Podcast Transcription: Ruben Reyes Jr.

Aug 21

Aug 21 Podcast Transcription: Ruben Reyes Jr.

This episode, Marketing Coordinator and Bookseller, Jules, interviewed Ruben Reyes, Jr., author of There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven, a collection of surrealist and immersive short stories rewriting the past, present and future through the lens of the migrant experience. The two discuss parasocial relationships, “revisionist futurism”, and cruise culture.

Jules
Hello!

Ruben
Hi!

Jules
Thank you so much for being here and for being down for me to interview you. I’m so excited.

Ruben
Oh, my god, thank you for having me! I'm so excited about this.

Jules
Okay, Ruben, wow! This comes out in like a month, right? How are you feeling about this? This baby?

Ruben
I'm feeling excited and nervous and all of the feelings I think that one would feel. I don't know, I've lived with it for so long, right? That it's amazing that people are gonna be able to access it now. This little piece of my brain that represents who I was from, I don't know, 22 to 26/27 when I was finishing the collection.

Jules
Dang. And so I always am so curious about short story collections because I know sometimes they live in other places first, and I think you had mentioned that in the acknowledgements. Which, you made a point in the acknowledgements being like, “shout out to the people who read these first,” like me. So, I saw that and I was like, “okay, some of them lived in other places first.” How did you find that they transformed and were able to live in this book, too?

Ruben
Yeah, that's a great question. So, as I think many short story writers, like I was just writing one-off things, right? I had this idea or character or something that I wanted to work through. And so I wrote a story about it, and over time, I accumulated stories, especially when I went to my MFA program and started thinking about a book, basically. But, you know, in that weird time where I was just doing one off stories, I did kind of want to get eyes on it and so I ended up submitting some places and was lucky enough to have some of the stories in earlier forms published by literary mags and in other venues. And at the time it felt done.I think they were done to a degree, right? Like they were good stories. I wouldn't have published them, I think, if I didn't think they were. But once, you know, I sold the book and I started thinking about the book as a book and I started working with my incredible editor, Jessica, I started seeing that I could push some of them a little bit further. I also went to grad school in between drafting some of the first stories and the book coming out, right? And I learned a lot. I actually learned a lot in grad school, which is, wow, what a concept! And I was able to apply that and make them better. And so the versions in the books are pretty close to the versions I've published for the stories that were published previously, but I think they're a little better!

Jules
Yeah, it's always so interesting, I feel, to write something and then not touch it for a long time and then go back and it doesn’t feel like you wrote it, which I think provides freedom to be like, “this can change.” It's very interesting. Yeah, that's super cool.

So, you have multiple stories throughout the book, right? [They’re titled] “An Alternate History of El Salvador or Perhaps the World” and they're all very different, but they fit under the same umbrella. The first one is very much “history, this is what could have happened.” And the second one, same thing, which I wanna talk a little bit more about the second one in detail [later]. And then the third one feels almost futuristic in a way, almost like it lives in this timeless kind of place. At least that's how I interpreted it. I am wondering, do these stories actually exist in the same world or are they different?

Ruben
It's a great question. The funny thing about that series, so for people who haven't read the book yet, it's this kind of, I'd call them a series of flash fiction pieces. They're pretty short, not all of them less than a thousand words, but some are pretty close. They're only a couple pages long and they all have the same title, which is “An Alternate History of El Salvador or Perhaps the World” which makes the table of contents look a little funky.

The first time I kind of had anyone read those was in a workshop and I presented them all together as a story. And people had that question. They were like, “so it's like an alternate colonial history, which is the first story, does that lead to the second one and the third one and the fourth one?” Which was a really interesting question, but I knew that they weren't connected directly or linearly. And then during that workshop, I actually had a professor who mentioned, “in a book, could you spread them out?” And that's what I ended up doing. I really liked that idea. Because to me, they're standalone pieces. It’s kind of like the multiverse, like the multiverse is so trendy right now.

Jules
Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking.

Ruben
But I love – yeah, but I love the concept! It's so interesting, right? This idea that there are like infinite universes touching ours where only certain things are different. And that's kind of how I'm thinking about it. It's basically like these are “alternate histories” that kind of take place in a multiverse. So there's like the story about Selena, right, Quintanilla, and that's just an alternate history of her life adjacent to ours with a lot of obvious similarities. I'm interested to hear how people read them because in my head they're kind of standalones, but obviously I've connected them with this title and with this kind of concept of an “alternate history”.

Jules
Yeah, as I was reading it, I was like, “it could, it also could not,” which I think is also fun to think about. But I'm really leaning into the multiverse kind of aspect of it, like the butterfly effect in a way, right? Like if this one went like half a way, then this could have happened or, you know, et cetera, et cetera.

