INTERVIEW: Melissa Lozada-Oliva by Miranda Tsang
Candelaria
Melissa Lozada-Oliva
Catapult
Interview by
Miranda Tsang
What begins with a domestic scene of a grandma making tortillas with her boyfriend quickly escalates to murder (possibly self defense) and evolves into both a relatable story of family and a thrilling, supernatural tale. In Candelaria, her third book and debut novel in prose, Melissa Lozada-Oliva shows that her background as a poet doesn’t lead her to shy away from plot.
The novel follows three generations of women as they reckon with their legacy . . . and some more sinister forces. Candelaria — who we see preparing tortillas — comes from Guatemala, as does her daughter Lucia, a talented seamstress. Lucia’s daughters Paola, Bianca, and Candy were born in the United States. While generational gaps and unacknowledged misdeeds have distanced the women from one another, they are eventually drawn back together when they find themselves at the center of a looming apocalypse. “I think there are certainly horror elements and there’s a bunch of genre mashing,” says Lozada-Oliva, when I ask her what she makes of the novel’s “gothic and horror” classification. “I don’t think it’d be fair to say that it is hard literature either or maybe I’m being too self-deprecating. But it is weird writing specifically in the horror space when it’s not all the way capital-H horror genre. I would rather a reader describe what their experience with the book is.”
While this is her first “novel novel,” as Lozada-Oliva calls it, her previous book, Dreaming of You, was a novel in verse, centering on a character, based on herself, who, lucky for us, has the gall to resurrect legendary Tejana artist Selena (who returns to earth a bit worse for the wear). Prior to that, she published her first book, Peluda, a collection of poems. I spoke with the writer about her trajectory from poetry to prose, but also the realities of being a daughter of immigrants and the exciting ins and outs of Candelaria — its fluid genre, flawed and funny characters, and the importance of grounded settings to complement the novel’s (sometimes literally) delicious flights of fancy: apocalypse, magic caves, cannibalism, and cults.
Miranda Tsang: You based this novel off of your poem “How to Survive the Zombie Apocalypse as an 82-year-old Guatemalan Grandmother.” When did you write the initial poem?
Melissa Lozada-Oliva: I feel like you can tell how old it is by the long title because I was so influenced by internet alt lit. And I was just in love with long titles. In the poem, there’s not really a beginning and end. You just see her on her journey, and it’s this metaphor for something else. But in writing this novel, my responsibility was showing the rest of that story.
MT: All of your characters are so realistic and familiar and I think that’s what makes the story feel grounded, even while so many fantastical things are happening throughout. How did you go about making them feel so developed? What was your process as a first-time prose novelist?
MLO: I know, I feel like it’s such a different animal writing a novel because there’s just so much more breadth that you have — and there’s more freedom and there’s less freedom in a way than just writing a novel in verse. It’s just so different. For me, making these characters realistic and grounded was just making sure that they were imperfect. And I think every single one of them does something slightly shitty, and every single one of them acts a little selfishly. I think maybe it’s in my personality to be friends with difficult people or something, but I just have really heavy empathy. I sound like such an asshole — “I empathize too much” — but I just approached each of them with zero judgment and love, and yeah, they’re all a little funny.
MT: I feel like a lot of the time in literary spaces or MFA programs, we’re discouraged from writing about normal-people things. In Candelaria, Candy works at a movie theater and it’s kind of a shitty job, and Candelaria worked at the Old Country Buffet. Can you talk about, I don’t know, just keeping it real in the novel?
MLO: I got my MFA in poetry, and I really got to focus a lot on feelings and moments, and something that really struck me in one class — this poet Mary Howe came in and she had really big hair and she was just so real and so cool. And she was like, “Something I ask all of my students when they’re writing characters is, What is their job?” You can’t get away from work when you’re writing characters. Everyone needs to work. Or even if they don’t, where is the money coming from? Who’s helping them out? And that’s what I was thinking about with Candy working at the movie theater and the Old Country Buffet. People don’t just exist in coffee shops that they’re not working in.
MT: Speaking of how people make their money, as someone who previously worked in nonprofits, something that really resonated with me was this sort of benefactor figure in the story, Maria Santiago, who ends up being less than trustworthy. There’s the older generation that keeps being like, You have to be gracious to this person. And then the person who’s actually on the receiving end of the giving is like, I don’t owe this person anything. Can you talk to me about how this figure emerged for you?
