Interview conducted by Caroline Cherry Averitt, Elana Fauth, and Shelby Nipper
Transcribed by Caroline Cherry Averitt
In November of 2025, Arkana had the opportunity to interview Bessie Flores Zaldívar, author of Libertad (2024).
Arkana: Libertad is a young adult novel that covers a great deal of tough topics. How do you approach writing for young adults, and how would this novel have been different if you had written it for an older audience?
Bessie Flores Zaldívar: I believe that anything that could happen to young adults belongs in young adult novels, you know what I mean? My first concern approaching all these topics was to not, in any way, preach to teenagers about things that are very real. The novel covers death at the hands of the state, grief, queerness, homophobia, domestic abuse, and so many other topics. I just wanted to be real about that. My whole thing with YA is that I believe in the campsite rule: that you leave readers better than you found them. If this novel had been for adults, which it very well could have been (and in some ways I was pushed in that direction by different people), the difference is that I wouldn’t feel like I am responsible for the reader in the same way. I think there’s a reason teenagers are a protected group. They should be. They’re incredibly powerful. They’re a tough audience. But they’re also incredibly vulnerable. So for me, what felt most important was that, while I depicted all those realities, by the end I was able to leave my reader better than I found them. I was able to offer them hope in the face of all these injustices and terrible things, which I do not think we necessarily owe the adult reader. I mean, every artist can make that decision for themselves. But in literary fiction, we put our readers through a lot of messiness, and at the end, we don’t really offer much insight other than “this is true and this is life.” YA is different for me.
Arkana: When you started writing this novel, did you set out for it to be YA? What feels important to you about the YA genre?
Zaldívar: I did, because I started writing this novel when I was 20. So I was very close to Libertad’s age. By the time the book was coming out, I was closer to her brother’s age, which was an interesting transition to go through. For me, it feels like the role of queer YA is to provide a space to grieve. You know, a lot of us did not get to be openly queer in ways that you see people now being. Also, people now might not be queer in this outspoken way. And so grieving that experience of being a teenager and seeing your heterosexual friends fall in love and have relationships that are widely accepted and public in the heteronormative world and knowing that you can’t have those classic teenage experiences––or, at least, it was like that for me growing up––there’s a lot of grief in that. It’s looking back and saying, “I didn’t get to have that. I couldn’t have possibly had that.” But there’s also a lot of space for celebration in queer YA. I got to write a protagonist that was much braver than I was growing up, and I was pretty brave. I was the only person who was out in my school when I was a high school senior. I was also the student council president. I was pretty cool and out and a badass and people didn’t really fuck with me over being gay. And when they did, I was happy to confront that. But with Libertad, I think I got to give her many things that I didn’t have the language to do myself. And as an adult, I could give this character the language, or I could introduce the characters who could give her the language. So that’s what feels important. Within YA you can grieve and you can celebrate what could have been, what wasn’t, what should be.
Arkana: You did a previous interview with JMWW about Rain Revolutions, and in that, you talked about how you don’t consider the use of Spanish in your work a craft element, but included it because these stories are happening in Spanish. In Libertad, some of the Spanish words are defined, some are not. And then, of course, the main poem is in Spanish and has footnotes at the end, which has the translation. How do you approach bilingual writing and deciding what you define and what you don’t?
Zaldívar: A lot of that will come down to conversations with your editor. There was a moment where my editor asked me if I wanted to include the translation of the poems right there in the narrative, rather than have it at the end. That decision was ultimately based on the fact that I didn’t want to interrupt the narrative with a translation, and I believe that the reader should do the work of flipping to the back if they want to have the context. I think that the reader does have to work. You know, if you want easy entertainment, there’s TikTok, and there are also books that fulfill that role of easy fun entertainment, where you don’t have to be an active participant. But that’s not the kind of art I’m interested in doing. I want a reader who is willing to work for the story as well, not because the story is undecipherable, but because it is foreign to them. Of course it is. You know, on the back of the hardcover of Libertad it says, “An electrifying story in a setting never seen before.” And I remember the first time I read that, I felt like shit about it. I was like, “That sucks.” I mean, it’s great that I’m writing this story in an electrifying way and in a setting never seen before. It also sucks that in the year 2024, this is the first book being published in the United States that takes place in Honduras. For me, what guides how I write bilingually is what feels right, what sounds right. And making sure that I’m not catering to a lazy reader, making sure that I am not doing something that feels awkward or weird, or that in some way portrays Spanish or any other language as extravagant or foreign or out of place. I want both languages, which are very natural to me at this point––I’ve been speaking English for most of my life––to feel like they both own the page, because that is the truth for me. I love the English language. My brain really loves the English language. My heart seems to prefer Spanish. I am so skilled at English in this very specific craft way, that I do think it has become a tool for hiding. With Spanish, I find myself having to be more direct, more honest, less fluffy, because there’s less of that training in me that I have received.
Arkana: Do you feel confident writing about political turmoil? How do you remain honest, and do you ever consider how people with different opinions might react?
