I was born in Fresno, California. My mother and father were barely out of their teens and our little family struggled the way young, poor families struggle everywhere. I remember my mother saying to me when I was very young when people ask you what you are you say Mexican-American. We were third or fourth generation Californians who spoke Spanglish. I was a toddler when my mother graduated from the university—a near miracle, I imagine now. Sheer tenacity a trait she would hand down to me. My father was an aspiring musician, which is to say, he was gone a lot. Absence, a trait handed down to him by his father, created all kinds of interesting dynamics and desires in me, in our family. All this and the fertile, sprawling landscape of Fresno County are some of the reasons I write.
I started writing creatively when I was twenty or twenty-one. I knew I had found something special because it made me quiver on the inside, weepy, raw. I would cry at my keyboard trying to give what was in my head a container on the page. I was spilling over and didn’t know what to do with it.
So I sat on it.
For ten years.
Then I invested in it and everything changed.
I am just beginning.
I write about autobiographical events. I fictionalize autobiographical events. Sometimes I make up small and large details. Sometimes I don’t. I stick to a few big projects. I start and sometimes finish smaller ones. I write slowly. I am curious about everything and everyone around me and often lack a filter when trying to get to the heart of a matter. I am easily moved to tears. I am nostalgic. Memory is very important to me. Music is also very important to me. I am a feminist learning what it means to be a feminist. I am Mexican-American still learning what it means to be Mexican-American. I trust my intuition. I am not afraid of conflict. Failure does not scare me. I get angry about things out of my control.
My writing is sometimes bigger than me. My skills do not always do my ideas justice.
I have so much to learn. I have so much to do.
I started writing creatively when I was twenty or twenty-one. I knew I had found something special because it made me quiver on the inside, weepy, raw. I would cry at my keyboard trying to give what was in my head a container on the page. I was spilling over and didn’t know what to do with it.
So I sat on it.
For ten years.
Then I invested in it and everything changed.
I am just beginning.
I write about autobiographical events. I fictionalize autobiographical events. Sometimes I make up small and large details. Sometimes I don’t. I stick to a few big projects. I start and sometimes finish smaller ones. I write slowly. I am curious about everything and everyone around me and often lack a filter when trying to get to the heart of a matter. I am easily moved to tears. I am nostalgic. Memory is very important to me. Music is also very important to me. I am a feminist learning what it means to be a feminist. I am Mexican-American still learning what it means to be Mexican-American. I trust my intuition. I am not afraid of conflict. Failure does not scare me. I get angry about things out of my control.
My writing is sometimes bigger than me. My skills do not always do my ideas justice.
I have so much to learn. I have so much to do.
CANDACE EROS DIAZ is a queer Xicana writer based in Oakland, CA. She's received fellowships from the San Francisco Writer’s Grotto, Lambda Literary, and The Steinbeck Fellows Program of San José State University. She is the recipient of a Vermont Studio Center residency and is a proud VONA/Voices alum. She co-curates the long-standing San Francisco reading series Babylon Salon and is the Program Coordinator for the MFA in Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s College of California where she earned a dual-concentration Masters in Fine Art in creative nonfiction and fiction. Her work has appeared in Under the Gum Tree, The East Bay Review, Arroyo Literary Review and Huizache, among others, and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
