A New Generation of Colombian Writers: Authors Interviews from the Colombian Writer’s Symposium, Part 3

This interview is the final installment of a three-part interview series. Please head to Part One and Part Two to read more.

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Melissa Lozada-Oliva: author of Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, Jesus is Alive!

 by Greta Cunningham and Brad Sontay-Tzun

You’ve spoken a lot about the desires and perils of wanting to be seen, and your work has explored the sometimes narrow lens through which we’re willing to view others. How has your comfortability or interest around being seen changed throughout your career, and how does that inform your art?

When I was starting out, that was really in the conversation—being seen and really understood, really holding onto these Latinx authors I knew, and that being really important to me and my art, wanting other people to see themselves in what I was doing. I think there was also this fearlessness that I had where I was just saying everything and being really vulnerable. I feel almost like I’m losing it, which is okay; I’m getting older. I think it was really important for me to hold onto that fearlessness and use it as much as possible because it does go away. All this to say, I don’t know how much I like being seen anymore. I think I feel a lot shyer and more protective of my space because, when you are that vulnerable and when you are that open, it opens you up to people who don't want the best for you and people who will misinterpret what you're saying. I think I'm just more intentional with who is seeing me. But, at the same time, it's important to be a little reckless when you can be.

You've worked across many forms—poetry, a novel, a novel in verse, short stories, screenplays, and essays. How do you think about what form might be right for a new story or idea, and how has your relationship and comfortability with these forms changed over time?

Before I started writing poetry, I was really interested in writing fiction. I was really only reading fiction, but then I saw what poetry could do. I was doing more performance poetry, which is telling a story and having to relate to an audience in a certain way, really having to read the room. The performance poetry I was doing was competitive, so you had to really understand what the audience liked. I think that has really been integral for me. Even when I'm writing on paper—not self-consciously—I’m thinking about how it will be perceived. It is really important for me to entertain. 

I think short stories have the same magical quality as a poem, where they end, and you feel really changed from it, even though it’s a really short period of time. In poetry, I found that I can explore this ephemeral, uncertain feeling, and the same is true in a short story. A short story also has a similar form or has form in the way that a poem does, like a sonnet or villanelle. In my head, a short story has to be eight scenes, and I can't really exceed that, so I have to put it into this compact space. I think I was just in a period of my life where I wanted to see what these feelings felt like in more specific stories rather than just a poem that's a page long. I think I feel like writing a novel feels more restricting for some reason, but I think I can be a little freakier in the short story space, the same way I can be with poetry. 

When you have that ephemeral idea– or maybe nothing is coming to you in that moment– how do you begin? How do you start channeling the idea into a form when it’s just in that nebulous state? 

I think it's so important to have these nebulous, magical ideas because they don't come often, so when they do, you really have to listen to them. It’s a matter of paying attention and being open to magic, but also having this regimen of discipline so that you know what to do when it comes. If you're not sitting in your chair every day for a designated amount of time, being frustrated by the moments when there are no ideas, and sitting with that, then you can't do anything when the idea comes.

What have you had the difficulty writing, like “I see the vision, but I can’t get the words onto the paper?”

Because writing fiction was newer for me, there were some stories where I was like, “I'm really struggling with this one.” I have a short story in Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, Jesus is Alive!called “Pool House,” and that definitely started with a nebulous feeling. I wanted to sit with how scary it is being a child, what protection means, how childhood means that someone is creating a childhood for you, creating a sense of safety for you. But those ideas I'm expressing to you right now, I didn't understand until I was working on the story for four years, and I kind of just had to keep at it, keep revising it, and give it to different people to read.

On your Substack “Reading Sucks,” you write about the books you’ve recently read and the distractions that came up while you were reading them. What have five years of “Reading Sucks” taught you about reading? How has this attunement to the reading process changed how you write?

