Interview by Betsy Robinson
Image Jr Korpa @ Unsplash
What inspired you to write a work of magical realism? How did the plot come to you?
It started with a question I couldn’t let go of: What do we owe the past versions of ourselves who never got closure? I didn’t sit down thinking I’d write magical realism. I was trying to find a shape for all the memories that didn’t follow a straight line. The novel grew out of that, like emotional archaeology, digging through layers I didn’t realise were still there. That’s where the metaphor came from, too: a man returns to Woodstock, a place he thought he’d left behind, for a funeral—and ends up confronting the ghosts he’s carried with him, both real and imagined. It didn’t feel like I was inventing the story. It felt like I was recovering it.
What did the writing process look like for Sparks of the Liberating Spirit Who Trapped Us Back in Woodstock?
It was fragmented, and surprisingly tender. I started with texture, tone, and dialogue because of my background in screenwriting. I discovered the heart of the characters through their voices. That gave me the urgency to keep going. In fact, once I found that rhythm, I finished the first draft in one month.
Writing this novel often felt like returning to the page not to produce, but to listen. The characters came to me as composites—part film characters from stories I admire, part versions of myself I no longer am. I built them from scraps, like assembling memories as a way to return again and again to the same emotional question.
Does your novel reference the Woodstock festival?
Not exactly. The idea of Woodstock came to me through my poem of the same name, which won the WILDSOUND Festival’s Nature category last year. That poem never left me. It was the first heartbeat of the novel.
In Sparks, Woodstock is both a place and a metaphor. It’s where timelines blur, where the past and the present sit across from each other and talk. It’s a space where the main character, Johnatan, is forced to confront what could’ve been; not just in his life, but in the lives of those he’s lost. I also became obsessed with the way the word ‘Woodstock‘ sounds like ‘wood stuck‘. That small glitch in language opened a hidden passage for me: an invisible bridge between the literal and the emotional. That’s where the story lives.
How did you incorporate your poem Woodstock into the novel?
The poem was the doorway. It was atmospheric, surreal, and emotionally precise. Writing it taught me that memory doesn’t operate in linear time. It moves like weather, drifting, gathering, dissolving. That became the emotional logic of the novel.
Some lines from the poem echo in the first part of the book, especially in Johnatan’s reflections on loss. Not always directly, but in feeling. I believe poems leave residue: emotional traces that don’t fade. The poem became a kind of compass. It reminded me to trust the luminous, strange aspects of grief. It also gave me permission to let nostalgia carry weight, to let it pull the narrative like a tide.
Does writing in Spanish versus English affect the style of your writing?
Absolutely. Spanish is where I keep my tenderness, my earliest memories, my family stories. English is where I keep my ambition, my edges, my academic self. Writing between the two means I’m constantly translating—yes, words, but also entire ways of thinking and being. That tension shows up in how my sentences curve, in the rhythm of my metaphors, in the way I play with sound and double meanings.
That’s why I’m drawn to wordplay. Sometimes the slippage between two similar-sounding words opens up an unexpected meaning. It feels like I’m tracing an invisible etymological history; a secret logic that connects ideas beneath the surface. That’s where my poetic and linguistic instincts meet.
I wonder if bilingualism is its own form of magical realism. What else would you call it when your mouth has to translate your heart? I don’t write in one language. I write through both. The dialogue in this novel, for example, emerged in English, not by choice, but by frequency. I grew up consuming so much English-language media, especially theatre and film, that often my characters start speaking in English before I even know who they are.
That’s probably why dialogue is the backbone of my work. I follow it the way a poet follows meter. It’s all about rhythm. The rhythm tells me when the story is alive.
How has it felt to expand from writing short stories and poetry to writing a novel?
Poetry taught me how to compress emotion, how to make a sentence burst. Short stories taught me voice and urgency. But the novel asked something I wasn’t used to: stamina. Not in terms of speed, but in terms of attention. I had to sustain a feeling (this deep, subtle emotional tone) across 40,000 words without diluting it.
At first, that was terrifying. But what carried me was the sense of responsibility I felt toward the characters once I understood how alive they were. I wasn’t just crafting a plot but becoming a vessel for their synthesis. I didn’t want to resolve them. I wanted to walk with them.
Author’s Note
This book is part of a larger conversation about what it means to be a hybrid writer in today’s world. As a Mexican poet publishing in London, I’m keenly aware of how rare and crucial that position is. We need to make space for it, not as a box to check, but as a necessary evolution in literature.
Publishing this novel now, at this moment, feels urgent. The world is trying to simplify identity again, to flatten us into archetypes or hashtags. This book resists that. It’s hybrid. It’s non-linear. It’s haunted by ghosts and contradictions. And it insists: that’s valid. That’s literary. That’s enough.
There are more of us coming; writers who don’t fit the mold, who write in-between languages, who build narrative in spirals, not straight lines. We are complex narratives. And the future of literature depends on making space for that complexity, not just in Mexico, not just in the UK, but in that liminal space between.
Publishing Sparks of the Liberating Spirit Who Trapped Us Back in Woodstock isn’t just about my voice—it’s about widening the aperture. Because our stories aren’t the exception. They’re part of a tradition that’s only just beginning to be recognized.
As the recipient of the 2024 Young Poets Scholarship from the Gutiérrez Lozano Foundation and a two-time finalist in the V and VI Francisco Ruiz Udiel Hispanic American Poetry Prize of Valparaíso Ediciones (Spain), Marie Anne’s poetry appears in books, anthologies and magazines from North American publishers, such as “BIPOC Issue”, “Walk of Life”, “CULTURE” , “December Poetry” , and in the digital catalogues of Mortal Magazine, F3LL Magazine, The Ground Up & For Women Who Roar Magazine .
Her poem A Movie Called Honeycomb was selected for publication in the Torrey House Press chapbook, In the Garden, part of the Environmental Humanities Program at the University of Utah. Marie has also received national recognition for her Spanish-language fiction, with publications in the Instituto Sonorense de la Cultura, Yuku Jeeka, Vislumbre, Neotraba, and Craquelarre magazines, and in the digital catalogs of Perlas del desierto and After Hours Magazine. Her short story The Boots That Shake Spirits won first place for publication at the state level in the Budding Feathers 2022 literary contest .
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