Ruben Reyes Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Interview

Ruben Reyes, Jr. discusses his short story collection, There is a Rio Grande in Heaven, with Robert Lee Brewer, Senior Editor of Writer's Digest.

What prompted you to write this book?

Before I conceptualized an entire collection, I was just trying to teach myself how to write a short story. The bulk of the stories were drafted after the summer of 2018, a brutal couple of months for Central American migrants under the Trump administration. Eventually, I realized all my stories were circling one central question: How can fiction help us make sense of the real-life dystopia Central American immigrants face every day? There is a Rio Grande in Heaven is my way of working through that question.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

The earliest story, about a Salvadoran colony on Mars, was drafted in the summer of 2016, which means the book took about eight years to complete. Writing my first book also involved figuring out what kind of writer I wanted to be, so I experimented a lot. Some of these experiments made it to the final manuscript, other were cut.

I always knew I wanted to write weird, speculative stories about Salvadoran immigrants, so that remained consistent, but I think the stories range so widely—in both genre and form—because writing the book was an exercise in self-discovery. That's ...