Guatemalan Rhapsody by Jared Lemus is one of those rare books that hits the sweet spot of being at once escapist and deeply engaging. Reading it, I felt the exhilaration of being plunged into the world around me even as the ugly drumbeat of 2025 mercifully faded for a bit.
In the conversation that follows, Lemus spoke with me about the spiritual threads running through his debut story collection, writing imperfect characters, how to approach the ever-slippery task of crafting great endings, and writing visibly political fiction, among other topics.
Jared Lemus is the author of the short story collection, Guatemalan Rhapsody, published with Ecco-HarperCollins in March 2025. His debut novel is forthcoming with Ecco-HarperCollins. Lemus’s work has appeared in The Atlantic, Story, The Pinch, and The Kenyon Review, among others. He holds an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh and is currently the Kenan Visiting Writer at UNC-Chapel Hill.
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Karen Tucker (KT): Congratulations on this electric debut. Before we dig into art and craft, would you share the origin story of this collection? As a follow-up question, I’d also love to hear your origin story as a writer.
Jared Lemus (JL): Thank you, Karen; it means the world to me that you would take the time to read the collection and engage with it so thoughtfully. As far as the origins of the collection, I think the bulk of the writing took place between 2019 and 2024. My heart beats story collections, and so, even while I heard from professors and friends and fellow writers that “collections don’t sell,” I couldn’t help but remain in love with the structure and constraint of the short story. “William Trevor considered the short story ‘essential art,’” says John Dufresne in his craft book, Flash! Writing the Very Short Story, continuing with: “Writing a story is infinitely harder than writing a novel, ‘but it’s infinitely more worthwhile.’” This is the same way I feel about stories, even while I’ve heard others say that stories don’t have as much emotional depth or character development as novels. So, the origin of my collection really was to try to prove that this was not the case. I also felt that I could portray a wider range of characters and situations in a collection than in a novel. As the title suggests, this is a kaleidoscopic view of Guatemalans and Guatemala, a rhapsodic movement, all part of the same whole, tuned to the key of the country and its people.
As far as my origins as a writer: I’m too weird to do anything else. The beauty of writing for me is that I can sit at home and cry or laugh or sing or throw balled-up pieces of paper against the wall or talk to myself or pace while muttering incoherencies while I write and no one will judge me…except for my two kids and my spouse, who do so constantly, but they’ve been in the game long enough to know what’s up. I used to want to be musician, and I do still play bass and guitar on occasion, but more so like a hobby now or a jam sesh with my oldest. The problem with being a musician was that, because I can’t sing or play drums or piano, I needed bandmates, and they were hard to come by. You have to find people you mesh well with, who want to play in a similar style as you, who show up to practices regularly, and who want the same thing out of the work. With writing, it’s solitary—the act itself at least—so it’s all on my shoulders. The pros or cons of whether or not I sit down to write is all up to me, but it also affords me creative freedom to express myself however I best see fit without having to run it by three or four other people to make sure they agree. I always say the same thing about my origins: I traded music for music on the page.
KT: You’re currently the Kenan Visiting Writer at UNC Chapel Hill and a fiction writer with a prose style that reflects your musical past. Your stories, though, feature a range of workers: a village launderer, a van driver, a truck driver, campus custodians, an aspiring tattoo artist, and others, all of whom are underpaid and overlooked. First, thank you! These are the stories we need right now and too few of them are being published. Second, can you talk more about your interest in writing about low-wage workers and their accompanying issues?
JL: I think the easiest answer is that I’ve had some really shitty jobs in my life, and I think this is probably true for most people. Especially if you’re lacking the silver spoon. These are the people I’ve been and been around: waiting jobs and trading tips for (much like in your book, Bewilderness) pills, washing dishes and shooting up, working at a call center and staying up until 4:00 a.m. smoking weed and cigarettes and washing them down with PBRs and High Lifes. I, honestly, don’t think either my characters or myself would have gotten into any of these things or into any of the trouble we’ve gotten into if we’d had a livable wage and lived in a non-capitalistic society. I think that’s what drives, at least it was for me, people to drugs and bad trouble—the lack of resources, the cyclical nature of the game, and the lack of a way out.
KT: I’d also love to hear your thoughts on writing visibly political fiction—the risks, the challenges, your approach, your hopes for it—and anything else you’d like to share.
JL: I think one of the risks, as many artists (musicians, writers, dancers, etc.) are finding out, is the loss of fans and the dragging of their names on social media. It shocks me when fans of bands like Rage Against the Machine and Green Day turn on them when they speak out about their political beliefs, saying, “Stick to music.” Like, did y’all not listen to the lyrics in their songs? I think in writing, when there is no backing track or instruments, readers must focus on the other thing that’s there—the written word—so the politics are intertwined with what people are reading and on full-display. On the other hand, we obviously don’t have as wide a reach as actors and musicians and the people reading our books are typically aligned with what we’re saying. I don’t see a MAGA supporter picking up a book titled “Guatemalan Rhapsody” and thinking to themselves, “I wonder what this nice brown man has to say,” you know?
