Lena Valencia on Chronicling the Beauty and Danger of the Desert

Lena Valencia’s Mystery Lights, 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.

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Jane Ciabattari: How have your life and work been going during these years of covid and turmoil? How were the writing and launch of Mystery Lights affected?

Lena Valencia: 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 that explored some very dark themes, but I found it too emotionally challenging to immerse myself in that world once the pandemic hit and I was isolating in my Brooklyn apartment, listening to sirens wail all day. I started working on the Mystery Lights stories again, and experienced a bit of a second wind. I wrote five stories between late 2020 and 2022, four of which made it into the collection, and I made some significant revisions to others. Language emerged as a theme in the collection—and how rhetoric can influence people—sometimes in helpful ways, other times to dangerous ends. This was partly inspired by a morbid curiosity around antivaxxers and other Covid-era conspiracies, but also by the language that’s used in therapy and self-help.

JC: How has being part of the literary community— in the MFA program at The New School and now as managing editor and director of educational programming at One Story, the revered literary publication, and co-host of the reading series Ditmas Lit—influenced your work?

LV: Being surrounded by writers in the literary community has given me insight into practice and discipline. Many writers I know are juggling day jobs, families, and other obligations in addition to their practice. Seeing the many different paths they’ve taken to keeping their writing going has inspired me to be disciplined in my own writing. Curating a reading series has forced me to read more widely, which is of course an important part of any writer’s toolbox. It’s also been so lovely to see the outpouring of support from the literary community for these stories. I feel very lucky.

JC: What authors feed your work?

LV: I’m drawn to writers who dabble in the uncanny or who push their characters to emotional extremes. Some writers whose work influenced the stories in Mystery Lights were Shirley Jackson, Kelly Link, and Mariana Enríquez. I’m also an admirer of writers like Danielle Evans and Hari Kunzru, whose work explores race and class tension and the general strangeness of contemporary life through the lens of character.

JC: You open the title story at a viewing stand in Marfa, Texas, where sightseers are lined up to witness the Marfa lights—tiny mysterious orbs of light floating above the horizon from time to time, attributed to ghosts, UFOS, extraterrestrials, heat lightning. Wendy, who is handling the marketing campaign for the reboot of Marfa Lights (a nineties series with a cult following about two Texas Rangers solving supernatural mysteries—think The X-Files meets Twin Peaks), knows that the lights she’s watching are “drones, paid for by the network.”

She and two underlings are there to oversee the premiere, only to discover an influencer has pulled in thousands of “unstable” followers  to disrupt the event. You have so many threads going through this story—Wendy’s end-stage career angst, her competitiveness with her assistant, her worries about her daughter, questions about the permanence of art after her tour of minimalist artist Donald Judd’s installations, the questions influencer Teresa Montecito raises about “bland nostalgia bait” used to sell products. What came first? How did you construct the completed story?

LV: On that same trip to Marfa mentioned above, my husband and I went to see the Marfa lights and saw nothing. We joked about how easy it would be to fake the lights with drones. I wondered what kind of person would fake the Marfa lights, and why? What reservations might they have about this deception? And with that, the idea for the story was born. As with all my stories, I like to layer internal conflict with exterior drama to create tension in the piece. This story went through a good number of revisions—there were a lot of moving parts to work with, and a lot of fine-tuning that needed doing as a result.

JC: A character known as the painter, who shares biographical similarities with Georgia O’Keeffe, is at the center of “The White Place,” in which the artist paints a mysterious watermelon-shaped orb she sees at Plaza Bianca in the desert near her home in UFO country. Your cast of characters includes Alice, the painter’s cook; her daughter Sandra, and Mike, an ambitious young artist whose affair with the painter incites a strange love triangle. You include O’Keeffe references in two other stories (her painting of the Brooklyn Bridge in “Bright Lights, Big Deal” and a quote from O’Keeffe in “The Reclamation”). How did your interest in O’Keeffe begin, and how has it shaped your work?

LV: I admire O’Keeffe’s work and became more interested in her while on a writing retreat in New Mexico. The quote I use in “The Reclamation” about the desert being a place “that knows no kindness with all its beauty” served as a guiding idea behind the collection. The wilderness may be beautiful, but it’s not simply pretty scenery and can be dangerous if one isn’t prepared for the extremes of the landscape.

