learning to be brave: a conversation with bessie flores zaldívar

Bessie Flores Zaldívar (all pronouns) is a queer writer from Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Their debut young adult novel, Libertad, was awarded the Pura Belpré Honor by the American Library Association and has been named a best book of 2024 by Kirkus Review, Booklist, Publishers Weekly, Chicago Public Library, among others. Bessie received an MFA in fiction from Virginia Tech. She is a professor of creative writing at Quinnipiac University and lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

On April 9, 2025, The Interlochen Review editors Jade Rothbaum, Jada Walker, Aanya Khairari, and Iliana Demas sat down with Bessie for a conversation about the process of crafting her debut novel, Libertad.

Jada Walker: What sparked the initial idea for Libertad, and how did that idea evolve as you wrote the novel?

Bessie Flores Zaldívar: I started writing Libertad when I was in college, I was twenty years old. One of the kids I just met with for the manuscript consultation said “I think every fiction writer in some way is always writing autofiction,” and Libertad is very autofictional. I grew up in Honduras, queer. I left in 2016 to come to the U.S., and the novel takes place a year after I left, in 2017, when I wasn't actually living there anymore. What sparked the initial idea is the political conflict central to the book. In the United States, as you know, a president can run for one term, serve four years, and then can run again for another four years–eight years total. In Honduras, because there's such a long history of presidents overstaying and establishing dictatorships, the constitution is pretty clear that a president can only stay in power for four years.

Juan Orlando Hernández was the president at the time of the book in 2017, which was an election year in Honduras. It was in the last year of his term and he was really not liked by the public. In the time he had been in power his brother had been captured by U.S. forces in Miami for trafficking a lot of cocaine into the U.S. He had essentially used the money from the Social Security funding, medical funding for the country, to finance his campaign, and that had come out. A lot of people died because there was no medicine or there was expired medicine or pills made out of flour and stuff like that. People wanted him out of power and did not want his political party to stay in power after he left. Then one day in 2017, towards the end of the year, he just announces that he's going to run again and we're like, well, that's not really possible. It is as if Barack Obama had announced he's going to run a third term, or Donald Trump announced he's going to run a third term. Obviously the reaction would be like, oh, but that's not that's not how that works.

But he somehow amends the Constitution and it becomes clear. There's nothing we can do. He's going to run again and then on election night he's losing by a lot, I think 85% of the votes have been counted and he's down five points, which statistically speaking means he's lost the election. It is impossible to bounce back from that, and then at midnight on Election Day everyone's celebrating that he's out of power and they cut power, and when power comes back an hour later, the count for the election says he's ahead by 5%. So obviously, we know what's happened, it's terrible, and a political conflict breaks out. A lot of protests, people demanding that the count is redone. Some people die in those protests, and eventually life goes back to normal because it's a very poor country where people can't really afford to stop working and help, and he stays in power for another four years.

It was based on that event that I wrote the novel, and based on my own upbringing as a queer person in Honduras. I understood very early on that I had to immigrate to the United States, but I also had a lot of questions about my immigration, so to answer your question what sparked the novel, I had been living in the U.S. for two years at that point. The political events had taken place and I was starting to wonder if I had made a mistake immigrating. I was getting to experience my queerness very openly in a way that I wouldn't have in Honduras, but I missed my home and I missed my family, and there were other factors that made me feel like an outsider in the U.S. I wondered, if I could play a simulation of my life and go back, would I make the same choice again? So I wrote a character and essentially put them in that position and tried to see.

Jade Rothbaum: How did you develop the narrative style of Libertad’s poetic voice and how did it change over multiple drafts?

BFZ: As for how it changed over multiple drafts, one of the issues I ran into with the character's voice with my editor specifically was that she wanted the character to be more reactive, more like a teenager. You know, if your mom isn't doing what you want, if your siblings are being annoying, if things aren't working out, you're supposed to be snappy as a teenager. I thought about that for a long time and I realized that that was actually a very American thing, to have a snappy teenager who gets what they want and is always reacting to everything.

That's not necessarily true for other cultures, and in Honduras specifically, where every day there's some sort of political catastrophe going on, there's some sort of big threat, if you react to everything you would you get exhausted. And it's not about saving up your energy for the really bad things because everything should make you feel indignant.Your dignity is all you have as a human person. It was about being realistic that this character can't be on all the time, and this character would be more in community, with shards of joy in everyday life despite everything. I wanted her to be more subdued in that way. Sometimes not reacting to everything is a very powerful action, sometimes absorbing it and observing and knowing when to strike, where to strike [is] more powerful than being in constant reaction to everything. So that was part of developing her poetic voice. I wanted her to be observant. And, as a queer person in a country that isn't friendly to queerness–and certainly it wasn’t in 2017–a lot of it is also about safety. Where do we risk our safety?