Ruben
I'm obsessed with that right now. I think it's so fascinating as a thought experiment, but also to me says something about the experience of immigration, but also maybe marginalized people in general. Maybe this is just my brain, but I feel like I'm always thinking about “what if” when it comes to my parents and their immigration, or I look at my cousins in El Salvador whose parents stayed and raised them there and I'm like, “okay, that could have been me if certain things were different.” There's something about the multiverse that really speaks, I think, to the immigrant experience. I think that's why I loved Everywhere, Everywhere, that – wait, what? Oh, my god, I'm butchering the title.

Jules
Everything Everywhere All at Once?

Ruben
Yeah, my favorite movie of 2022 that I can't even remember the title of! I think it honors that, right? It honors that kind of weird thing that the diasporic condition is a little like living through different multiverses, which is why that movie works so well for me. Anyway, it's something I'm obsessed with and I'm thinking about and yeah!

Jules
So cool. I mean, like, I feel like it's you're rewriting history and then in turn rewriting the future, which I think is such a fun device when storytelling, you know?

Ruben
Yeah.

Jules
And I think it's interesting when you start every story, you're like, “okay, is this going to be surreal? Is this going to be a little bit more grounded in reality?” And I think that allowing the reader to almost wonder if they should suspend their disbelief is so challenging and fun and very engaging.

Ruben
Thank you! I'm glad it's not confusing. But it's like, I don't know, it's kind of how my brain works! I have no problem coming up with ideas. I think the hardest challenge is following through and living with a story for multiple years. But the idea portion comes easy to me. And so the collection goes in a lot of different ways. I'm glad to hear that you found them engaging and fun because I, you know, I had a lot of fun writing them kind of following my obsessions in all these different places.

Jules
Yeah, totally. I feel like, too, you comment on what you're doing throughout the book. So I wrote two lines that you had said. In “The Myth of the Self-Made Man”, which, one of my favorite [stories], you said, “what a privilege it is to reconstruct the past.” And then (let's see if I can pronounce this) “Quiero Perrear” – is that how you say it? Don't let my grandma hear me.

Jules and Ruben
“Perrear.”

Ruben
“Quiero Perrear!” Yeah, “perrear”, I think. My pronunciation is off, too, but yeah.

Jules
In “Quiero Perrear! (And other catastrophes)” you say, “the past can be an anchor or a bludgeon depending on how one wields its weight.” It's so cool how you are saying “this is a responsibility” and then you're putting on the Responsibility Hat.

I wonder, did you have any reservations in doing that? You say that it's a responsibility. Did you find that it was like, “okay, let me be a little bit tactful on how I'm doing this”? Or were you kind of like, “no, I'm free to do this and then I'll take the responsibility on later”?

Ruben
Oh, totally. I mean, definitely from the beginning, I knew it was a big responsibility. I mean, in general, I grew up Catholic. I have a lot, a lot of guilt, a lot of feelings about how my actions have consequences and what I do matters. Which, maybe Catholicism pushes it a little far, but it's a good thing to have that kind of self-awareness to a degree.

In college, I studied history and literature. So I was doing a lot of academic and theoretical work on how we write history, you know, how history very explicitly favors the winner and how history has been written by people who are not like me, by white men mostly. That academic training very early on was taught in some way to question history and how history is taught and written down. And, because I love literature so much, I was thinking about how fiction can be a way of building history in some way or affecting history or thinking through this question of how history is written.

And when it comes to El Salvador, I grew up thinking El Salvador didn't have a history. I went [to El Salvador] growing up and it was the place that I would spend my summers and it's the place where I had family. But I never thought of it as a place of historical or cultural significance, which is a really, really tough thing to grow up [with]. I didn’t know, and, in retrospect, that's a really messed up thing to grow up thinking.

And so when it came to fiction and then I decided that I was gonna engage with Salvadoran history and the history of the US and El Salvador and the kind of relationship between the two, I knew that I had to do it in as interesting a way as possible and also in as faithful a way as possible. These stories go to a lot of different places, right? There’s cyborgs, we go to Mars, they're speculative, they're absurd, but they are rooted in the kind of social and political histories of El Salvador in the United States. Because ultimately that's what I wanted to comment on. I wanted to comment on the world even when I was writing about other worlds. But I definitely felt the responsibility to take history seriously and thoughtfully in this collection.

Jules
Yeah, I think it's interesting when you talk about not knowing if a place has history and how there is that guilt– come on, theme!

Ruben
Okay, theme!

Jules
I feel like, you know, it's so interesting because we can feel disappointed [about that], but it's like, if that information is not readily available for us it's harder to connect the dots.

This is not the same at all, but I went on a cruise to Puerto Rico, Love a cruise, I'm Floridian.

Ruben
I love a cruise too, I'm from SoCal.

Jules
I love cruises!

Ruben
There is this amazing Carnival cruise, three day cruise to Ensenada. It was a classic in my family and friend group. We love a cruise in this house.