I started doing that in the pandemic when I couldn't leave my house, and I really wanted to focus on reading and talk about my love of reading and return to the joy of reading. I used to work at a bookstore for 40 hours a week when I was 23, and then on my days off, I would just read all day. I think that's something that I just don't do anymore; I don't have enough time. But back then, I felt like I had all of this time. I wanted to return to reading for joy, reading for pleasure, and also reading for homework because every writer should be reading all the time. 

Initially, I thought I had to read so much, but then after the first year of Reading Sucks, I kind of forgot what all those books were about, so I realized I should always be reading, but I should be reading intentionally. I also decided my distractions are saying something important, and I wanted to honor them. I also wanted to interview authors about their relationships with reading and their difficulties—what reading was like for them as a kid because everyone had different exposure to books and reading as children, [I wanted to hear about] when reading sucks for them, when reading is fun, and what their favorite moments in books are. 

Do you have a sense of who you're writing for when you start something? You talked about how with performance poetry, there's this attunement to the audience and this desire to entertain. Is the audience in your mind? Are you thinking of writing for yourself, a younger version of yourself? Is it really all about honoring the idea? 

I think it changes. I feel like the writing I do for myself is the morning pages; Nicky Gonzalez says it’s this brown water that runs until it's clear, the gunk that’s private. And then I'm thinking of friends when I'm trying to write something scary. What would scare one of my best friends? Kurt Vonnegut said “Write to please one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, your story will get pneumonia.”                 

You’ve described your work as playing with the balance of being spooky and being funny. What do you enjoy about the interplay there?

Horror and humor both emit involuntary reactions, and they kind of sound similar, but in order to get that reaction out of someone, you have to be really calculated. In a joke, you have to set up a story so that there’s a punch line. In a horror story, you have to slowly set up a scare. They are these very human reactions that take you by surprise and kind of remind you that you’re alive, so I love exploring that. I think it would be really weird to exist in a world where there was only horror, and really weird to exist in a world where there was only humor. Both seem very wrong. They exist really intertwined. If you’re just a doomer, I don’t want to hang out with you, and if you’re just cracking jokes all the time, you don’t know how to look at the world. 

You’re Guatemalan and Colombian. How does that inform the way you write? How does that translates into your work?

When I visit my family in Guatemala, everything is a big joke. They’ll tell me something that’s deeply traumatic, and then we’ll be laughing about it, so I think I’ve carried that into my life. Sometimes I laugh when I shouldn’t, and I think there’s a lot of storytelling there. It’s a very beautiful and fucked up place that I want to honor and spend more time in. 

Following that same idea, does your queerness also add another perspective to your writing? 

I think there’s a traditional way of telling stories that can be very heteronormative. There’s this expectation that you might have reading from a heteronormative lens. I think being queer and being in queer communities really influences the conversations that these characters are having, the outcomes, romances—what love stories can look like. In my short story collection, there’s only one true love story, but it ends with her body being very different. I think there’s a different understanding of what love can look like and an interrogation of happy endings. 

You’ve spoken before about the expectations that are placed on Latinx or queer writers for their writing to be political. And you’ve also spoken about how your understanding of what could be considered political has expanded over time in your writing. How do you view your writing today? Is there a political throughline you felt in your latest work, or is that a notion you’re trying to reject altogether? 

If you’re writing being like “this is going to be political,” it’s going to kind of fall flat. It just has to come from a place of honesty and experience, and then it will be political. I think something political in the short story collection is that all of the characters have jobs and are working. There’s a very class-conscious thing happening. I didn’t realize I was doing that until the end, but it was very intentional for me to have every character work. It just felt important. I think everything is political, whether you want it to be or not. I have definitely witnessed art that wants a big message, and then I don’t feel it because it was so set on that. And then I’ve been moved by things that maybe aren’t even intentionally that message. 

Whose writing influenced you the most growing up? Was there anyone who you were like, “This is who I want to become when I grow up”?