Zaldívar: This is such a beautiful question because I am facing it as I am thinking about my keynote address tonight, where I will be addressing something that is not controversial anywhere else in the world, but it certainly is in the United States. There was this moment of hesitation for me in it, whether I could or could not do it. And ultimately, what helped me make the decision, which is the answer to your question, is that I am more worried about living with myself, and what I could not stand to live with not having said, not having done, not having expressed. History is constantly repeating itself, and it is a lot of pressure to put on one writer, on one artist, to be extremely informed about everything all the time and have all the answers. I think that we do have a responsibility to stay informed. I do think we have a responsibility to do the work of knowing where we’re speaking from and what is informing what we’re saying. I think that in the U.S, there is this movement to be like, “oh, rest is so important.” Like, “stay away from the news, disconnect and whatnot.” I think that is coming from a very privileged place. I think: how long are y’all going to rest for? Is there a plan to, at some point, pick up the work? Who gets to rest? Who doesn’t even get an option to rest? These are questions I ask myself alot. Because the things that we see in the news are their reality, not something they just see in the news. With Libertad, I tried to inform myself as much as possible, but a lot of it was just truly my lived experience, though I did watch a lot of documentaries done by Indigenous grassroot organizations in Honduras. So I guess my answer to that is: what I cannot live with is not speaking up when I know that it is my responsibility, and I have the space to do it. You know, tonight, I have to give this keynote address at a very popular writer’s conference in this country. It is my first time in Arkansas, and I don’t really know who the audience is gonna be and what the reaction is gonna be. But I do know that after it, I have to go home and I have to live with having been given the amazing privilege of having a good, big crowd of people to address and what I did with that time, what I did with that space.
Arkana: You’ve talked about how you started writing Libertad after moving to the U.S. Do you think you could have written this from Honduras, or did you need space from that place to write about it?
Zaldívar: This is the first time anyone’s asked me that. It’s beautiful. That’s an amazing question. I don’t think I could have written it in Honduras, because I don’t think I had the skills, the time, or the understanding of craft to be able to write it at the time. Who is to say that I wouldn’t have learned it if I had stayed, but I don’t think so. There’s no such thing as getting a creative writing degree in Honduras at all. And Libertad, while it feels like it was a novel I had to write, now that I’m writing other things, I’m like, “wow, this is a lot of work.” Libertad was a lot of work, but it felt almost like God was whispering it in my ear. It still required a lot of craft and technique and understanding how to employ the different elements of fiction, which I did learn all in the United States. I also think I needed a lot of language regarding queerness and identity that I was not learning in Honduras, but I did learn by coming here. And most of all, the book is written from the question of whether, if I could go back in time, would I choose to immigrate again or not? Which is not a question I would have had in Honduras. I would have only known one reality, which is the reality of staying. So, perhaps this wouldn’t have been the book that I most needed to write, you know? I definitely think that it’s the work of coming here.
Arkana: You have previously called yourself “a revolutionary.” How does that and your queerness affect your work, both in content and the ways in which you produce it?
Zaldívar: That’s a beautiful question. I often try to ask myself, as I’m writing, how can I make this weirder?
How can I make this more demanding of the reader? I really feel resistant to writing easy things. I also like to keep a balance, because I do want my work to be accessible. I don’t want it to be in code just for other academics or make it so that people need an MFA to read my book. That is disgusting to me. In some ways I chose to do YA because it forced me to make a book fun. I like fun page turners that are brainy and sexy and revolutionary. But that is one of those questions that is a lifelong work question. I do want to write something that is absolutely genre dissolving, and I think in some ways, with my next project, I feel that. But I don’t have a perfect answer.
Arkana: Can you tell us a little bit about your writing practice, and do you have work rituals or ways that you center yourself when you sit down to write?
Zaldívar: Famously, I go to bed at 8 p.m or 8:30 p.m.. By 10 p.m., I should be asleep. Definitely. Like several hours of being asleep, and I love to wake up at 5:00. I don’t use alarms or anything. My body naturally wakes up at 5:00. I think waking up startled is a terrible way to start your day. Sometimes in the winter, I see that it goes up to 4:30. I think it depends on how early the sun comes out. I really like the hours in the dark. I write first thing in the morning; I make myself coffee, and then I write for as long as I can sustain it, which seems to cut off whenever I can hear sounds outside, when I can hear children going into their school bus or moms yelling at dogs and shit like that. That distracts me and I don’t want to write anymore once the world is awake. If I have to teach, then I will teach. It’s hard to balance writing and teaching, so I tend sometimes to not write on the days that I teach. But on the days that are my own, after I write, I try to walk. I’m a big walker. I do a lot of my writing through walking, I would say. If I don’t walk at least five miles a day I feel a little crazy. I read every day, usually in the afternoon, or try to consume some other form of art. I live in New Haven, which is a great city to live in as an artist. I surround myself with artists. All of my friends are artists in some way, other writers or painters or whatnot. And I’m always interested in seeing how other people are conceptualizing and processing their own purposes in art, especially when it’s very similar to mine, but they’re doing it in a completely different way. That’s fascinating to me. And I do a lot of talking on the phone with friends that are far away, usually about our art. I think that talking about the work is almost as essential as writing the work itself.
Arkana: What advice would you have liked to hear as an emerging writer or an MFA student?
Zaldívar: I know that sometimes it may not seem like it, but you are so lucky. Spaces that are dedicated just to your writing, that are all about supporting your writing, developing the tools for your writing, and sharing your writing are so extremely rare. They shouldn’t be and they shouldn’t belong exclusively to academia. But an MFA is such a special place. And I know a lot of people have had really terrible experiences, and a lot of that can be connected to how white academia tends to be. And that is all very true and valid. But if there is anything that you can do to enjoy it as much as you can, you should. Take advantage of the resources that you have. It is a very rare moment in time and, also, know that you don’t graduate from an MFA and know everything there is to know about writing. Absolutely not. What the MFA should teach you is how to be a perpetual student of writing. It should give you the tools to continue to do the work by yourself and with others after you do it. And that is so, so special. Enjoy it as much as you can.