Jules
Yeah, it's true! It's like Vegas on the water, it’s such a good time!

Ruben
No, it's amazing. You get off the boat and the whole world is shaking a little bit! You gotta get your land legs back!

Jules
So I went to Viejo San Juan. After the hurricane, too, so that was very interesting seeing how all of that had changed. Walking through and being like, “there is so much history here that I feel like I haven't been able to access.” And so trying to access that through fiction, inherently, is going to open your mind up a lot, but it's almost like you have to still reach out and branch out just to be able to access it, because it's just not always available. It's very, very odd.

Ruben
Yeah, no, I totally agree. And I think fiction is a great way to do it just because it's so, at least to me, accessible. The fiction I love is always really moving and compelling in a way that, like, you know, reading the facts of a country's history is maybe not, or not always. I mean, to me it is because I love a Wikipedia rabbit hole and that's the kind of person I am. There's just like this kind of depth, I think, that you can access through fiction. This is why I love reading international literature and translation when I can. When I was discovering El Salvador's history, you know, it was a lot through poets and through fiction writers from El Salvador, too. I don't know. There's something really magical about accessing a country's history and its people and the experiences of the people upon whose history was acting through fiction.

Jules
Yeah, totally.

I am going to ask you a question that I already know the answer to because I follow you on Instagram. You've been watching Fantasmas.

Ruben
Yes! Oh my god, Julio, if you're listening, I'm obsessed with you. Julio, your brain.

Jules
Julio! My Favorite Shapes, the Papyrus Sketch on SNL, just so good! Julio is brilliant.

Ruben
I know. I love. I think he wrote, have you seen Fisher Price Wells For [Sensitive] Boys? That SNL skit.

Jules
Yes!

Ruben
I think he wrote that one too, and I'm obsessed. I just love him.

Jules
Yes. Incredible. Just so good. But it's kind of that same thing, right? My roommate and I are watching it, and I have not seen the last episode, but we were talking about this idea of “Revisionist Futurism” and how it's like, you know, “this can be anything! The future can be anything.” I think they made a joke because there's the whole thing about the movie [in Fantasmas] that's funded by Zappos. I was in the airport and there was a store that you can't go into unless you're an Amazon member. And I'm like, “that's the same thing. If you think about it!”

Ruben
That's the same. Yeah. Yeah.

Jules
It's the same thing, it's only in its infancy, you know?

So I'm wondering with the “revisionist futurism” idea in mind, when drawing from your own experiences or those around you, how did you find that like that poked through and where did you feel like you were able to lean in?

Ruben
Yeah, I mean, I think eventually I realized that that was the only way to keep things interesting for myself. I feel very blessed to write in the time and publish in the time that I'm publishing because I feel like now there's a baseline of what like immigrant literature or child of immigrant literature, which is what I'm writing [is]. We had the 90s, right? We had the 90s where people were doing that really interior, really appealing-to-empathy kind of thing where they were just, for the first time it felt like, right? Even though people had been writing already, it felt for the first time that people were writing about immigrants in fiction in a way that other people were noticing, right? And it was like, “oh, my God, like what a struggle immigrants have in this country.” Again, these are books that raised me. I want to make it really clear that they're really important. They're the only reason I can write. But those kinds of stories that are kind of typical about immigration and alienation and like, you know, real quiet literary realism. They felt stifling for me to kind of answer the kinds of questions I wanted to ask, which are about systems and about where we're going as a country, especially when it comes to immigrant lives. And for me, I had to kind of dive into the future or an alternate past or, or do something weird, basically. Do something that familiarizes the issue for people. And I think that's what I love about Fantasmas. It's like a version of New York that I recognize as inspired by current New York, but pushed ahead a little bit and made weird in a way that we can see the crumbling infrastructure of New York, basically, in this kind of on the screen in this kind of absurd and weird way.

And so maybe that kind of answers your question. I think for me, to comment on the present, I needed to either go to the future or the past, or an alternate past, or something. I needed to do something weird to be able to talk about how weird real life is, is essentially how I'm thinking about it, yeah.

Jules
Yeah. And without spoiling it for anybody who's listening who wants to watch Fantasmas, that, there's this talk about, and again, I was talking with my roommate about this, commodifying and commercializing your trauma in a way that's digestible. And how do you do that in a way that still feels real and true to you? And I think that you were able to, you know, write about what you are very close to and still do it in a way that's like, “I'm not necessarily pandering. This is what could be, this is what has happened.” And like still, you get the point across in a very surreal and interesting way. You really towed a line that like, as I was reading, I was like, this is just so good.

Ruben
Thank you! Thanks for saying that because I was worried about that. Like I said, I was born here. I have all the privileges of citizenship and my parents lucked out in many ways. In so many ways, I'm the pinnacle of the American dream, but I know that structurally that's not how the world works. I wanted to write about the complicated edges a little bit. And so I appreciate that, yeah. It was something I was really concerned about because I didn't want to be repackaging other people's trauma for my benefit, which is always kind of a potential thing that people can do when making art. It's a tough one. It's a tough line to tow, though. For sure.