For the multiple drafts, what I came back to was that as autofictional as this novel is, at the end of the day it is a novel. Bessie only got to live once, but Libertad [was] revised about seven times. That's why I know this character is much better than I could ever be, a much better person, a much better daughter, a much better sister. I got to improve them with every draft while still keeping a core of the rebellious teenage spirit.

Aanya Khairari: Were there any people, whether fictional or in real life, that you were influenced by when creating Libertad?

BFZ: Definitely. The main family structure of the novel is pretty much autofiction. My grandmother is a seamstress and my mom was a wedding planner. I'm actually the oldest sister in my family and I have three younger siblings at this point. But Maynor’s character is based, almost copied and pasted, on my brother, who's a couple years younger than me. The politicians in the model are all real people and I use their real names, which was a scary thing to do and a choice that felt important for me.

JW: Libertad’s story is both intimate and expensive. How do you approach balancing personal storytelling with the broader commentary?

BFZ: My life is political because of who I am as a person. I didn't get to choose whether I would want to just chill and relax. Because I am an immigrant and I am queer, I didn't get to choose balancing the political and the personal. For me it is one, and for Libertad and the characters in the story it is also one. When I get this question, it's often accompanied by the idea that somehow the storytelling is one thing and the broader political things are the background, the technical part of the story. But in real life, you don't get to choose. There was just the experience of it, which is all at once always, I don't get to opt out. Libertad's journey is psychologically driven.

AK: How did you decide which moments to reveal or leave unsaid? What pivotal choices shaped your character during your writing process?

BFZ: I was wary of the moments I felt scared of writing this. When you feel scared of writing something it's probably because you have to write it. But I also wanted to keep in mind that the audience for this book is teenagers. This book could have been for adults when I was trying to sell it. We were trying to find an agent and my professors in my MFA were like, why don't you try it as adult? This can be a literary novel. It doesn't have to YA. For me the distinction between YA and adult books is what you owe teenagers. I think you owe them hope. You can't be like, here's this very traumatizing story about political violence and homophobia and terrible things and good luck, that's just life. You can do that in an adult novel. I think adults are more comfortable with the idea that sometimes bad things happen and that's it. But there's a reason teenagers are a protected population. You owe them something for that emotional trouble and for me that was writing hope into the story.

At the end of the story, even if all these horrible things happen, there was still hope and that determined which moments were left unsaid versus said. Like when her brother dies, for instance, and she imagines how he died, I try to pull back on the details that didn't feel necessary to me. The moment was already very emotional for the reader. It didn't need to be grotesque, it didn't need to be traumatizing. That was one of the pivotal choices for me, having her imagine without being explicit.

I would say that the other pivotal moment for me was when she's deciding between these two girls. It felt very important to me to approach this in a non-heteronormative way, where one of them is clearly the right choice and the other one isn't. That's something that I learned very early on as a queer person in the U.S., that queerness really rejects the idea of disposing of people. I wanted you to approach the two love interests and the psychological choice in a very queer way, and that was deciding that you can be in love with multiple people. Relationships don't have to be one-on-one. Queerness allows you to expand what does it mean to love someone, what does it mean to be in love with someone. So she is just like, yeah, it's true that I like both of those girls and we'll see what happens with that.

I like to draw the points in the plot and do little pictures. But I do a lot of my writing and my drafting through my body. I go on very long walks, I try to experience weird shit, like I'm going to be an extra in a movie. I try to go to boxing matches, things that I wouldn't do otherwise, and see how that fills up the well of your heart. I almost see it like a sponge, like a period of fermentation where you're filling up, filling up, filling up, and then eventually as a writer it breaks and it's like an explosion, you can't help it at that point. That's what my process looks like. I'm not a very disciplined writer. I do wake up naturally every day at 5 a.m. and try to write, even if I don't want to, but it mostly looks like remembering that my career is not my art. My art is my art, and as an artist I have to be open to experiencing as much as I can.

AK: What techniques do you use to maintain consistent dialogue and dynamic voices? How do you balance multiple characters within the storyline?

BFZ: In this book it was easier because so many characters were based in real life. So I just had to be like, oh, how does my brother talk? That's how this character talks. How does my grandma talk? How would she say this?

But I'm really getting into doing detailed character profiles. I think that there are things that you as the writer need to know that the reader maybe never finds out, and it comes down to asking core character questions, like what would break this character? What is the one thing this character could not survive if it happened to them? It doesn't mean the story has to make that happen to them, but you have to know as the writer. What is this character like, what do they really want. How is my character at church? How is my character at having sex and what is the most awkward my character can be made to feel? The character might never have sex in the novel, but I want to know how would they be. The character might never go to church, but how do they behave at church. Asking these clear questions about them develops their voice for me to the point where I can start hearing them.

