Erica Eller

Biographical Evidence

Herself (b. August, 1983 - )

The following is a case study of the literary development of Erica Eller, penname Herself.

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November, 1984: Learns to sign her name with an X.

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August, 1989: Eats an embarrassing love letter she wrote instead of mailing it or throwing it away. Tears the pages into bite-size pieces and swallows them one by one. After having swallowed the complete letter, she recites an epitaph for her deceased letter in the mirror.

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July, 1993: Returns her deceased Great Aunt Agnes’ overdue library books, found stashed behind some boxes of Harlequin Romance subscription paperbacks. Subsequently begs library to remove the fines associated with her family name. The library refuses.

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September, 1995: For the first time of many, lights a copy of The Odyssey on fire and leaves it on her librarian’s doorstep.

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December, 1999: Buries the only copy of her first written novel manuscript entitled "A Scatological Peach" in her backyard in order to give it a false death. Informs the police of the missing manuscript and offers a ransom of $500 for anyone who can find it. The only thing dug up by the police in her backyard is a coffin filled to the brim with moldy peach-pits. The coffin is taken away and eventually donated to the local historical society to be accepted as part of their curio collection.

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January-February 2000: Writes her second novel entitled "Running Backwards in 21 Ways" in reverse, from finish to start, without interruption, for the duration of 21 days.

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August, 2001: Learns the art of book-binding and subsequently binds each of her family members’ bibles shut.

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September, 2001: Writes her famous manifesto, a political diatribe against the cult of genius entitled "Why I Fucking Hate Writing."

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October, 2001: Begins writing weekly hate mail to her local historical society in order to make a stand against the domination of fact over fiction.

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June, 2006: Devises a plot structure involving two naïve audience members of Verdi’s opera Simon Boccanegra who get wrapped up in a backstage tragedy that parallels what is happening on-stage. This plot is the basis of a work in progress entitled "Audience, the Greatest Tragedy."

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February, 2008: Begins a fictional memoir charting many of her botched suicide attempts that were designed to replicate historically famous and successful suicide attempts. The serial continuity of this memoir is derived from the author’s addiction to repeating history.

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June, 2009: Combats the domination of the Literary Canon by researching each author on the list of Nobel-Prize Winners for Literature and pairing them with their pulp-fiction-author-doppelganger. Posts her findings by writing the names in the format X=Y inside of every T.S. Eliot book-sleeve in the library.

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April, 2010: In search of truth, she reinserts her name into every fictional character she has ever written about who is based off of herself and finds her archive of stories limited to a cast of one: Herself. Thus, re-names herself the only suitable penname: Herself.

Erica Eller is a writer, drummer, and artist based in San Francisco. When not reading, she writes and vice-versa. When not listening, she talks and vice versa. When not eating she sleeps and vice versa. Etc. Etc.