Jules
Well, know that you slayed it.

Ruben
Thank you.

Jules
So to talk about that short story, where they go to Mars, you not only talk about, you know, like immigration, you talk about climate change and how the ocean is acidic and everything is falling apart and now people have to go to Mars. And then all of a sudden xenophobia is different. Ignorance and intolerance is [now] different. This is more of a comment than a question, but the way that you were able to depict like,”actually, this can look any way. And it's just like, this is how it's applicable now in the world that we're living in, but know that if anything was different, you're no different.” I feel like that's where intersection and when different identities kind of cross over, how it's like, “you may be an exception in some spaces, but you are not in others.” Using surrealism and absurdism and more of a fantasy kind of lens really allows, myself obviously, other readers from different backgrounds can still find that applicable in their everyday lives.

That wasn't a question, that was just a comment!

Ruben
Thank you. I love, I love that you pointed out that story. Like that's the oldest story from draft to final in the collection.

Jules
Really?

Ruben
So the fact that it still resonates is really special to me. It went through a lot of changes, arguably the most changes out of any story in there. But that idea I had before Trump was president, when he was really ramping up his campaign that summer of 2016.

Jules
Woof.

Ruben
Yeah. And I love that story. I mean, I grew up reading Ray Bradbury. I love The Martian Chronicles. I love his space stuff. And so I kind of wanted to take my attempt at it.

Another thing that I love about that story, and that I'm glad you pointed out, is that it is about inner Latino conflict, like how Latinos can be villains to other Latinos. How immigrants can be villains to other immigrants. Because that's something that fascinates me in the world that I feel is underrepresented in a lot of the media we have. There's a million stories about white people being terrible to Latinx immigrants, which is a big part of the story, but there's also the ways in which the community polices itself. And that's kind of what that story was. There's a number of stories actually that I wrote being like, “okay, let's talk about Latinx villains because they exist. They're here.”

Jules
For sure. Like the bias, there's classism, colorism. It's just so interesting how it can all be broken down in one specific community. And I feel like that story just really did that.

Let's talk about the choose-your-own-adventure story. Because I love a choose-your-own-adventure.

Ruben
Me too.

Jules
I feel like that's where you can really get down and dirty and like, “yeah, what if this went this way? What if this went this way?”

Ruben
Yeah.

Jules
When I had my galley, it didn't have specific page numbers so I just read it linearly. That made me wonder, did you write it linearly, or did you find that you were kind of just like, “boop, boop, boop, let's see what crosses over”?

Ruben
Yeah, I'm trying to write an essay right now actually about how I wrote that story. So hopefully, hopefully I can share that with you at some point.
Editor’s note: That essay is now finished and you can read it here!

The TLDR of it is that I was talking to a friend who was talking about choose-your-own-adventure stories and I was like, yeah, that would be really fun to write. Carmen Maria Machado in her memoir has this amazing section. I don't know if you've read it.

Jules
Oh, I have. I love that book.

Ruben
I love that book, “Dream House [as a] Choose Your Own Adventure” story. So I had read that and I was thinking about the form. And basically I realized the first thing you have to actually do is make a decision tree that maps out all the possibilities. And I'm not a huge outliner, but for that story I had to be. So I made that, which basically just had a very one-sentence-per-section kind of outline of what would happen. And then from there I had to just write it section by section. And then I started playing a little bit with the ordering and with the decisions and with other stuff. I went real galaxy brain to write that. I just kind of wrote it in a little bit of fugue state.

Jules
I love that.

Well, and it's like the same thing with In the Dream House, and to bring it back to Black Mirror with Bandersnatch, right? I love when an author or writer is just like, “hey, it's a choose your own adventure, sure. But at the end of the day, this is going to end how I want it to end. You're going to go where I want you to go.”

Ruben
Right, exactly.

Jules
I reread it a few times and I was just like, “yeah, this can go down the same trail or like you kind of will end up in the same kind of place.” Cool.

Ruben
Yeah, I loved it because it's about the illusion of choice, right? To me, like that's what a choose-your-own-adventure is. It's like you think you have choice, but you actually don't. And, to me, that’s the paradox of immigration, right? You can make your choices, but also you're beholden to the system that shapes it. So that's what that story is about. It felt like one of the truest ways of writing about immigration that I was able to find when writing this collection.

Jules
Yeah, for sure.

Let's talk about Miss Quintanilla because...

Ruben
I'm gonna start crying! Every time I talk about her. I get all in my feels, but yes, let's do it. Let's talk about so.

Jules
[Your story in the collectoin] is so beautifully written. Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s Dreaming of You is the only other reference I have.
Editor’s note: For context, Dreaming of You is the story of a young woman who reanimates Selena Quintanilla through seance.

