Alisa Lynn Valdés

Alisa Lynn Valdés is an award-winning print and broadcast journalist and a former staff writer for both the Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe. With more than one million books in print in eleven languages, she was included on Time’s list of the twenty-five most influential Hispanics and was a Latina woman of the year as well as an Entertainment Weekly breakout literary star. She is the author of many novels, including Playing with Boys and The Husband Habit.

Valdés's new novel is Hollow Beasts.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I tend to come up with book titles that are double entendres, sometimes even triple or quadruple entendres, catchy enough to entice a reader to open the book, but layered enough that at the end of the book the title will make sense on multiple symbolic levels. Hollow Beasts is no exception.

What's in a name?

I choose character names with deliberation. Jodi Luna, the protagonist of Hollow Beasts, has a name that is both symbolic and a bilingual double entendre. Jodi’s full given name is Jodilynn Luciana Luna. She’s a Hispana from northern New Mexico, with roots that go back in that area to the 1500s. Luna is a regional, old Spanish surname in New Mexico. It means moon. Jodilynn is a countrified anglo name that she shortens to Jodi, but jodí is the Spanish first-person past tense for “I f*cked up.” She’s the oldest rookie game warden ever hired by the state of New Mexico, a nature poet who has decided nature needs more than poetry in the era of climate change; it needs warriors. Luciana means light, hope. So her name, to me, symbolizes, in a way, how the US colonization and anglicization of our region, its wilderness and its people left them screwed, how she is a bit of a screw-up in this new job, but also that she is motivated by a hope and light that are rooted in the ancient power of the moon.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

My teen self knew she wanted to be a novelist, and loved suspense novels. I don’t think she’d be surprised at all.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Endings are harder for me, especially with an ongoing series like the Jodi Luna books, because it’s a balance between figuring out how to tie up the loose ends enough to feel satisfying, while leaving others dangling as hooks for future books. That said, I rewrite beginnings more, probably by virtue of revisiting them more each time I sit down to write.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

I have a lot in common with Jodi Luna. We are both middle aged single mothers from New Mexico, who left to attend ivy league colleges and become writers, but returned to New Mexico in our middle age to live a more rural and secluded life dedicated to protecting wildlife. I’m not a game warden, but if I were younger and could do things all over again, I would be.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I am a musician by training. My undergraduate degree is in music, from the modern music conservatory, Berklee College of Music. So music, and being a musician, have influenced my writing more than anything else in my life. I approach writing as an auditory endeavor. I seek the music in prose. I employ the same mindset in writing novels that I use in jazz improvisation as a saxophonist, which is a bit hard to explain to people who’ve not studied jazz improvisation. Jazz improvisation is spontaneous composition, on the spot, over a set of complex cord changes, governed by strict harmonic and melodic rules that must be memorized and practiced for years so that what flows out of the artist in the moment seems and feels easy. So I “practice” my stories and the shapes and sonic colors of my work before I sit down to write, and when I do sit down to write I enter a trancelike state of absolute concentration where the words just come, fully formed, from a subconscious place. I’ve been told I’m an unusually “fast” and clean writer, and I credit my training as a jazz improviser with training my brain and fingers to work in a peculiar way that lends itself to the illusion of speed.

Visit Alisa Lynn Valdés's website.

My Book, The Movie: Hollow Beasts.

--Marshal Zeringue