When I was growing up, I really loved Sandra Cisneros. I think we read A House on Mango Street, and I was like “Wow.” I think now, there’s so much more that people have at their fingertips, but that was very important to me. She’s really opened a lot of doors for Latina women writers. I remember reading a Junot Diaz story     in a high school class—I think “Aguantando” from Drown—and being like “Oh my god, this is incredible.” And then David Sedaris. I loved how he was a humorist and an essayist writing about his family. He has this essay called “Ashes” about his mother dying, and it’s really funny and really heartbreaking. I studied it being like, “How did he make me laugh and cry at the same?” 

How did you know when you are done? like this is the whole set of short stories I want for the collection? 

I had a deadline, so I think that helped, but I was also figuring out what the order of them was going to be. It took me a bit to figure out thematically what I was trying to do. The title story, “Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, Jesus is Alive,” was the fifth story I wrote, and then I was like, “Okay, this is what I’m doing. This is about women trying to look for salvation and dealing with their demons—supernatural and not.” Then that was the compass for the rest of them. 

This new book of short stories always use the first person. How did you decide to go that direction with this collection?

I think it might be easier to write from first person. A lot of the characters are talking to other people, so it’s nice to have someone in mind for the character to be talking about. There’s someone on the other end, and that just makes it easier to write. I feel like with third person, there’s just a lot more judgment. With first person, I get to become that character and have a lot of empathy. I don’t like being God. I don’t like that the character doesn’t know what’s going to happen to them, but I do. I think as a reader, I also feel more empathetic when something is in first person.

You talked about having this sort of thematic realization halfway through writing Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, Jesus Is Alive! Were there any other moments of surprise for you, especially writing in a form that was not unrelated but departing from what you had done previously?

I didn’t realize how hard writing fiction was. I think I got really good at writing poetry, so I was surprised at being bad at writing. I’d think I have an amazing idea, and then I’d show someone, and they’d be like, “Why don’t you try again?”. And I was like “Oh, it wasn’t a slam dunk? I didn’t knock it out of the park the first time?” So I think the discipline that it took was a surprise. I was like “Oh this is why people get an MFA in fiction.” 

Looking back at all your books– peluda, Dreaming of You, Candelaria, and Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, Jesus is Alive!– are there any throughlines that you’re seeing between your work or anywhere you feel like you started going in a different direction? 

I think there are metaphors I’m pretty obsessed with. Peluda and Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, Jesus is Alive! have this shared thing. There’s a short story about a girl who inherits a sentient tale, and it takes all the body hair from her; in peluda, it’s a poem. I think I’ve been really obsessed with body hair forever. I’m really obsessed with this metaphor of cutting cilantro so small it turns into an atom. I think I always go back to family. Someone said every writer has three doors that they open over and over again, and then they just repaint the doors, but it's always the same three things. So I guess mine are family, body gore, and maybe friendship or mortality. Those are the things that I feel drawn to—people being complicated and loving complicated people. 

What was the moment that you were able to confidently say you were a writer? 

I’m still working on that. I think I still tense up when someone is like, “What do you do?” I don’t say I’m a writer, I say that I write. And I can just say I’m a writer, but then I also have to be like “I teach” because it’s loaded. I think I didn’t feel confident with it until I published Dreaming of You, and I should have because I was already writing. And I think there are writers who don’t have anything published, and they’re amazing writers. I worked at a cafe this past year and a half, and I worked with baristas who were writers, and we worked serving writers. It made me realize everyone is writing; this isn’t as precious as I thought it was. 

Is there anything that readers should know as they find this new book of yours? 

I feel like you would like this work if you like the uncanny, complicated. Maybe you saw a clip from a David Lynch movie and were like, “I feel kind of strange.” If you ever needed to get up and pee in the middle of the night and saw these little weird shapes around you, maybe you’d like this book. It’s funny, and it’s freaky.

Brad Sontay-Tzun is a junior poet writer at Northwestern University majoring in Creative Writing and Anthropology.

Greta Cunningham is a junior nonfiction writer at Northwestern University, majoring in journalism and creative writing.