Ruben
I love that book.

Jules
This book came out a while ago, so I'm kind of going to spoil it. But there is a moment where Selena's parents reach out to the person and say, “we didn't ask you to do this, we wanted to remember her as she was.”

I think what you did was very interesting in remembering her and making her human and saying, yeah, this could have happened this way. And at the end of the day, she might've met not quite the same fate, if it were to have changed would things have been different for her? And how would things have been different for her?

How did you, when talking about her, first of all, how did that come to be, the idea? And then second of all, because she was real, where did you find comfort in that?

Ruben
Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, so this is one of the “Alternate Histories”, right? And it's about Selena Quintanilla and (mini spoiler) she doesn't die in my retelling.

So I grew up obviously hearing some of her music, but I think I really fell down the rabbit hole of realizing what happened to her when I was a little bit older, probably when I was in college. And, now I listen to all her music and have become a little more obsessive about it. In part because her music's amazing and she was this amazing artist, but also because she's come to represent so much, for a lot of Latinx people. She's one of the most visible Latinx artists of all time, basically. And in large parts because she died, right? She was like this really interesting figure to approach in my fiction too. And like I was saying, If I think about it too long, I get kind of emotional because she was so young, she was so talented. She had a really complicated life. Her family life was pretty complicated in ways that we only, I think, understood fully after she died. Her father still runs her legacy in a kind of weird and exploitative way. And so I was like, “I wanna let her be a person.” That was my goal. I was like, “what if she just got to be a normal person who grew up and like, you know, got to marry the man and live happily with him.” And essentially that's what I tried doing in that story is kind of giving her a happy ending, which was just like a normal ending in some ways.

At the same time, I was interested in talking about the forces that did kind of shape her life, right? Celebrity obsession, the music industry, know, all fandom, all things that really interest me. And so the story also kind of engages with that, with a kind of foil character that's in there.

Someone read that story and they said, “I love how this story shifts the focus from her to being more about the industry or fame and the harmful effects of that.” I thought that was, I hadn't thought about the story in those terms, but it feels true to me that that's actually what the story is about. But at the same time, I get to kind of protect her a little bit through my fiction, which is weird and patronizing and like totally a slight effect of fandom, but also like it's what I wanted to do because her story moves me so much.

Jules
Yeah, it's the same thing with “what-ifs”, you know? And I did think that the commentary on the music industry was interesting.

Our coworker, Bel, just wrote a book, Honey, and in it, she talks about the music industry and how difficult it is, particularly for young girls. Add the fact that [Selena] is from a marginalized group, and it makes it just so much sadder, and in those kinds of instances, specifically with her relationship with her family, it's like, if you're going to be in that kind of space, you have to have that support in a way that's not, you know– I don't want to say mutually beneficial because she did help support them– but I think then comes that expectation. And then the relationship changes. You think about the power dynamic as well and how socially that she was so young, like it can just change a person, you know? I really think that in that story, the fact that it was, okay, now I don't wanna spoil it, but the fact that you can see it happen in another situation in a different circumstance and you're left thinking, “could it happen again?” Different person, same circumstances, same background/similar background, could it happen again but different?

Ruben
Yeah, I mean one of the things I was trying to do in, I’d argue, every story in the collection is write about systems. Like how do I write about systems and structures, which are the defining forces of our lives, in a way that makes them visible when so much of our lives and those in power want to make them invisible? And so in that story, yeah, it's about the music industry and other stories, it's about the immigration system. How do I make that really visible to people? How do I make capitalism and its kind of cruelty really clear to people while also writing stories that have characters and that are engaging and interesting and surprising, right? It's a tough balance. So if you think about systems all the time and structural inequality, like I think you'll probably like the book.

Jules
I love short stories. They’re just really, really fun and good and short, so they make you feel like you’re reading not only a wide array of themes and, at times, genres, but that you’re getting through them really quickly.

I usually recommend them for people who are tired of reading the same kind of thing and are trying to switch up the vibe. They’re very easy to travel with. They are usually best for people who are trying to get back into reading.

So, I decided it would be best to ask some booksellers what collections they love and what they recommend the most.

I will start off by saying that I really loved Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung which is translated by Anton Hur. It’s a gross little book and no two stories are the same. Some are based in horror, some are based in fantasy, and some are just straight up surrealist and bizarre. And, also, it’s still August when this episode is coming out. This means it’s still Women in Translation Month, so you should get it while it’s hot.

Alyx
Hi, my name is Alyx. My favorite short story collection is definitely Bliss Montage by Ling Ma. I recommend it when someone is looking for something a little funky, but ultimately rooted in a literary fiction voice. It’s surreal and twisty and I love it. Highly recommend as a gift.

