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.
