Spotlight on: M.M. Olivas
M. M. OLIVAS is an alumna of the 2022 Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop and the 2023 Under the Volcano Writers Residency. Her short fiction has appeared in several publications, including Uncanny Magazine, Weird Horror Magazine, Apex, and Bourbon Penn. As a trans, first-generation Chicana, she explores the intersection of queer and diasporic experiences in her fiction. She currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area, earning her MFA in creative writing at San Jose State University and collecting transforming robots. More information about Olivas and her fiction can be found at olivasthewriter.wtf.
Sundown in San Ojuela is your debut novel. Congratulations! Tell us all about it.
Thank you, and welcome gals, gays, theys and ghouls to the Yap Session™ with yours truly. Yes, Sundown in San Ojuela is my debut novel, and it’s a gothic spaghetti western set in the present-day Inland Empire of California. It follows local goth and walking gay disaster Elizabeth Remolina, sole inheritor of her tía’s ancestral home. In the wake of Tía Marisol’s death she returns to Casa Coyotl, a mission-style manor that witnessed the traumatic events of her childhood. She meets Aztec vampires, trickster deities, and a necromancer who dreams of a life beyond the suburbs.
Your series combines elements of contemporary fantasy, Westerns, horror, and Gothic novels. What prompted you to combine those disparate ideas? What are some of your influences?
My editor once described Sundown to me as American Gods meets A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, and that may be the nicest thing anyone has ever said about my work. The main inspirations for the novel came from the Mexican folktales my mother and abuelos shared with me in my younger, more impressionable years. Once I began my journey into researching more about my cultural heritage, I started leaning more about the Mexica people, and Tenochtitlan, and their deities, and I so badly wanted to write about them—Xolotl, Mictlāntēcuhtli, Quetzalcōātl—these characters I seldom see mentioned in the same conversations as other pantheons such as the Greek or Norse ones.
When it came to the tone and aesthetics of the novel, my comfort genre has always been horror. In high school, while I was drawn draw to works by Shirley Jackson and Mary Shelley, I was always more of a film person. Alien, Halloween, Texas Chainsaw, Suspiria, Cure, Near Dark, Possession, The Thing, Nosferatu—those were the movies that shaped who I am, and those were the movies that inspired a lot of the tropes and visual language I drew on for Sundown—especially Suspiria. Dario Argento’s use of colors, the nightmare surrealism of his framing, and Goblin’s killer score are all baked into the DNA of Sundown.
Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus, Sergio Leone’s A Fist Full of Dollars, Isa Lopez’s Tigers Are Not Afraid, and all of Akira Kurosawa’s work also taught me how I wanted to tell stories. The process of figuring out how to translate match cuts and one-takes and dolly zoom and split, diopter lens shots into prose narration was where I found the voice and style for my own writing.
I digress.
I knew Sundown was going to be set in the desert from the beginning—my family is from deserts, and I was living in Riverside when I started writing. I knew it wanted to be about the Aztec deities; I knew it was going to have the Big Gothic Victorian House. Mixing those ideas together gave me the Spanish mission architecture of California, and the very real horror of the indigenous genocide those buildings represent became a core part of Sundown. The rest was just expansion on that initial idea.
Do you plan to write more books set in this world?
Not really? No, that’s a dishonest answer—I treat all my work as though it exists in a shared universe very close to our own. I like to think strange and supernatural things are constantly happening everywhere, all around us, and my stories collect them—what exists beyond the veil of domesticity. Most of my stories try to fit into—or rather claw out of—the real-world experiences of queer people of color. So staying close to the world they experience is important. (My novelette Sangronas, on the other hand, explicitly takes place in a more stylized near-future Bay Area, where my Chicana vampire girls are learning to evade the hyper-surveillance state that is the US, with ICE agents hunting them and other Sangronas down. That one has roots in the world I know but ventures a bit farther beyond the reality of my typical stories.)
I know this isn’t really an answer. I’ll say this: I have no current plans for a sequel to Sundown in San Ojuela, but I’d like to keep open the possibility of taking its side characters and doing something wholly new with them. Especially Sundown’s necromancer, Julian, who’s still brooding about in my skull…
This is your first novel, but you’re an accomplished short story writer. What are the differences for you between stories and novels? Are there advantages or drawbacks to each form?