Bex
Hey, this is Bex. I am not a huge fan of short stories because I went to an MFA program which loves short stories and MFA’s were started by the CIA, according to Wikipedia. But I really love Helen Oyeyemi’s What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours. The stories are weird and full of cobblestones and puppets and geese and it is just a whole other planet that I want to observe but not live on. But be there.

Zoe
Hi, my name is Zoe and I’m recommending the collection Vampires in the Lemon Grove and [Other Stories] by Karen Russell. Karen Russell is a fantastic writer and she has this unique ability to capture the fantastical in the mundane, and vice versa. Some of these stories are fantastically weird but there are still some kernels of everyday in them that really brings it home. There is not a day that goes by that I do not think about one of these stories from this collection. It’s really beautiful.

Jules
So you write about the music industry in another story and it's more so about the connection between these two people. They're almost connected through dreams, right? When writing about that, how did you find where the realism came in as opposed to– it didn’t feel like a romance. It’s about a relationship, and whether or not they knew each other or felt familiar. Where did the realism [aspect] come in there?

Ruben
I mean, like I said, a lot of my stories are commentary on the world and what I see in the world, sometimes literally like news stories that interest me. And so realism is always the basis. That story is, to me, the most adjacent Kafka retelling-slash-homage because it's about a metamorphosis, right? And the first line of Kafka's Metamorphosis. And so I was thinking about that. The real concern with these characters was, should I say this on the pod?

Jules
Go for it.

Ruben
I wrote it after Camila Cabello and Shawn Mendes were in the news because people were saying that he was her beard. And I was, or no, she was his beard. They had also just been spotted together again. So what's going on there?

Jules
You're lying. No way.

Ruben
No, a couple of weeks ago, I think. Yeah, they went to a concert together, I think.

So at the time I was fascinated by this idea that this was a PR relationship. And that's a big part of what that story is about, right? And then from there, it just kind of totally spiraled into being about a lot of other things. And I brought in this magical transformation. I brought this character who doesn't know what's real and what's fake. I was thinking about gender expectations a lot in that story, too. But it started in this really real place. So I think the realism part of it and the kind of plot-stuff regarding these characters and their relationship was rooted in this question of what “would it be like to be in this fake relationship?” And also why are we obsessed with figuring out if this relationship is a PR relationship?

This is another facet of fandom that fascinates me that I also participate in because I was also obsessed with trying to figure out if it was real or fake or what. And so that story is about, in my own way, looking at this kind of weird cultural moment in which we feel entitled to know everything about celebrities.

But now everyone knows that that's how the story started.

Jules
That's so funny.

Ruben
I'm so sorry to Shawn and Camilla. Love you both. “I Know What You Did Last Summer” is one of my favorite songs. Thanks.

Jules
Talking about, you know, parasocial relationships: I was a One Direction fan, loud and proud.

Ruben
Uh oh!!!

Jules
The big thing is that those boys got girlfriends and it was like, “is it? It's fake. It's fake.” And like, because it's beneficial to you, like it's, it's comforting to you to be like– I'm not saying that you want to date either Shawn Mendez or Camila Cabello– but what I'm saying is, it is interesting to be like, “it could not be real. What if it isn't? I don't know. Do I still have a chance?” You know what I mean? Like kind of thing or like, or even just having a little gossip sesh with a friend and be like, “what's going on?” The internet just makes it so much worse. And you can really go on those deep dives, and especially with social media.

I don't know if you follow any blind-item things?
Editor’s Note: Blind items are when anonymous sources report celebrity gossip and other pop-culture happenings to online sources.

Ruben
I dabble. I definitely dabble.

Jules
See, I struggle with blind items because I'm kind of just like, “I could have written that.” You know what I mean? Like, I could have gone in. I guess they do go through checks and balances and stuff, but...

Ruben
What’s that DeuxMoi one that's like “President Biden in DC,” and someone was like, “yeah, likely place for him to be.” Like they do sometimes devolve to that kind of thing.

Jules
Yeah. And sometimes they're vague and sometimes it's like, all right, well, this could be, this could be about anybody.

But I think when talking about celebrities in fiction and talking about like, you know, “will they, won't they have they did they,” I think is always so fun because it is always going to be rooted in that real life and that obsession with celebrity. Ugh It's so sad.

Ruben
Yeah. Well, it's about how we connect, right? It's about how we connect and how the internet is changing the way we connect. In part what that story is about, through these two characters. It's something that fascinates me. I only write about it in that story and a little bit. The Selena story is a little bit about that, but it's something I'm fascinated with for sure. It's like, why do I have so much pop culture, random, unnecessary pop culture knowledge in my head? I shouldn't, it doesn't serve me, but I still continue to absorb it and keep it. I don't know. I'm really interested in general and how pop culture shapes us. And I think the problem is that we often fail to take it seriously or dismiss it as shallow or unimportant when it really is important.

