Lena Valencia’s , her first story collection, shimmers with eerie desert locations, from a screenwriter’s glamping trip near Joshua Tree to a heavily marketed premiere in Marfa and an “entrepreneurial wellness and self-actualization retreat” in the Mojave. She conjures up vivid characters with complicated relationships, and chill-inducing supernatural phenomena. Each story reverberates with strangeness and suspense.
What was her inspiration? “I wrote the title story after visiting Marfa and decided that I wanted to write more stories set in the desert, specifically the desert wilderness,” she told me. “It was a setting I found ripe for horror: the violent history of the land, the harsh conditions of the climate, and the way scale shifts. Once I narrowed the scope of the setting, ideas for the stories began to fall into place.
My grandparents lived in Tucson and I spent a lot of time traveling to deserts in the Southwest as a kid with my family, so I had that connection. I still very much love those deserts and try to visit when I can.” Our email-conversation spanned the continent, Brooklyn to Sonoma County, where it has been dry as a desert and over 100 degrees on multiple recent days.
How have your life and work been going during these years of covid and turmoil? How were the writing and launch of affected? Like many writers, I went through a long bout of writer’s block during Covid lockdown. I had set the stories aside in 2019 and was working on a novel th.