At University you studied Literature and Linguistics?
I had spent 4 years studying to be an Industrial Engineer, so at the very beginning of changing to Literature and Linguistics it was quite difficult. I was just trying to keep up with the rest of the students. I felt like I was behind the rest of the people and also it was different for me because I was not as young as they were.
But after a few months of studying literature, I made a few friends and I was interacting with the professors, so things improved. Now some students came up with the idea of celebrating the students’ writing and we should produce a magazine to do that. We called it a fanzine because it was a sort of a home made magazine.
One of my professors suggested I write something for it, and that’s when I wrote my first story. And my attitude was that I would write a story, and if it wasn’t any good I wanted them to tell me. I didn’t want them to sugarcoat it.
And did that story end up in the fanzine?
Yes it did and that was the start of me working to become a writer.
Are there any writers who you would say would be your influences?
I will say that, yes, I do have some influences specifically more on the Honduran literature side, I think because that’s the kind of literature I grew up reading. I also read other authors that were international authors but I think the authors which touched me the most were Honduran writers.
For example, the theme I was working on when I was a teenager, that was heavily influenced in the romantic kind of sense, by a novel that I read which came out in 1900, it’s called, Blanco Olmedo from Honduran writer Lucila Gamero de Medina, not because of the topic, because the author certainly doesn’t talk about death the way I was trying to do, but I was influenced more by tone of the novel. The novel had a melancholic tone and it also had a particular type of flow to the writing. I was trying to write in a similar way to the way the author wrote in that novel. So that was an example of the way that novel influenced me.
Another example, this might be very random, but reading and watching movies from Guillermo del Toro influenced me a lot because he has this sort of dark fairy tale approach where he takes an endearing kind of story and adds a little bit of darkness to it. He adds a different tone to a story and kind of shapes the story the way I would like to see a story take shape.
What kind of orientation do you have in your writing?
My stories tend to be about something really normal, really common, like the visit of a granddaughter to her grandmother after being away for 10 or 20 years or just helping a mother that is sick. But then my work turns that common story into something else, something a little darker, a little less normal.
I don’t add in dragons or anything like that, but at a certain point I’m trying to break that sense of normality. And I think that approach has been influenced by the things I read when I was younger and that I keep reading now.