Jules
Yeah, I saw something online once that was like, “we were not put on this planet to like, even have mirrors, let alone have the internet.”I've seen that conversation more so in like, Facetune and, filters and, you know, just like self perception. But I think, too, if humans are just supposed to connect, then of course when seeing people that you admire, people who you have ready access to, of course you're going to be able to fixate and want to know everything. And I think in that story, I found myself being like, “well, are they together? Are they not?”

Ruben
Right. Yeah.

Jules
I was all of a sudden then super invested and it's like, actually, it's none of my business. It’s mean, but it's none of my business actually. could maybe just go on a walk and think about my friends and my life, the people I do know.

Ruben
Yeah, totally.

Jules
So let's talk about the acknowledgements, because I mentioned this earlier. I love reading the acknowledgements first because I feel like it's the best way for me to, A) get a sense of the author's voice and get to know them, but it's also great to know that there are so many hands and bits and pieces that this [book] has been touched by.

Maybe this is just like a general question, but when do [the] acknowledgements come in? And when you wrote them, like, where were you at the time in this process?

Ruben
Towards the end, I waited. So, if anyone's listening and they feel like they should have been in the acknowledgements and they're not, I hear you and I see you and I'm holding space for you because I'm sure I missed a lot of people. I think a first book is impossible, it's like your whole life basically that you're trying to account for up to that point. What I did try to do is jot down little notes for myself about people that I shouldn't forget for specific things like people who read drafts. I was like, “okay, you need to thank them because they spent so many hours reading drafts of this stuff.” And it's kind of hard to remember, you know, when you're years down the line who read something in an earlier stage. And so that was really important.

But I actually wrote them pretty close to the book being finished And I tried to keep them as short as I could. Because I could have kept going.

Jules
It's a challenge.

Ruben
Big time. And it's really hard. Yeah, I mean, a book is a whole life. A book is so much of your life and all the people that, you know, have shaped your life. And so I hope I did okay. And if someone's butthurt, I'm sorry. Hit me up. We can... I'll buy you a coffee or something.

Jules
You'll get them, yeah, you'll get them next time.

The biggest thing that drew me in when looking at this book on Edelweiss trying to find a new book of short stories was the cover.

Ruben
I'm obsessed with the cover. Let's talk about it.

Jules
Let's talk about it.

Ruben
I'm obsessed with it. So I worked in publishing for two years and covers were always the hardest thing to get right, I think, because there’s kind of too many cooks in the kitchen situation where everyone had an opinion on it. And they're hard. It's just hard. It's just hard to get a cover right. But I feel really lucky because I think we nailed it pretty easily and pretty early on. And in large part, that's because the artist Maria Jesus Contreras is a genius. You should go follow her on Instagram immediately.

Basically, I sent an email with thoughts to my editor about the cover in general. And I knew I wanted bright colors. I knew I wanted it to be approachable because there's some heavy material in the collection, but I also think it's fun and silly and absurd, and so I wanted to make sure that that was represented as well. I thought bright colors was one way of doing that. And in this initial email, I was like, “hey, I saw this artist do this amazing cover for FSG that I'm obsessed with. Just saying like, who knows?” And through some magic, the art department ended up really liking her art and thinking she was a good match and we got her on board and she did this amazing cover that I'm obsessed with. Yeah, that's kind how I came together.

Jules
It's so beautiful. I'm so excited to see it on the shelf, especially because it's coming out in a summer month. I mean, it's like a year round cover, of course, but like it's such a summer cover. It's so good.

Ruben
Yeah, totally.

Can I ask you what you like about it? Because almost everyone I talk to mentions the cover. It is really kind of a hit, and I'd love to hear why it calls to you.

Jules
I love negative space in a cover. I think sometimes covers are just a little bit busy and kind of hard to read and kind of hard to look at. So the fact that I can see a very clear sky, I mean, the colors just pop, right? My big thing was the mango.

Ruben
Yeah.

Jules
The bright orange, I mean, the color scheme, I think in general is very bright and fun. And then I was like, “Oh! Eyes in the knife! Oh! Oh!”

Ruben
Yeah. I think her brain works in an amazing way and I'm just so happy that she did this cover.

Jules
And also the fact that she is brown. Isn't it amazing when you get to collaborate in that way? That's so cool.

Ruben
Yeah, I mean, I know. I know. The collection is so much about both collaboration and conflict amongst Latinx people and there's some non-Latinx people in the collection, but it's like, talk about a fantasy world, there's a lot of Latinx people in the collection. And so whenever in the process I can work with a Latinx creative, it's like the best, it's the best.

Jules
I think that's the bulk of what I had for you!

So we've got two questions that we usually like to end with. What are you reading right now?

Ruben
I'm gonna answer by saying what I've read recently and what I'm gonna read soon, hopefully.

