An Interview with Alyson Mosquera Dutemple (Fiction ’19)
Fiction alum Alyson Mosquera Dutemple was recently interviewed for the Colorado Review. Her newest piece—”Marvelous Freaks of Nature!”—appears in the Summer 2022 issue.
Read an excerpt of the interview below.
RR: Mavis repeats a lot of unhealthy patterns and behaviors in this piece. We learn her behavior isn’t a new thing that has just developed. Even her parents text her, “We don’t want this to get to be another repeat of last time.” When you were coming up with Mavis’s backstory, how did those behaviors manifest?
AMD: Her behavior is definitely precipitated by something that happened, but it’s not isolated to events that happened recently. I think that comes through with the parents. I wanted to hint at the larger picture beyond the immediate story. But Mavis doesn’t want to tell either of those stories, which was the fun challenge—to have a character that is so dead set on avoidance be a first-person narrator. I really like, as a reader, when a story asks me to fill in the blanks. I tried to let some of that happen in this by not specifying what her parents were talking about.
Continue reading the rest of the interview here: An Interview with Alyson Mosquera Dutemple – Center for Literary Publishing | Colorado State University
Alyson Mosquera Dutemple on the web:
