We recently connected with Mara Duryea and have shared our conversation below.

Mara, appreciate you joining us today. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

The most meaningful to me is my Monsters and Demons Series.

When I wrote the first book, I threw my heart and soul into it. Everything that I love is in that book. I lived my childhood in the Mexican Barrios, literally residing on the wrong side of the tracks. Sometimes the train would be so long that I’d be almost an hour late for school. I have Mexican blood in me, because my Navajo ancestors stole several brothers out of Mexico and brought them to Arizona. Only the youngest survived, and that was my ancestor.

My Navajo Grandpa married my Apache grandma and they lived on the Fort Apache Reservation. I spent my teenage years on the reservation.

I was born a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I can only grow flowers. The last time I attempted a garden, the squirrels ate it and hail beheaded my one single sunflower that made it to adulthood. I bake using the box recipes at Walmart. I go to church every Sunday and I’m a severe introvert with a touch of autism.

These are the things that I poured into my book. All of my experiences influenced what I wrote. I prayed over every passage, every brainstorm. I talked with and still talk with Him constantly about it. He puts images into my head, passages, things I should write, things I should leave ambiguous. I work with Him in all that I do.

When the second book came around, I put even more of my heart and soul into it. I made sure to always ask and counsel with the Lord.

As I wrote, with Him overseeing it all, something beautiful came out. It was something more than what I thought of on my own.

Book Three appeared and I thought to myself, I don’t want a series where only the first book is good. I don’t want to be forced to do anything that I don’t like. People tend to say that they don’t know how to compare my book to anything. And well they should. It is like nothing else. I feel cheap when I try to compare it.

This is a planet of Apaches, of Navajos, of Mexicans, and of many other different people swirled together to face monsters and demons, and yes, with the standards of my faith leading the way, but without being shoehorned in. It is certainly not obvious on the surface. If you can locate that backbone, then hooray.

This series is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints among wild Native Americans and the Mexican gangs of Arizona, and having a grand time on the rollercoaster. If you can discover that, then double hooray, because the book is nothing but high adventure, freaky monsters, seriously cool powers, and lovely with the fighting.

Should I give all the background and context, it could be a book on its own.

This is my meaningful project. This is my heart and soul. This is my gift given to me from Heavenly Father. If that is not meaningful, then what is?

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

As I said in the last answer, I am an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I am Apache, Navajo, Mexican, British, German, Scottish, and many more.

When I was five-years-old, I wanted to give my grandma a present. I wanted to give her a book. I took one of my baby books and began copying it onto a piece of paper. My dad looked at that, and he said, “Why don’t you make a story of your own?”

I was floored. It had never occurred to me before.

A few years later, my teacher said that the whole class was going to make a book. I was really excited. I saw a thick leather-bound book with gilded pages. That day, I got sick, and so I couldn’t go to class to make the book. My mom said, “I know. We’ll make a book together.”

I was totally excited.

I went to class the next day, and I wanted to see the masterpieces that my classmates had made. They’d taken construction paper, folded it in half, and stuck it into a nasty gray-blue paper like the grossest burrito ever made. I was so appalled, but I had my mom’s idea in my head.

Junior High came around. I’d rather die than go back to that stage of my life. It SUCKED. Friends got scattered. Classes made no sense. The math teacher was a hairy monstrosity who had us announce our homework grade in front of everyone. I always had an F. My clothes were ugly. My hair was a frizz bomb. School got out later and the walk home was a wasteland of death. About that time, I became obsessed with body sprays, because everybody had one but me.

Around then, the stories began to bombard my mind. I used to play out my stories with my toys, but I was twelve now, and I couldn’t play out my stories with my toys with the same satisfaction. The stories were stuck inside me. They were broiling.

One day, during a burning hot lunch hour, I was so miserable that I wanted to leave. I wanted to escape. The stories were grilling my soul. And then, a voice said in my head, “Why don’t you write the stories down?” It was like a light came on. The sun had come up. Physically, I could not escape that broiling desert with its baking picnic tables. I could escape into my head. I could run off to that place and be happy.

I had a journal at home that I wasn’t writing in. I pulled it out and started writing. Sweet relief filled my being and I wrote and wrote until my hand ached.

Because everywhere I lived was prevalent with ghost stories, those things made it into my writing, or at least their influences. When I was in grade school, there was a bruiser of a girl who had a small gang of her own. She herded me and a few other miserable girls into the bathroom and starting screaming for Bloody Mary. She switched the light off and had her cronies hold the door closed.

Nobody knew how strong I was. It was that sub-human strength born of terror. That girl was bigger than all of us. I threw her in the trashcan and pushed the door open by myself against about six other girls trying to keep us in there. We all escaped.

My work has a duality to it, for I did grow up in a Mexican Barrio and on the Fort Apache Reservation. Wild, haunted, dangerous. And yet I was and am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. There is safety in that. While things can grow awful and bad in my stories and my books, there is always safety at the end of it. There is a happy ending.

My earlier horror stories were trying to follow the horror story set-up, with a bad ending, or at least a weird one. In the end, I was like, no. Everybody is always ending their stories bad or weird. There’s no reason for me to follow that. I’m a writer. I don’t need to follow their rules. I can make it scary and end it good.

When the bad guy is dead, he or she is dead. There are no last minute betrayals or leaving a character in the middle of dying, or anything else. I hate those kind of stories, and so I will not write them.

I dealt with ghosts at first, but now I just make monsters. I can control monsters. I love making monsters and I love making heroes to fight them.

What is my mission for my writing? What is the message I want to send? Have fun, dang. It’s what reading is for.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

I have no goal or mission. I write for sheer joy. I love it. Whatever you get out of it is up to you. I’m not trying to teach or say anything.

I stay away from politics and social issues, because the planet of Ilo has its own issues and politics. It is not an extension of Earth’s stupidity.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

My lessons were how to sell on social media. In the end, social media was obsolete. Every lesson I had went out the window because of so many toxic people, so many crybabies, and too many people demanding only one kind of story–they usually wanted them for free.

They wanted me to buy their stupid books so that they’d buy mine. What profit is there in that? None. They demanded five-star reviews no matter how I hated their book. They cried about getting three stars and would run all over howling about it. There were no readers on social media. Review swaps sucked. Getting one dollar books was a waste of money.

Tons of followers meant nothing. This was the toxic writing community that cried over everything.

The trolls began to rise and all they did was hurt people. I almost got into a fight with one who just wanted to snip at me over nothing. I really mean nothing. You might as well get in a fight over lemon water, should it be there or not? If there’s a disagreement, then start cussing and turning sanctimonious. Use those asinine words like “You live a sad life. I feel sorry for you.”

And so, I realized that Twitter was a prison. I turned the whole thing off and lost over 10,000 fake followers. I left every facebook writing group. I cut it all off, and then, I was happy. Sales stayed exactly the same.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://maraduryea.wordpress.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sparrowincarnate/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SparrowCove

Image Credits
Nicomelia Benally, Julia Benally