Interview: Graduate Michael J. DeLuca

Michael J. DeLuca is a 2005 graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop. His debut novel The Jaguar Mask came out in August 2024 from Stelliform Press, and his novella Night Roll was a finalist for the Crawford Award in 2020. He publishes Reckoning, a journal of creative writing on environmental justice. He also operates the indie ebooksite Weightless Books. His short fiction has been appearing since 2005 in venues such as Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Apex, Mythic Delirium, Fusion Fragment, and Three-Lobed Burning Eye. He lives in the post-industrial woodlands north of Detroit with partner, kid, cats, and microbes.

Your novel The Jaguar Mask came out in August 2024. The novel blends magical realism, fantasy, and mystery. Did you set out to blend genres, or did it come about to serve the story? How did blending genres affect your novel’s structure?

It’s hard for me not to blend genres. I am deeply in love with prose style, always aiming for something beyond my reach in terms of art, subtlety, literary fireworks. One of the things Odyssey taught me was how to use genre expectations as sort of guardrails for my unreasonable ambitions. When I started writing the novel that became The Jaguar Mask, I knew I’d never be able to deliver a novel set in a Central American nation in an authentically “magic realist” style, so I thought a lot about how to set up guardrails for myself that would keep me in contemporary fantasy territory. I’m still a little amazed how many times I managed to repeat the words “plucky heroine” in my head without having them actually appear anywhere in the book. The mystery elements came in somewhat more organically, as a means to help structure the plot—mystery is great for that. But in the end, it was the story I was trying to tell that determined how the different genre elements got synthesized. Mysteries without answers turn out to be a great way to set up that sense of awe at the uncanny that’s a classic experience of reading fantasy. They’re also an essential hallmark of the noir subgenre, which itself provides a very well-established set of tools for dealing with government corruption, environmental injustice, and insurgent resistance to oppression. So The Jaguar Mask came about as a sort of alchemical combination of intention and serendipity—planning and pantsing, you might say.

The Jaguar Mask is set in Guatemala City. How long did you spend doing research for the story, and what kind of research did you do? Did you do most of your research before writing the first draft, or did you do your research as you wrote?

I did a ton of research for this book before I even knew I was writing one. I’ve long admired Latin American magic realism and its adjacent traditions. I have been a big Mayanist nerd since I was a kid. I flatter myself those obsessions had some small influence on my youngest sister’s decision to move to Guatemala to start a career in charitable work, and it was in visiting her there that I started building confidence that this was a kind of book I could actually write. I kept going back, and the more I found out, the more I realized I didn’t know. I spent twelve years writing and researching The Jaguar Mask. It’s been out for six months and I’m still doing research for it!

You’ve published numerous short stories, with “Grace in Orangeland” forthcoming in Kaleidotrope. What were some challenges you experienced moving from writing short stories to writing a novel? How do you know when one of your ideas is meant for a short story versus a longer piece?

The Jaguar Mask is the fourth novel-length work I’ve tried to write, the second I’ve finished. The first one will never see the light of day. In between those, I’ve published two novellas and something over 40 short stories. When I came to Odyssey in 2005, I’d decided to give up on novel length at least for awhile and focus on stories to try and hone my craft; as a result of Odyssey, I fell in love with the short story format and wasn’t interested in anything else for a long time. I think part of what made me feel ready to go back to writing a novel was a sense that I’d figured out what length fit what idea. I know a lot of writers have the experience of writing, say, a novelette and realizing it should be a flash piece, or selling a short story that gets good attention and expanding it into a novel. I’ve never had that. I guess the difference for me is about my level of excitement, specifically the depth of my excitement about an idea. Short stories are deceptively big—I can cram a ton of research and ideas into that relatively small space. Novels are exponentially more vast. I poured twelve years of my life into this one, no problem. What allowed me to do that was never getting bored. There was always more to learn, always more to tell beyond what was on the page. I guess what I need from an idea big enough to be a novel rather than a short story is to be overwhelmed.

You’ve also written several essays, including your most recent, “Anticapitalist Bike Story,” which came out in Solarpunk Magazine in March 2024. Have any of them led to fiction? Or do you find your fiction leads you to your essay topics? How do you approach writing an essay versus writing a short story?

My ability to write essays came out of my blogging, which I’ve always thought of mostly as practice for writing fiction, but which has inevitably evolved into its own thing. In some ways I find an essay much easier to structure, in that the only character motivations or goals I need to worry about are my own, and that introduces some flexibility in terms of what works as an opening or a resolution. The pool of subject matter is very much the same for me, though. I wrote a novella, Night Roll, all about biking as a tool for climate resilience and community-building, then discovered I had at least one essay in me on much the same subjects. As of this moment, my creative process has not yet gone in the other direction, but maybe it’s only a matter of time.

What short story or novel have you read recently that stood out to you, and what was it about the story that made it a standout?

Since I’ve just been thinking about it, I’d like to call out Íde Hennessy’s story “The Piano Player Has Eight Arms” from Reckoning 9. It’s 1,200 words, just over flash length, which for some reason is a sweet spot for me. It’s set in the near-ish dystopian future at a fancy restaurant that serves drinks made from rare and exotic species, and the piano player is indeed an octopus. What impressed me about it immediately is how deceptively quiet it feels while also immersing the reader in this beautifully rich and sensory world and place. It’s a great example of what I was taking about above, how big a short story can be. This is the kind of economy of writing I aspire to.

You’re the publisher for Reckoning, a magazine about environmental justice. How has being a publisher affected your writing? What do you think you learned from the process that you apply to your own writing?

See above for an immediate example! Reading magazine submissions is eye-opening in that it exposes you to breadth. We can try to read broadly on our own, experience different styles of writing, different voices, but in a submission pile, that experience is concentrated. I compare it to a fire hose in that it’s this massive volume of ideas and emotions pouring down your throat, but you can only take so much of it. I think it’s why a lot of editors seem to do less writing the longer they edit: when you’re seeing so much of what’s out there it can produce a kind of choice paralysis. Editing is also incredibly rewarding in its own right, so that maybe it starts to feel like a shortcut; helping others realize their vision eases the impulse to create your own? I certainly have less time to write since I started Reckoning, but in fact we’re in the process of reorganizing a little in hopes I can have more time to get back to it in 2026. I find the experience of editing makes it easier to see cliché before it’s coming in my own writing, and it makes me want to focus on the core of what makes my writing my own, what I can do differently than anybody else.

What’s next on the writing-related horizon? Are you starting any new projects?

I’m in the prolonged brainstorming stage for a new novel, a mosaic novel of fantasy Americana which, despite being just a pile of notes, is already satisfyingly huge enough to get lost in. I also might have a chapbook short fiction collection coming out this year from The Fabulist! But that’s still up in the air and maybe I shouldn’t even be mentioning it.