Considering how many people who are burned alive in this story, I am guessing you might be something of a pyro yourself. If so, what inspired you to write a story that is at once a haunted media, curse, and pyrophobic? What, to you, makes fire such an effective medium through which to channel the speculative elements of your narrative?

When I was a preteen I infamously tried to do an experiment on my family’s microwave that led to the entire floor of the building we lived in to be covered by a thick layer of smoke, so I can’t escape the allegations. My main inspiration for this story, however, was the Final Destination franchise, and my own endless fascination with lost films and telenovelas, the latter a media I’m very much in love with. Brazil is a juggernaut in the telenovela industry, and we have an extremely rich history not only with successes (Escrava Isaura allegedly led to a ceasefire during the Bosnian War and introduced a new word to the Russian language) but with failures, losses and fires, similar to the well-known vault fires of the film industry.

The most famous one was the 1976 Rede Globo vault fire, which led to the loss of most of their 1960’s catalog, but the one that gave me the seed of the idea was the far more recent 2021 Cinemateca Brasileira fire, where nearly a million documents like scripts, film copies and old equipment were lost due to governmental neglect.

How I merged this with the aforementioned passion for the Final Destination franchise is a mystery, though. I guess I just really wanted to tell that kind of story.

Your story belies, if not an experience in, then an understanding of the film industry. Have you worked in film yourself, and if so, in what capacity? If not, what inspired you to write a prose piece set in the film industry, and what was your writing process for “getting it right”?

I never worked with film—nor telenovelas, unfortunately! I do read extensively about it, but if I did anything right with the actual film bit, it was thanks to the support of some of my Clarion colleagues who actually work or worked with it, and gave me good advice on what worked or not in Ângela Camargo’s story.

Many authors are guilty of having a “secret” favorite character who may not be their protagonist. Since you cover multiple POVs in this story (though you could debate that The Story is the only true POV), you have the ability to cover lots of ground in that regard. Who, if anyone, is your “secret favorite” of all the POV’s in this story?

Nívea Figueiredo! I like writing nasty characters, but her POV allowed me to go on and on with telenovela history, which was a lot of fun for me. Although all the radio and telenovelas mentioned in her POV are made up, I tried to follow the general timeline of this kind of success in her media at the time—with a lot of creative license, considering nearly every telenovela produced in Brazil during the 1960s is lost to time, so Senhora’s fate is not that special.

I love the ending in this piece. To me, it felt like the story itself gained a level of agency lost to so many stories in the shuffle of selling, marketing, viewership/readership, archiving, and all the other necessary evils of creating art as a profession. In this story, however, the telenovela itself is a character, an acting agent: a catalyst for change, and in those precisely crafted ending lines, you cement that dialogue between creator and consumer, story and creator, and most importantly, story and consumer—saying: I may have been created, but now I am me—as all good stories inevitably do. What was your motivation to write a story that, ultimately, becomes its own destruction? It’s such a unique idea, and I’d love to hear where that inspiration was born.

I said this more broadly in the first question, but I’m fascinated with the concept of lost media, especially when said media remains lost—when a particular piece of lost media I’m interested in is found, I immediately lose interest. The mystery of what it was, the memory of it, and who remembers it, rather than its physical tangibility, is what makes my heart sing, and I think I wanted to capture a little bit of that feeling. Of what a piece of media is when nothing of it remains; not its actors, nor its pictures, nor its negatives, its tapes, but a memory, an idea of it. And this memory, this idea, being its own state of personhood.

If you had worked on this telenovela, what department would you have worked in on the film crew, and how would the curse have claimed you?

I worked with fashion in the past, so most likely costume design. To honor the Final Destination franchise, I’d go through a Rube Goldberg-esque death where a small accident like, I don’t know, tripping on a pair of scissors triggers a chain reaction that leads to a hot burning clothes iron falling straight on my face.

I’m sure that, like me, our readers will be eager to read more from you after finding this story! Where can people find you, and what other projects do you have in the works/forthcoming right now?

I very infrequently post my art on social media, mostly on Instagram or Bluesky (@dntlz on both). I have a couple of forthcoming short stories, as well as some comics projects that include a graphic novel for children (no burning people to death in there, worry not) that will come out later this year in Brazil.