“The White Place” was inspired by a visit to O’Keeffe’s home and studio. I can’t think of another woman artist who inspires the same kind of admiration that O’Keeffe does, and I think that’s what drew me to her. The painter in “The White Place” is not a 1:1 fictionalization of Georgia O’Keeffe, but a loose imagining of how a woman artist who came to prominence in a male-dominated artworld might internalize the sexism she experienced and use her power in ethically questionable ways.

JC: In “Trogloxene,” your narrator Holly watches her younger sister Max’s “weird” behavior after she’s been lost in underground caves at Forrester’s Caverns in the Arizona desert for ten days, a disappearance that has brought news crews to the site (“11-Year-Old Girl Still Missing in Cave”). Holly checks out the websites about the caves, searching for clues, and learns they were discovered by uranium miners, that “the bats that lived there were called trogloxenes because they left the cave to feed,” and that it’s rumored “humans who’d gotten lost in the underground maze [had] become mutants who lived on raw flesh,” known as “mudmen.” Are these underground caves drawn from existing caverns? What sort of research was involved in writing this story?

LV: The caves in this story are very loosely based on Kartchner Caverns in Arizona, which I visited as a teenager. Those caves are very much a tourist attraction, complete with elevated walkways and colorful lights in the various cave sections. (The idea of spelunking is terrifying to me, so this is about as close as I’d like to get to experiencing a cave.)

The seed for the story actually came from the Tham Luang cave rescue in 2018, when I read in a news report that the boys and their coach were being “quarantined” after their rescue. Obviously this was to make sure they wouldn’t spread any infections that they may have picked up in the cave, but to me the term “quarantine” brought to mind something more sci-fi adjacent (mind you, this was pre-Covid), which is where the idea of the mutants came from. The research I did for this story was mostly along the lines of exploring cave terminology to make sure I was creating a believable setting in the scenes that take place inside the caverns.

JC: “Trogloxene” is linked to your final story, “Vermilion,” in which Nancy and her husband Tom take a hiking trip to the southern Utah desert, and listen to episodes of the Cave Girl Gone podcast, a project inspired by the disappearance of the host’s sister Max, which ties into Nancy’s grief over her sister Esme, who went missing fifteen years before. What was the evolution of this missing girls story?

LV: This was the last story I wrote in the collection. The story was inspired by a dream my husband had while we were on a hiking trip in Kanab, UT—he dreamed that a strange woman kept showing up in the photos we were taking on our trip when we would look at them on our phones. I found the idea so chilling that I couldn’t shake it. I took some notes, figuring I’d turn it into a short story someday (with his permission, of course). At this point, I’d nearly given up on Mystery Lights and had started to work on another novel.

When Tin House expressed interest in the collection and asked if I had any other stories, I said that I had some notes for one and very quickly drafted it and gave it to my writing group to read. They really helped me nail down Nancy’s interiority and hone her grief. Because I had a feeling that this was going to be the final story I wrote for the collection, I thought it might be interesting to try link it to another story. “Trogloxene” seemed the natural choice, since it also dealt with a family whose daughter went missing. Linking the two forced me to think about what happened in the aftermath of that story—oftentimes I don’t imagine a world beyond the story’s end, and this was a chance for me to do that. 

JC: How did you decide the order of the stories? Was there always a first and last in your mind?

LV: When I was ordering the stories, I was looking at the transitions from one’s end into another’s beginning. This is a technique I learned in Patrick Ryan’s Building Your Collection, a One Story online course on assembling a short story collection (one of the advantages of running the educational programming at One Story is that I have unlimited access to all the incredible classes). For example, “Mystery Lights” ends with Wendy gazing out into the night sky, and the following story, “The White Place,” opens with a description of the desert at night. I always knew that I wanted to begin with “Dogs,” a story that opens with a character driving to an unknown rental in the desert, which is straight out of the opening of a cabin-in-the-woods horror movie. The reader, too, is being transported into the dangerous world that the stories inhabit. “Vermilion” seemed like a natural ending point and concludes on a sad but hopeful note, with a woman showing another woman compassion, after so many stories about betrayal and deception.

JC: What are you working on now/next?

LV: A horror novel set in Brooklyn.

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Mystery Lights by Lena Valencia is available from Tin House Books.