Sabrina: What shakes you or what do you hope will shake you? 

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Diana: I think art that poses questions rather than answers questions for you – Art that makes you confront the dualities and the conflicts you encounter as a human being and that can take on the form of film, literature, and music. In the morning I listen to William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops, and that is something that shakes me. It makes me think about the possibilities and the creative process versus traditional storytelling that we are all raised to believe answers questions with a beginning, middle, and end. 

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Sabrina: Who were you as a writer in high school?

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Diana: My relationship to writing came first as a reader. I was always reading books at a very young age, and it was just something that I just really loved to do. I found a lot of enjoyment in that. I talk a little bit about that in Tracing Horses  – a little bit about my relationship to writing and how that helped me discover a little more about my identity and find some empowerment in that. I went to West Covina High School in West Covina. It is very suburban, but I had a great time in high school. I was very involved with music. I liked punk music and I've always had a great relationship with music and art and looking to that for not necessarily answers but having a relationship with people who are creative. I did some writing in high school. I remember writing this story– this really bad story. I don't even know what it was about; but I remember my teacher reading it aloud, and then asking the class "do you know who wrote that?" Then she said my name, and I remember feeling very seen. Like, "woah: I can actually write a bit." So I was always kind of writing and dabbling in that in different ways in high school, but I didn't start to study writing until I went to community college.

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Sabrina: What was it like growing up in California? 

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Diana: Growing up in California was amazing. It is one of the most beautiful places, in my opinion. I grew up in the San Gabriel Valley, which is where I lived until I was 28. Then I moved to New York City for 13 years, and now I live in Tuscon, Arizona. The book Tracing The Horses is all about what it is like to live in the San Gabriel Valley. It talks about the trees that are there, the people that are there, and the Mexican-American community, which is indigenous to Southern California. It was Mexico before it was California. 

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Sabrina: What writers inspire you? 

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Diana: Lorna Dee Cervantes, the Chicano poet; Sandra Cisneros, the Chicano writer; James Baldwin, for his activism both on the page and outside in his real life; Migdalia Cruz, the playwright; and María Irene Fornés, a playwright and director. 

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Sabrina: What advice do you have for young writers in terms of improving craft? 

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Diana: I would say the best thing is to separate the revision and the editorial process from the generative aspects of writing. When you sit down to write, you should not be revising. You should save that critical lens for when you have a deeper insight into what the end result could or should be. You would stunt your writing if you came to the generative process with a critical lens; certain things would be killed off before they were allowed to live and be nurtured. Sometimes that nurturing comes through the revision process, not in the act of writing. 

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Sabrina: Who do you write for? Yourself or for others? 

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Diana:  I write for the community of people that I grew up around. I grew up around working class people of color who don't necessarily have Master's Degrees or are not sanctioned as poets through academia, but who actually live very poetic lives. They have helped me to better understand how art can be found in the common day. I think I write for people who I can relate to that seem very similar to the people that I grew up with. Over the course of writing the book and talking to people, it seems that my audience is young women since the narrator in [Tracing the Horse] is a woman growing up – it is a coming of age story.  

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Sabrina: We read your poem, "Little Swan," in class. I was wondering if you could talk a little more about that. 

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Diana:  I think that dreams are a very powerful reflection of either obfuscated, suppressed memories and desires. That poem is based on a dream that I had with my brother and my dad. Often times my poems end with someone telling me something – it just happens that way. [The end of "Little Swan"] was something my dad said to me in a dream. I decided to think more about that, and at the same time think about theatre because there is a part about me writing plays [in the poem]. I have written plays, so it was just collapsing the dream with this idea of this metaphor. Because of the traumatic situations that I had gone through, I didn't really get to be a child. It also takes on a secondary meaning when I talk a little bit about the loss of a child in another poem. 

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Sabrina: Could you talk about your writing process? 

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Diana: My writing process hasn't changed much from when I first started writing. I start by free writing. I simply write what is on my mind. Some of those free writes can be very language based, some of them can be experimental, some of them have to do with what I am doing that day, some of them are just based on memory. Typically I can write at least seven to ten pages of free writes in one sitting, then I leave them alone for some time. Then I come back to them when it doesn't seem like I am the person who wrote that. And when I come back to it, that is when I revise. Then I start pulling out threads that seem to have a shimmer to them or that want to become part of something larger. I use that to collage together poems. 

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Sabrina: What advice do you have for aspiring writers and poets? 

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Diana: It is about the poet, not the poem. Oftentimes we think of the revision process as fixing a poem, but I believe that it might be something that you as a poet must undergo, learn, or take on in order for the poem to exist in its best form. Although the revision process is important, you have to look into your interior and your work as a poet before the poem can take on and bear the vision that you have for it. You should always be reading, you should always be curious, and you should always be living your life in a way that you are experiencing things that inspire you. When you come to the page, you have things to write about.