KT: Along with being visibly political, some of your stories are visibly spiritual. I’m thinking of your opening story “Ofrendas,” as well as “A Cleansing,” the story that closes the collection. How do you approach writing fiction that explores spiritual matters?
JL: I was brought up in a Catholic household, so we had saints and ceremonies and the like. Then, we (my immediate family and I) converted to Christianity and in that religion we had speaking in tongues and praise and worship. But I was also brought up with my grandmother’s Maya background which involved cleansings with eggs and rose water and palm fronds and concoctions made from herbs and oils. So it was this hodgepodge of beliefs. But, at the end of the day, I only felt, if just somewhat, connected to the Maya spirituality: the thanking of a pantheon of gods as opposed to one vengeful and wrathful god who scared me into believing in “H”im. I’m currently trying to find my way back to my Maya roots. I’ve been entangled in the American ones for too long. “Men of Maize” by Miguel Ángel Austrias talks a lot about this: the industrial complex of the Ladinos and the spirituality of the Maya. I’m clawing my way back.
KT: You have an extraordinary talent for writing flawed characters. They make wrongheaded choices, they say and do foolish and hurtful things, and yet over and over I found myself rooting for them. Can you talk about writing imperfect characters—both the why and the how?
JL: Thank you. Yeah, you know, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,” and all that. I think we’re all flawed in one way or another. That’s not to say that we go out of our way to hurt those around us or people we encounter, but we are self-centered in many ways. I think about scenarios where we will always put ourselves and our loved ones first before we think about helping strangers, and I’m not sure there’s anything wrong with that. I feel the same way about my characters. Would I leave my life today and start robbing cars along the highway with my friends? No. I mean, who would if they have other options? But my characters decide to do this because they’re out of options. It’s not that these characters are “bad,” they just don’t have another choice: they’re orphans with no job prospects, just trying to make enough money to eat that day. So, all of these “flaws” stem from necessity. No one wakes up in the morning thinking, how can I harm people today? Well, maybe our two current presidents. But for the most part, we wake up to go to work to make money to eat and survive; but how far would we go to protect the ones we love if something or someone tries to cause them harm? And that’s really all I’m doing with the collection: humanizing these less-than-perfect characters who are doing things that they may not even want to do because they have to. And, besides, I think reading about unflawed characters is boring.
KT: One of the more challenging aspects to writing fiction is crafting a great ending. When you’re working on a novel, you only have to do it once, but in your story collection you wrote twelve of them. Or actually, you wrote thirteen since you give readers two endings in “Bus Stop Baby.” What do you think about when you’re working on an ending, what are you aiming for, and/or what advice on crafting endings can you share?
JL: My biggest advice, and the one I give all of my students, is: don’t plan your ending. I go so far as to say, don’t plan anything at all; leave your thinking brain at home, that’s not what you need when you’re writing creatively. You are there as a confidant to your characters, a conduit for their stories, not as a writer trying to impose your ideas, beliefs, and structure to their lives. Get out of the way and trust that your characters will tell you where their story is going and how it ends. I find that if I have an outline for a story, I leave no room for discovery because I have a map, of sorts, that I’m following. I’m an arrow with a target in sight. How many unexplored possibilities, how many other trajectories are missed because of this? Let your characters tell you what they need from you and trust that, though they may not hit the target you had in mind, they will guide you to where that arrow needs to land.
KT: What books, music, art, etc. influenced you as you wrote these stories?
JL: I have more influences than I could list in an entire issue of the MQR (thank you to all of the editors, btw) but here are a few of my top favorites by category. Books: Fortune Smiles by Adam Johnson, There There by Tommy Orange, The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond, and Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson. Musicians: Kendrick Lamar, Conway the Machine, Busta Rhymes, Ab-Soul, a ton of metalcore bands, Rage against the Machine, System of a Down, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, and marimba music. Movies: Snatch by Guy Ritchie (though it hasn’t aged very well, the fast-talking, subtle humor got me), Fight Club by David Fincher (the toxic/fragile masculinity aspect), and The Big Lebowski by the Coen brothers (just some average dude getting into trouble). And, though they will never know it, the three guys in my first apartment complex when I was 18 with whom I smoked weed and freestyled with every night for a year. They were all in their 30s and 40s and got me into clubs, took me under their wings, gave me the nickname “Soul Child,” and introduced me to MHz, Nate Dogg, and Master P. My rhythm and flow (on the page) has gotten better since then, guys, wherever you are, I promise.
KT: Thank you so much for speaking with me about Guatemalan Rhapsody and for sharing all of this with your readers. Last question: What writing project are you working now?
JL: Thank YOU for taking the time to do this with me. I’m currently working on my debut novel. It’s a polyphonic novel tentatively titled Magic in the Land of Eternal Spring. It’s a polyphonic book about the fiction town of Huecotenango, Guatemala—a composite of some of the villages and towns and cities I saw growing up—it’s a place you end up when you have nowhere else to go. When two brothers crash outside of town, they bring with them promises and threats, dividing the town into those who believe they’re there to help and those who think it’s better to have just a little than it is to gamble and end up with nothing. I’m excited to get it to my agent and editor and to see it on people’s bookshelves and coffee tables.