In August, I think probably around the time this podcast comes out, there's a book coming out called The Volcano Daughters by Gina María Balibrera, which is this amazing historical novel set around a massacre in El Salvador that happened in the 1930s and it follows these two sisters who are separated kind of by this dictator and the violence of that moment. But it's also really funny and full of references. Both of the sisters are artists. So there's some great meditations on art-making. It's kind of like, okay, a book for me! A book made just for me. And it's Gina's debut and I'm just, I think people are going to love it. So I love that book. And that's, think, out on the 20th of August.

Next I'm gonna read Santiago Jose Sanchez’s Hombrecito, which is a debut novel by a classmate of mine at Iowa. I've known Santi's work for years now and I've read portions of what became this novel. I'm just obsessed. I'm just obsessed. I'm really excited to see the final version, which is literally next on my to-be-read list.

And I'm also going to shout out a book from earlier this year, Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez, which is...

Jules
I've heard amazing things about that one.

Ruben
Oh my god. Xochitl is an angel. We also went to grad school together. She's just good people. And when someone is a good person and also a good writer, I'm so excited about it because I'm like, “yes, thank god!”

But this novel is her second novel. I loved her first novel Olga Dies Dreaming, too. I'm just obsessed with her. She's one of my favorite writers. Her second novel came out in March is loosely based on the life of the Cuban artist Ana Mendieta who was murdered by her husband, though he was acquitted. And it's kind of a fictionalized look at that, but also a reflection of being a first gen Latina student at Brown in the 90s, which is also really fascinating to me as someone who went to an Ivy League as well. I found it really resonant. But Xochitl’s writing is so full of life and fun and I just love that book and it's like a perfect book for any time of year. So, I can't wait to reread that one, honestly. But yeah, I read that earlier this year too.

It's been a great year for Latinx literature. Like, I'm just amazed. Because I keep tabs and some years are not amazing years and this is a really, really fantastic one.

Jules
Whenever I'm selling a book on the floor written by somebody who is Latinx or, honestly, I love translated books in general, but I always say that like when somebody is a Spanish speaker, you can read it. You can feel it in the text. And I feel like the prose is always just so lush and in your face. Like The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez. Those short stories, same thing. Very powerful, beautiful, gross. I always say it's like a very poopy book. You know what mean?

Ruben
Yeah!

Jules
There's two short stories that have poop in it, but it's so vivid that I was like, “I was there. I saw it happen.”

Ruben
Yeah

Jules
I also just want to talk about the fact that short stories are slept on.

Ruben
Ugh, you're telling me.

Jules
I feel like there's been a huge talk recently where people are like, “yeah, like people don't really buy short stories. People don't.” I’m like, why not? Because anytime I'm ever on the floor and somebody's like, “I'm traveling” or like, “I'm trying to get back into reading,” I immediately put a book of short stories in their hand because I'm like, first of all, short.

Ruben
Short!

Jules
Second of all, small and easy to carry.

Ruben
Correct.

Jules
And third of all, it's going to make you feel way more accomplished. You're like, “Oh cool. I just finished a full story. Now I just have four more or five more or whatever.”

Ruben
You're doing the Lord's work because I agree. I agree.I mean, I think they're having a moment in some way, right? But I agree. I think they're still slept on. I think the publishing world rationale is that short stories don't sell as well as novels, and I think that's an assumption that we make based on just like the past and not necessarily true.

Also, if you think about history, the short story form in the mid-century, especially in science-fiction, was the dominant form. Ray Bradbury made his whole career off just publishing short stories in Playboy. There's something really appealing about the short story form.

Jules
Things can be short and powerful! I always want to be left wanting more, you know what I mean? So if I read a good short story and I'm like, “this could have been a full book. I wanted this to be like 10, 20 pages longer.” There are– no shade –but I think there are some books where I close [them] and I'm like, “this could have been a short story.”

Ruben
Correct. Yeah.

Jules
I feel like that form should not be slept on. Anyway.

Ruben
I agree. Totally agree.

Jules
Is there anything that you would like to promote for yourself or on behalf of anybody else?

Ruben
No, the story collection is out! I'm very hopeful, soon to be announced, that I'm also working on a second book that hopefully will be out in, we'll see, a year-ish. And so I hope people will pick up the short story collection, and if you love it and are obsessed with it, I hope you'll pick up the next book when it's out. Yeah!

Jules
Well thank you again!

Ruben
No, thanks so much. And thanks for everything you do. Really appreciate it.

You can get your copy of There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven over on our website!

Sources Mentioned:

There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven by Ruben Reyes Jr.

The late singer Selena Quintanilla

The 2022 film Everything Everywhere All at Once

The pronunciation of the word “perrear”, which translates to “to twerk” in English

Carnival Cruise Line to Ensenada, Mexico

The surrealist 2024 TV Show Fantasmas by comedian, writer, Julio Torres

The comedy special My Favorite Shapes by Julio Torres

The Papyrus sketch on Saturday Night Live, written by Julio Torres