M.M. Olivas’ work has appeared in Uncanny, Weird Horror Magazine, Apex, Bourbon Penn and more. As a trans, first-generation Chicana, Olivas’ fiction explores intersection of queer and diasporic experiences. She currently resides in the Bay Area, earning her MFA at San Jose State University and collecting transforming robots. Her debut novel, Sundown in San Ojuela, will release in the fall of 2024 through Lanternfish Press.
M.M.’s story, “The Prince of Oakland,” first appeared in Weird Horror Magazine, and will appear in BRAVE NEW WEIRD: The Best New Weird Horror Volume Two, available to preorder now.
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Give us the elevator pitch of your BNW-nommed story, please.
The way I described my story when working on it was the “ghost harvesting story,” and I’d generally describe it as, “With gentrification rapidly spreading across the San Francisco Bay Area, Yaren and Griff start a business harvesting ghosts from the Bay’s historic homes.”
What does your writing routine look like? Do you have an office? A preferred coffee shop? The back of the bus? Standing under your neighbor’s eaves, avoiding the rain? Are you one of those true modern Weirdos who write your entire novel on your phone?
Embarrassing to say, but I’m incredibly rigid with how I write fiction. Whereas I find poetry comes easiest to me when I’m in a state of flux—on public transit, or on hikes, waiting for friends in cafés—fiction requires me to settle into a quiet place for long stretches of time to really sink into the narrative. Like, I can’t do places with noise. Even when my roommates would quietly play on their phones, the tapping was there, those dull and awful little tap tap taps. I have a desk in my room where I write on my laptop most of the time (and eventually get distracted by my own Transformers toys) and my job as a substitute teacher gives me the privilege of having a new, perfectly impersonal desk each day to do my work between assignments with my students. Some cafés are quiet enough to get by though. Sometimes.
In regards to craft, all my raw ideas begin in my notebook as sketches—specific frames or stills where the composition of them are vivid and clear in my head, or character sketches. A sketch of Griff with his crown was the birth of this particular story, and the rest of it was, as it usually is, me trying to pull a story out of that one evocative image.
What does “Weird” mean to you, in the context of storytelling? And what creators/experiences/influences helped sculpt this definition for you in your creative journey?
“Weird” is strange word for me. “Other” or “Otherness” is usually where “Weird” takes me, and stories of social ostracization, being seen as Other, are ones that resonate deeply with me. “Weirdness” or “Otherness” really just implies deviation from what is normal, commonplace. It’s an abnormality, and for many people in communities like mine, the trans community, queer community, Chicana or any other ethnic group that’s not the dominant norm, experience a type of Double Consciousness. W. E. B Du Bois was the person who coined the term, but I tend to think about Franz Fanon’s literature on the topic of Double Consciousness, of existing within and (continuously or unconsciously) adopting the sensibilities of the dominant, colonial culture that seeks to place itself above the culture of a colonized people. This creates conflict with the self, where the two sides of your consciousness are at odds, with one teaching you to feel shame or alienation from the other. An easy example of this is non-white ethnic groups perpetuating white, western beauty standards. “Mejor la Raza” is a phrase thrown around a lot in Latine communities, that reinforces the idea that lighter skin is more desirable and less “dirty” than dark skin, and progressively marrying into white, more European families, means you’re purifying your bloodline. It’s an incredibly racist concept, but one that is pushed within our own spaces by those of us convinced that those features are something we should be insecure about, that they’re not desirable, that they’re strange, odd, disgusting off putting, ugly.
And then there are those of us who are marginalized within our spaces more so, for being gay or gender nonconforming. What is the answer to this taught and internalized sham? Well, it’s pride. It’s unapologetic joy and love and embrace of all the aspects of Who You Are. This level of pride, of self-confidence is off putting, is weird, even cringe. Now that is an incredibly longwinded and messy way to get to what I actually want to say, which is: as someone who existed as Other, within margins, as a closeted Chicana in what was a predominantly white community at the time, I experienced that sense of Otherness. That Double Consciousness, and internal shame. It’s why I gravitated towards “Weird” monster movies like Creature From the Black Lagoon, Godzilla, King Kong, Frankenstein—creatures demonized solely for the sin of being who they are. I also gravitated toward villains, characters who reveled in their otherness and found power in it, and let their rage be known. That’s probably why I’m not interested in writing clean, morally upright people. The messy, broken, bitter ones are far more compelling to me. And because I’m not at all wholly unique, I know that if I found resonance with those narratives, then others will too. That’s why I write the stories I do, with the full embrace of the strange and off-putting of my identity that took so long for me to learn wasn’t shameful, but beautiful.
On the Tenebrous Discord, we ask everyone to introduce themselves as a Film-meets-Music Artist (Citizen Kane x Metallica, f’rinstance). It doesn’t have to be your favorite, and don’t spend too much time overthinking it; now GO.
Easy, Dario Argento’s Suspiria meets Joy Division. As basic as that may be.
What’s the Weirdest thing—capital W—that’s ever happened to you (that you’re comfortable sharing)?
Oh, which to pick? Weird shit follows my family all the time. My short story, “if there May be Ghosts” in Bourbon Penn is actually about 90% nonfiction, minus the ending and names/pronouns, if you want an example.
But at the risk of reviving what should stay dead, what always comes back to me: I was at at a writing retreat in [REDACTED], and one day, as I was on my morning run about two or three miles from our AirBnB; in the woods; and totally remote, save for the railroad tracks I was jogging along; I noticed something shiny within some overgrown vines down in a ditch. I jogged up close and realized that I was looking at a car. Charred and tossed upside down so the boxes of documents were spilled out across the dirt. The weather had chewed them up, and the car looked like it had been there for a while. A half mile deeper in, when I found another car, in a deeper ditch, I decided maybe it was best to run back. But those miles back to civilization, where the only sounds were the woods, my breathing, and my sneakers on railroad gravel, were probably the tensest moments of my life.
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BRAVE NEW WEIRD: The Best New Weird Horror, Volume Two, is out June 26th.