The Art of Crafting a Novel: In Conversation with Luis Jaramillo
Luis Jaramillo’s latest novel, The Witches of El Paso (Simon & Schuster, 2024), follows Marta and her elderly great-aunt Nena as they journey through El Paso, Texas in search of Nena’s long-lost child. Along the way, the two women forge a deeper bond, uncover buried family secrets, and awaken Marta’s own supernatural powers. Blending elements of family, tradition, mysticism, and love, The Witches of El Paso is a rich and layered exploration of identity and legacy.
Jaramillo sat down with Camilla Marchese Gonzalez to share the writing process and inspiration behind his latest novel.
What sparked the idea to write this book?
I wanted to write about my family, especially about my grandmother and her sisters. I started with a different version of those stories and wrote a whole draft of something that wasn’t working. Then this new character showed up, Nena. She’s not based on anyone in real life, but she had this really strong voice that led me to come up with the rest of the story. It enabled me to tell a multi-generational story while telling the history of El Paso, Texas.
This character also brought in supernatural elements to the story. I tell my students that it’s really key to find that one thing that enables you to tell everything that you want to tell. It takes effort, of course, and mistakes come along the way. Introducing supernatural elements felt like a big mistake. It wasn’t something that I intended to do, but once I accepted it and incorporated it into the story, it solved things. Initially, I resisted it and wasn’t sure that I could implement all these elements and make them work, but once I committed to it, I was able to write the book.
Can you talk about how space and setting influences the story and the characters in the novel?
I wanted to write about El Paso because of my own family stories. It was fun to visit El Paso and talk to relatives, and to talk to other people I met along the way. Going to Ciudad Juarez, a place that I grew up going to, but as an adult and looking at it like a writer, is a completely different experience. It is always a really interesting thing to have that new kind of perspective.
But I also wanted to write about it because it’s a border town and I was thinking about the border in different kinds of ways. In Witches of El Paso, I was also writing about other kinds of borders, like the borders between life and death, between one stage of life to another stage of life—the borders between people. One of the things that I was really trying to work with was taking these intellectual ideas and making them work in terms of the plot and the emotional story, too. They had to really live in the senses of the book, in the senses of the characters, and in the desires of the characters. Borders are an intellectual concept in the book for me.
Magical concepts and mysticism play a complex role in your story. What was your process for exploring these elements, and were there any specific inspirations or tropes you aimed to embrace or avoid?
I wasn’t trying to resist tropes—I was trying to embody them in a way that felt organic and fun.
When I was a kid, through my teens, I read a lot of fantasy and science fiction and other things with supernatural and speculative elements. I had a lot of those tropes and storylines in mind when writing this book. Once I started to write, I committed to writing a book that had speculative elements. One trope that I’ve always been fascinated by is the story of someone who gets taken away from their every-day life and then gets thrown into an adventure and then gets reintroduced back into their life again. That was a real trope that I was playing with and I wasn’t really trying to resist it—I think it’s so compelling. It’s something that kind of mimics the experience of reading too. When you pick up a book, you enter this other world and then come back to your own life changed in some way because of your experience reading it.
Did you draw any inspiration from the magical realism tradition?
I was greatly inspired by books of magical realism. I guess going back to teenage years, I read a lot of Isabel Allende and loved her, and I think that really influenced me. And then later on, I read other Latin American writers, too, of course, that influenced my conception of magical realism.
I also think a lot comes just from the experience of the border and Mexico and the United States, and that part of the United States. There is a tradition of mysticism, and I write about a market in Juarez that actually exists. I didn’t make it up at all. It’s this huge market that sells really witchy things and there are people who can do various spells on you. Once I started to talk to family members, I got a lot of family stories about connections to the spiritual world. Stories that I had forgotten or didn’t know of when I was younger. For example, I learned about a relative in Mexico around the 1600s who was accused of witchcraft. All these things were interesting to me to write about.
When I first started the book, I would tell people that I was writing about witches, many people, mostly white, would ask, “Oh, and it’s not set in Salem Massachusetts?, and I would say, “no!” [laughs] There’s this whole magical tradition all over the world. There are witches and the curanderas that exist in Mexico and in parts of the United States.
Was there anything that surprised you, either of your characters or of your writing in your latest novel?
I was surprised by so many things! I think that’s the fun of writing, and a reason why most of the process outlines don’t work for me. When I’ve tried to do outlines, I’ve very quickly had to abandon them because I wrote something that made the rest of the outline not work, and it seemed un-fun to have to bend the story back to the framework of the outline. But in this book especially, I was really shocked by some of the things that I came up with as I was writing, like the day that I wrote about Nena time-travelling from World War II-era El Paso to the El Paso of the late eighteenth century. Or when I wrote about Nena being taken to a convent in colonial Mexico. Or when I wrote about the first time that Nena really makes magic. I had to scramble once I wrote these scenes, doing research to figure out how to accurately render times and places I knew nothing about. But this was fun too, like when I was reading a book about convents in Mexico of the 1700s, and I found accounts of nuns accusing each other of being witches. One nun claimed that another cursed her, causing her to urinate rotten embroidery thread. I would not have gotten to that detail with an outline.
What was the revision process for The Witches of El Paso, how did you know it was ready to be published?
This book took me a long time to write. Let’s say eight years. I’ve come to accept that I have a process that works for me. It’s not fast. I write a lot and then I cut a lot. And then I write a lot more, and then I cut a bunch again. On and on. The writing part is important for me because I need to be able to write during the generative periods in a free way, allowing myself to make a mess. When I cut, I turn on another part of my brain, the more analytical editor side, which is completely separate from the part of my brain that thinks up scenes. Both parts are necessary, but I can’t do them at the same time. As I was working on the book, I had readers along the way, including other writers I’ve been friends with since we were in the MFA program at The New School—we’ve been reading each other’s work for 25 years now! My husband is also one of my first readers. Once I felt like the book was in good enough shape, I sent it to my agent, and then we spent at least a year on edits. I knew it was ready to get published when he sent me a draft that had only line edits in it. Once I made those changes, it became his job to sell the book.
Luis Jaramillo is the author of The Witches of El Paso and the award-winning short story collection, The Doctor’s Wife. His writing has appeared in LitHub, BOMB Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications. He is an assistant professor of creative writing at The New School. He received an undergraduate degree from Stanford University and an MFA from The New School.
This interview series is produced by Camilla Marchese Gonzalez