MLO: I think I’ve just interacted with many Maria Santiagos in my life; there is always a very nice white woman who’s there to help you out. And then, there is something of this philanthropic/nefarious reason. I’ve been watching The Curse with Emma Stone. I have to take my time with it; it makes you cringe. And I think Emma Stone, she’s just so talented, first of all, but her character is this philanthropic white woman who is so nice to this indigenous artist, but something is so wrong. I recognized it deeply. Someone has talked to me like this before where I’m like, “Oh yeah, they seem like they want to help me out. But something is a little nefarious. I think just trying to get through the world and trying to get your foot in the door, you do need help from people like that, and you’re always interacting with people like that. It is a moment of not having agency in order to one day have agency. Yeah, it's complicated.
MT: In your original poem there’s a line that the Guatemalan grandmother says, “the less they know, the better.” And I felt like that was one of the themes that struck me throughout the book, where people are keeping secrets from each other. Candelaria won’t tell Lucia why she married her off and Candy’s off doing things she knows her sibling wouldn’t like. Candy and Bianca don’t tell their mother where their sister Paola is, even though she’s been missing for years, and of course their mom would want to know.
MLO: I mean, I think everyone is trying to protect someone, or they think that they’re protecting them by not telling them all the information. And while that’s true, they’re also protecting themselves. They don’t want to face something that they’ve been a part of. As a daughter of immigrants, I think a big part of growing up and doing what I wanted to do that my parents wouldn’t let me — there was a lot of lying and it just became second nature to just not say where I was going. I’d be like, Oh, I’m at my friend’s house. Really I was downtown at a show or something, and there was no way my mom could track me on my phone yet, thank God. Oh my gosh, I wonder what kind of shit I would pull if there was the surveillance state of parenting now. But I think it’s so natural for children of immigrants, or people in the diaspora, or just, I don’t know, anyone who has grown up like me, to be like, Yeah, it’s totally normal to just lie to your parents. They also keep things from you until [older], and then maybe they tell you too much.
MT: Maybe we can talk about Candy’s cannibalism. I don’t want to give too much away for people who are reading, but presumably it’s a pregnancy craving. Which also implies that whatever’s inside of her wants to eat people. And the cult in the book has decided that whatever is inside of Candy is going to save the world. So I’m curious about that decision. What does it mean for the world that the thing that will start it anew also wants to eat us?
MLO: Yeah. I mean, I think the whole thing with what is inside Candy and what made Candy pregnant, everyone in the book is interpreting it a different way and using it as a means of power except for Candy; everything has just happened to her. And the only fault that she has in this is that she slept with her sister's ex. And that is the only source of power that she's had. But otherwise, everyone is trying to control her body — metaphor. The cult is very focused on how they really think that they're doing something good and saving the world, but most cults are actually not, or what we've learned from cults throughout history is that they are leaning more towards the side of destruction.
MT: She’s consuming blood; she’s consuming bodies. The fact that this thing is supposed to save the world is interesting to me — growing up Catholic, it reminded me of Jesus, the body, the blood, all of that. I don’t know if that tied in for you or inspired you in having it be such a dark craving.
MLO: Well, I will also say I think the cult is wrong. I don't think they’re not actually saving the world by manipulating Candy into this unwanted pregnancy. And I don’t actually think I was ever thinking of Jesus, even though I did grow up Catholic. But I think subconsciously that that was in there, especially with her dreams about the table and people eating her — Last Supper stuff. But I think I was really trying to [get across] one of the themes of this book, and I think somebody says it — living is killing. Or, in order to live, there’s some sort of suffering involved, or we have to be consuming things in order to stay alive. And the complications of that, and how do you contend with that? How do you know that you’re responsible for an animal suffering in order to stay alive? Or an unnamed migrant worker who is picking the vegetables that you’re eating for you and living in these horrible conditions? And it is obviously a very, I don’t know, first world issue.
MT: Your first book was poetry, the second a novel in verse, and your third a novel in prose. Has anything changed in your writing process, or what have been some of the differences in writing these different kinds of books?
MLO: There’s this evolution of landing on a novel novel. I mean, I’ve never written a novel before and it’s really, really hard. And I only had a year to write this book. So, I wrote a lot of extensive outlines. I felt really scared to write the last third, so I just kept editing the first two thirds before finally finishing it. And in some ways, it’s a lot more vulnerable and psychological than writing a poem that is clearly about you.