The difference between short stories and novels to me feels pretty big, like the difference between novel and film or stage play. There are different narrative techniques specific to each medium that don’t really translate well into other mediums. Short fiction is often working towards some kind of singular punchline or character moment. After it hits, we get out quick, though the energy sits with the reader long after it’s over. With a novel, there are more thematic explorations along the way to the climax. I write my short fiction as a way to really focus in on one specific concept and distill it to its core self, whereas a novel feels like building and sustaining momentum through more and more layers of complexity and character and themes. I think practicing both forms, telling compressed/dense short stories as well as longer, more expansive novels, teaches the writer useful skillsets that can expand their writing range in all mediums.
Which is not to say that you can’t capture complexity in a short story. My short story “The Other Side of Mictlān,” for example, is a whole adventure through the underworld with three POV characters done in under 6000 words, but that only worked because I was able to compress it within a narrative frame that I don’t think would translate well into a longer form. It felt complete at 6000 words. Sundown in San Ojuela was the narrative I chose to make into a novel because I wanted to explore so many characters, and so many themes—to give time and space to the Aztec creation myths; the violence done to people of color by the police; the experience of living as queer between two cultures that both say you are not like us. A short story would have only allowed me to allude to those concepts while the negative space did the hard work. The novel allowed me to weave all those concepts together, to show how they are intrinsically linked as different threads of a single, damning noose.
You’re a trans, queer, first-generation Chicana author. How do those elements of your identity influence your work?
Love answering this one. Genuinely, because this is something I’ve spent so much time unpacking and confronting within myself. My trans identity is as inextricably linked to me as my Mexican heritage, and I feel like in a lot of ways I’m seen as either one but never both at the same time. As if they’re wholly separate within me. But my experience of being a person of color living in diaspora affected my upbringing and worldview, just as living as a closeted queer person did. I think a lot about Gloria Anzaldúa, who writes about the intersectionality of queerness and ethnicity in her book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza—what she describes as “the fear of going home.” Because we do live in a borderland of cultures, one that marginalizes us for our Latinidad, and one that often rejects us for our queerness.
I’m one of the lucky ones: my family accepted me as fully as I ever could have anticipated, even if it wasn’t seamless. But there are far more who aren’t as lucky. That’s why I choose to make my work not about being trans or Chicana, but about being a trans Chicana. There are many works in both categories, but so few that tackle that specific in-between space. If I can be that voice, contribute to that body of work, then that’s all that matters to me.
You worked with SF Grand Master Nalo Hopkinson as a student at UC Riverside, and attended the Clarion Writers’ Workshop in 2022. How did those experiences shape you as a writer, and this book in particular?
Well, I actually sold the novel before I attended the Clarion workshop (I’m quite proud of that fact). But my editor and I didn’t revise the final manuscript till late 2023, so the book’s all unbridled, no-frontal-cortex, prime undergrad Mara brain. Which was funny for me because when we were editing the novel, so much time had passed between who I was then and who I’d become since. (Literally a whole new person! I wrote Sundown before I transitioned.) The learning curve was in trying to maintain the voice of the original author and her intent. To make it the fullest version of the story that past Mara wanted to tell. We struck a good balance throughout, I think. The things I felt were amateurish when editing started, I was able to then revise into sections that are now probably my favorites within the novel. It all came together really seamlessly.
Being mentored by Nalo, on the other hand—I owe Dr. Hopkinson my career. Everything. Attending UCR, I still wasn’t really well read and hadn’t yet explored authors like Octavia Butler or Samuel R. Delany, or even Le Guin and Bradbury. English is a second language to the majority of my family members, and many of them don’t read in general. Learning about the bigger spec-fic names was something I came to far later than most. And honestly my program leaned literary, as most writing programs do, so I didn’t think I was actually learning much until I took Nalo’s classes. She treated speculative fiction seriously, assigned readings from all across the genre including both newer stories and older ones. More significantly, she taught us how to play. How to create voice and rhythm with fun class games and collaborative writing assignments. Above all, she gave me the permission I didn’t know I needed, which was to write the things that compelled me the way I wanted to write them. Centering my queerness, my Mexican heritage.
It was Dr. Hopkinson who helped me apply to Clarion, and at Clarion, that’s where I was broken down and reforged into a more confident, more experimental writer. One with a cohort of peers who know my work better than myself, who I consider family and wouldn’t exchange for anyone.
Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know? Upcoming work or other projects of note?
Because I wrote Sundown before I transitioned, and thus didn’t write any explicitly trans characters in it (though, looking back, there are…signs), I’d like to recommend people check out my novelette, Sangronas, that just came out in Uncanny Magazine’s 60th issue. I think these two works are the ones I’m most proud of as a writer. I also just want to thank everyone who reads and supports Sundown in San Ojuela. I hope you all enjoy it, and that it heals something within other queer Latines who seek comfort and belonging amongst the monstrous and the fanged.
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