“Pezcara” is a fascinating tale. Where did you get the initial idea(s)? What was your writing process like, and was it different from how you usually write?
“Pezcara” is the last story I wrote during my Clarion West workshop back in 2022. It’s my culminating story from that six-week workshop experience, the story that feels the most me. I wrote it over the course of two days—something I can’t replicate now, this fast-writing skill only exists under the confinements of our dreamy Seattle housing, in the throes of one of Seattle’s hottest summers—and my Clarion West friends later workshopped it, guided by Charlie Jane Anders and Annalee Newitz’s feedback. It’s my ode to magical realism, to the genre that raised me.
Did you have any particular plans for where to place the scarier parts of “Pezcara”? Execution is everything in a horror story like this, and I loved your placement of the eerier bits.
I’m one of those people who believe the genre of realismo mágico is inherently horror; it is weird, it is at times wicked, it is born from a colonial violence. The horror moments in “Pezcara” are when the weirdness of this Ecuadorian coastal town of Esmeraldas meets the internal conflict of the main character, when the magical is so tangible.
New Year’s celebrations are often ones of hope for a better future, but there’s a little bit of menace to this particular celebration. What made you choose this particular holiday?
This is an Ecuadorian tradition, to burn a poppet doll on New Year’s Eve and leave the bad year behind as you jump across the burning effigy. We burn a body that represents el año viejo—the old year—so we can leave behind all that negative energy and welcome a new year full of hope and possibilities. I wanted to examine this celebration by emphasizing its violence and the borrowing of faces to do so. We burn what bothered us/oppressed us during the year, which is usually a politician, but the Ecuadorian humor is so wonderful that this resentment often turns into a chiste, a little joke; thus, we burn hilarious television characters like a Power Ranger or comic book heroes like Hulk. With this story, I wanted to explore what happens when the year you’re trying to leave behind, the year of mourning, the year of pain, this face you’re willing to destroy and escape, finds you.
What’s next for you? Is there anything you’re writing or creating that you’re able to talk about?
I recently finished the draft of my gothic horror novel! I’m revising the 500-page manuscript now, trying not to succumb to its insane length. The story takes place in an hacienda, out in the páramos of Ecuador, and explores the vestiges of the huasipungo time period; this era of enslaving indigenous peoples lasted centuries. There are ghosts, there is terror. I really love it.
