👹 Monsters, Messiness, and Making Meaning: A Conversation with M.M. Olivas 🌈

My worms, 

Every so often, you meet a writer whose brain feels like a sparkler. They’re flaring with light, buzzing with texture, and throwing off ideas that feel so specific and strange that you can’t help but feel lucky to be invited in. 

M.M. Olivas is exactly that kind of writer.

We got to talk about her debut novel Sundown in San Ojuela, her lifelong love of monster media, the cinematic nature of her writing process, and what it means to find power and play in queerness, diaspora, horror, and joy. 

This was a yap sesh for the ages.

Let’s get into it.

My questions are in bold. Olivas’s responses are directly below each question.

It’s a question that I think stirs up the loveliest of responses. So, I’ve got to ask: why do you write?

Honestly, I think it started with escapism. I was a weird little kid who didn’t read much but watched horror and monster movies constantly—Godzilla, kaiju, alien stuff, you name it. My dad was going through terminal cancer, and I had full access to whatever I wanted to rent or watch. So I’d take these toys and just bash them around, role-playing these elaborate narratives. What started as play eventually became structure: character, stakes, catharsis.

I always cared about monsters. I still do. I write to stay close to what compelled me back then. But I also write because those monsters let me express the dark, messy, conflicted parts of myself—especially the ones that felt like sins growing up in a white-centric Christian school as the only Latinx kid. Writing became a release. A reckoning. A way to reflect the perversions, desires, and contradictions we’re taught to hide.

What makes something (literature or otherwise) good? And how do you develop a palate for good?

I used to think it was all about character. I was obsessed with people who redefine themselves when everything is stripped away. But I’ve started leaning into things that are more abstract, ambient. Films like Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, or Ethel Cain’s slow-drip albums that reward patience. Lately, it’s not about plot or character at all—it’s about form. Atmosphere. Medium-specific storytelling.

I love when a piece pushes its medium to the limit. Like Carmen Maria Machado’s story that takes place entirely within a GoFundMe campaign. You can’t do that anywhere else but on the page. That’s what I chase. And that’s what I try to do. I try take prose and make it feel like a film. A match cut. A one-take. But in writing.

To develop a palate, you have to be willing to get bored. Be challenged. Read outside your scope. Watch weird stuff. Let yourself be allergic to something and still sit with it. Engage in good faith. That’s how your taste grows.

How do you know what to write? Where do your ideas come from?

I think in movies. My first drafts are like raw footage where I just dumping it all out. The real story comes in the edit. But the honing? That starts earlier.

If an idea won’t leave me alone, I draw it. I storyboard. I sketch masks, characters, key frames. I build Spotify playlists. It’s a whole ritual that lets me feel the energy of what I want to say. Then I spew it all out and later compress it down—cutting anything that doesn’t carry its weight. Perfection isn’t adding more. It’s knowing what to take away.

How do you balance writing what you love with writing what you think will appeal to your audience? Is there a middle ground?

I don’t think about audience. Especially not the commercial kind. Writing to appeal to the masses too often means writing for the comfort of people outside your own community. For people of color, for queer people, that leads to tokenization.

So I write for myself. Because I know I’m not alone. I’m not the only trans woman who grew up with religious trauma or loved horror and monsters. My audience will find me—because they’ve lived what I’ve lived, too.

Most books have a beating heart or central theme. For Sundown in San Ojuela, what would you say that is?

The heart of this book is queer survival. It’s about how we hold onto a culture that has hurt us—but is still ours. How we adapt, survive, and make peace with those contradictions. The horror in the novel isn’t just about ghosts. It’s about religion. Colonialism. Internalized shame. It’s about the ways we live with inherited trauma, and how we choose to transform it.

I think a lot about Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera. She talks about the physical, emotional, cultural borders we navigate and the need for a new, inclusive mestiza consciousness. That’s the kind of future I want to write toward.

Which character’s arc did you find most compelling to write, and why?

Julian. No question. He started as the protagonist. He was originally a she, actually. But I put so much into him—he became something else. A little gay necromancer who does horrible things, but isn’t evil. He’s complicated. He’s ashamed. And he’s trying.

I wrote his chapters in second person because I wanted readers to feel complicit in his actions—to understand how someone ends up doing the things he does. His foil is a police officer character, written in first person present. That one is all rationalization and lionizing. They both do awful things, but one of them is painfully aware of it, and the other justifies it in real time. It was so satisfying to finally get to Julian’s chapters and say: now you see him. Now you understand.

What does your writing process look like?

If it’s morning, I write with yerba mate. Always. I’m Uruguayan, so the ritual of the mate gourd, thermos, and bombilla (metal straw) runs deep and has become beautifully enmeshed with my writing process. I write digitally, but I also believe in handwritten freewrites to unlock the subconscious and encourage the exploratory writing needed for the early drafts of a book.

Always and forever, thanks for tuning in, y’all.

Interested in chatting with Olivas? Send her a note.

Y’all on social media? Find M.M. Olivas on Instagram. 

Want to read Sundown in San Ojuela? Buy her book at your favorite indie. AND, don’t forget to add it to your “To Read” list for a chance to win one of three copies. 

Yours in dirty, dirty dirt,

Ali