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Melissa Lozada-Oliva has range. She’s the author of the 2017 poetry collection Peluda (Spanish for “hairy”); her 2021 debut novel, Dreaming of You, explored the legacy of Selena Quintanilla’s too-short life in verse; and in 2023 she released the mystical, multigenerational novel Candelaria. Now, Lozada-Oliva is back with Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, Jesus Is Alive!, a collection of short stories that lives up to its eye-catching title.
This week, Vogue spoke to Lozada-Oliva about body horror metaphors, drawing inspiration from the syntax of an Evangelical highway billboard, figuring out her place in the world as a Guatemalan-Colombian-American writer, and more. The conversation has been edited and condensed.
Vogue: How does the process of writing and releasing short stories differ, for you, from working on novels and poetry?
Melissa Lozada-Oliva: I think writing short stories is actually pretty similar to writing poetry, just because it’s compact and a lot of times it feels like you’re writing towards—at least for me—an uncertain feeling. Sometimes I’ll write a story and then later I’ll be like, oh, that’s what I was trying to say. And I think the same thing happens with poetry.
Can you tell me a little bit about coming up with this book’s incredible title?
I basically saw it—as a character does in the book—on the side of a highway, on a billboard. They’re basically these Evangelical proclamations trying to get people to believe in the good word. But I was also really struck by the syntax of it: I love the comma, I love the exclamation point. It’s just such a crazy sentence. I also thought about how beautiful and nuts it is to actually believe in something like that. I think all of the characters in this book are trying to believe in things—and kind of think that they are better than people who just believe in God—but they themselves are after things that could hurt them, because maybe they’re lonely or they’re trying to figure out who they are.
Do you think that making art about grief makes it easier to process on a personal level?
Well, you really work things out when you put together a project, and I think I wasn’t necessarily sure what I was working out until I finished. Then I was like, oh, yeah, I am dealing with some amount of grief, and that grief kind of has to do with the changing world. These characters are all on the precipice of being real people or adults, and with that comes the grief of being like, this world that I knew isn’t what I thought it was, or is changing very quickly. I wrote a lot of these stories stuck at home in the pandemic, so it was a lot of processing that. I think this acknowledgement that grief is something you have to deal with every day just makes it more familiar.
There’s so much eeriness and emotionally rooted body horror in this book, particularly in the story “Listening.” Are you a horror fan in general?
I totally do love horror. I’m such a baby when I watch horror movies; I just saw Weapons, and I was like, whatever, that wasn’t that scary, and then I couldn’t fall asleep until five in the morning. [Laughs.] But horror movies definitely leave an impression on the poetry side of me. It’s really easy for me to make a metaphor out of that, and to use the horror space as a way to process feelings that I don’t understand.
Your stories encompass so much of the world; did you draw inspiration from travel or living outside the US?
I feel like every character’s job was really important. I drew a lot from jobs that I’ve worked and from being stuck in one place with people who you end up loving. One particular story is set in Guatemala. I went on a trip to Guatemala with my family, and there was that initial culture shock, but also I hadn’t been there for such a long time. Like the characters in these stories, I was kind of just figuring out my place in the world, in relation to where I fit in my country of origin.
I love your line about the artist’s role being to say yes to everything. Does that feel true for you at this point in your career?
I totally do not resonate with that anymore. It is so exhausting. You end up in these places that you shouldn’t be, and in groups where people don’t really want anything good for you, doing a lot of work for no reason. At the same time, it’s kind of hard to know what to say no to unless you’ve experienced it, right? I feel like I’ve grown up as a writer and an artist and now I know what to say no to, but I couldn’t have done that without going through these hard moments.
Do you have favorite short story collections that you feel helped set the scene for this one?
I was really inspired by Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates, as well as the story “The Tooth” by Shirley Jackson. She has this collection of short stories called The Adventures of James Harris and it’s all these women who are kind of upset in their domestic lives and interact with this devil figure named James Harris, who sometimes is Jimmy. I was inspired by strangers who are never really defined in fiction.
