with extreme situations: mortality, evil, accidental murder, or the terrifying ambiguity of existence. I was in Berlin a couple of weeks ago and I went to see an exhibit by Joseph Beuys who had this idea about social sculpture which I thought was beautiful. He said, “everything is sculpture, everyone is an artist”. He said that art is a vehicle for change because it sculpts consciousness. I felt really inspired by that. Art can change the world, I think. Do you?

I don't know if art can help us overcome evil. I think art can give words to feelings we've had. Art can inspire people to want to do better and be better and I think art can like help synthesize a lot of emotions that maybe we don't know how to synthesize on our own. Art can be a blueprint on how to approach something. I do think a lot of art and writing is just creative problem solving or visual problem solving, like look there's this problem and I want to talk about it. A lot of my work is about “oh there are these bad, violent things” and then addressing them in a playful way.

In the same way that all those artists that have inspired me, helped me understand how to talk about something or how to think about something, I really hope people read this and want to write a play about something they've been thinking about and struggling with.

Hole Play is about the end of the world. The ending is up for interpretation like does she fall down the hole, does she go to the party, does she carry on with her life after having this experience of rapture? We really aren't given many options to live the lives we want to be living. Like, recycling is a hoax. We're not even given the actual opportunity to do our part, like it all goes to the same place you know what I mean?

I just want to be told you're everything I ever want. I think a lot of people want that. I think a lot of people want to be told like you're everything I want, and the sun shines out of your asshole.

There's this Caroline Calloway quote from an interview where she says “I tried to be a party girl and write a book”. I would describe a lot of the characters that appear in Theatrics as “party girls”. How does that role inspire your writing?

When I wrote Hole Play, I was going to so many raves and was a dancer in a club. I lived with five other girls, and we were always up all night, going to DC, going to New York, and going to parties. I think there's something interesting about having a character that's a party girl experience rapture, like seeing the end of the earth. I guess I relate to that, I relate to that sort of femininity.

I don't like drinking anymore. I still love going out for hours and seeing where the night takes you, though. Recently, I keep going out, and partying, and being like I want to be in a space of freedom and creative liberation. That is the space the party girl exists in.

I love putting myself in situations and being like what's gonna happen? That’s one of the most fun things you can do: just go out and feel like what's gonna happen, who am I gonna meet, I want to be open to the world and talk to anybody.

I relate 100%. Bring the party girl to the literary forefront.

So, you're going on tour with Theatrics, right?

I'm trying to book a bunch of shows, yeah.

What’s that gonna look like? How are you going to tour it?

I guess I'll start with a little backstory. In 2018 I wanted to do a cross-country poetry tour with my friends. It was just a way to travel around the country and have somewhere to stay and get some gas money and perform our work. We traveled from Baltimore down to Florida all the way to the West Coast up to Canada… all around. It was one of the best experiences of my life. I got all my poet friends to fly in for different nights of the tour. We were camping and there’s something so good about performing your work every night, understanding what it sounds like to different people, and how to perform for different audiences.

So when the book came out I was like wait, I want to go back to these DIY roots where there’s real heart to it. I hope I'm not going to feel like it’s a high that I'll never be able to get again.

I'm doing an East Coast tour, that'll be the first two weeks of August. I want a noise musician or performer to come after me, I want to put like a local poet to come before me. Then I'll be flying to Oakland and meeting my friend Willow, who has played the Lamb in The Play before and we’re doing a Southwest loop.

Thank you, Maya, this has been great. Best of luck on tour and I really hope that I get to see you perform someday!

Thank you too. I would love to.

Maya Martinez is a writer and performer based out of New York. She was raised in Florida and believes in a free Palestine and liberation for all. You can find her in the following cities this August if you please...

August 1 NYC KGB
August 3 Hudson Little Deb's Oasis
August 5 Philly Clown Lounge
August 7 Baltimore James House (dm)
August 8 DC The Line Hotel
August 9 Richmond near the tunnel (dm)
August 10 Durham Shadow Box Studios
August 11 Asheville Harmony Wine Shop
August 12 Atlanta outside (dm)
August 14 Tallahassee House show (dm)
August 15 Gainesville Wormhole Books

August 21 Los Angeles PRB
August 22 San Diego LOS not required
August 23 Joshua Tree TBA
August 25 Tucson TBA
August 26 Albuquerque Dirt Farm
August 27 Santa Fe Smoke Moon
August 29 Las Vegas Majestic Theatre
August 30 Joshua Tree TBA
August 31 Los Angeles David Horovitz's 7th Ave Garden
September 1 SLO TBA
September 2 Oakland Xara’s Studio
September 3 San Francisco TBA

Arcadia Molinas is the online editor of Worms.

Earnestly Crass with Maya Martinez

When you get people to laugh, you can get people to learn. You can insert a new idea, and you can ask a question that brings the audience in, and gets them thinking, wondering and resonating.

I like to have fun with my mouth and my whole body when I perform. I love screaming.

I think good art gives you permission to make the art you want to make.

I just want to be told you're everything I ever want. I think a lot of people want that. I think a lot of people want to be told like you're everything I want, and the sun shines out of your asshole.

Earnestly Crass with Maya Martinez

When you get people to laugh, you can get people to learn. You can insert a new idea, and you can ask a question that brings the audience in, and gets them thinking, wondering and resonating.

I like to have fun with my mouth and my whole body when I perform. I love screaming.

I think good art gives you permission to make the art you want to make.

I just want to be told you're everything I ever want. I think a lot of people want that. I think a lot of people want to be told like you're everything I want, and the sun shines out of your asshole.

How I Started My Press With Discount Guillotine