Balancing, that one's hard. Honestly, you get a really good editor.

Iliana Demas: What made you decide to switch perspective somewhat sparsely throughout the book?

BFZ: It was the limits of what an eighteen-year-old can reasonably know and reflect on. I was twenty years old when I started writing this book, so I was pretty close to her age, but by the time the book was in the last revision I was twenty-six. So I was really closer to my mother's voice, to the older brother's voice, and there were things that I knew that you just couldn't know reasonably [at eighteen]. I thought that there was a lot of grief and heartbreak in what our elders know, in what the people who pass before their time know, that we never get to find out, and I wanted the reader to hold that grief. I imagine someday she'll ask her mom things or her grandmother things, and she'll learn more information. But in the novel itself she was too young to know those things, to ask the right questions, so that's what made me include those three third person point of view chapters.

JR: In my writing, certain scenes are easier to write than others. Did this come up during the writing process and what made those scenes more difficult or smooth to write?

BFZ: I remember when I found out that Maynor was going to die, because that wasn't my plan at the beginning of the book. I didn't really have much of a plan and I was showering and I was like, oh, is this what will bring the book together, if he dies halfway through the book? That's how I can envision the timeline and I don't get that emotional, but I felt emotional and teared up a little bit and I was like, but do I really want to do that to this character? And I try to go around it. I try to figure out a way, and then I was just like, no. This is what the book calls for. That was a hard scene to write versus scenes that felt so familiar to me.

My favorite scenes to write are the scenes where the three siblings were together and they're eating plantain chips and drinking Coke, talking about soccer. I loved writing those, it felt almost self-indulgent to write about these beautiful moments that were just moments with my own siblings. I say all the time that art is not wanting to have seen alone. You saw something and you don't want to have seen all alone, so you write a poem about it, you write a song about it, you write a book. What I felt with my siblings growing up, there was the heat, so oppressive, [we were] so poor and and and wondering what the United States is like. I've never felt more loved, and I wanted the reader to know what that felt like, I didn't want to have seen alone. So those scenes were easier, and the scenes where I had to break my readers’ heart and my own [were harder] to write.

ID: How did you balance the transitions between Spanish and English?

BFZ: I went off what felt natural. I'm pretty lucky in the sense that Spanish is my mother tongue, but I started learning English academically at school when I was four. For a long time I was only allowed to speak English in school, I couldn't speak Spanish, and I took all my classes in English, even though Honduras is a Spanish-speaking country. Growing up that way you just develop your own language with your classmates with what transitions make sense. So I just went off what felt natural, knowing both languages. There were questions that came up during the copy editing process like football versus soccer, I use them interchangeably, and if I wanted to speak to one versus the other. My rule with writing is that sometimes the first idea that comes to mind is the best one, the first word that comes to mind is the most natural one. Your mind is always trying to get as close as possible to what it feels.

Were there any books [that were influential]? Anything Ocean Vuong has ever written. Randy Ribay was actually my agent sibling–we have the same agent. His book Patron Saints of Nothing was pretty influential for me, which is about the same thing–we're going to the Philippines and using social media as activism and [there’s a] corrupt government. I listened to a lot of rhythm while writing this book, specifically Bad Bunny. Anything Toni Morrison writes. What really moved me in writing this book was watching [the film] Moonlight a lot and trying to capture the coming of age and queerness of a storyline. There's a whole world, everything that's happening around us influences us.

AK: The bottle design on Libertad’s cover also appears in the website and other locations. How was the symbol chosen?

BFZ: The way the cover came to be it was May of 2023 and Penguin was starting to send me potential artists for the cover, and then this friend from high school was on Instagram and found this image exactly as it is, except that where Coca-Cola goes in the Coca-Cola font, it said Libertad. It was by this Guatemalan street artist and he does graffiti and political art. And she sent it to me and I was like, shit, that is the book cover. I sent it to my publisher and I was like, I want you guys to reach out to this guy, I want this, can you buy it for the novel. I reached out to him and I was like, is it okay if I ask, and he was like, yeah, absolutely 100%. Then Penguin liked it, but books mostly feature a character, a person on the cover, so they really wanted to have a girl on the cover and they sent me three options, this one and the other two options had a girl. They even ran a survey to try to figure it out, but I really wanted this one.

You know, part of it is that the characters are always drinking Coca-Cola in the book, and I love that a Coca-Cola glass bottle can be turned into a Molotov cocktail and can be used as a weapon. I love that this object that we encounter every day– and Coke tastes the same everywhere, you can buy a Coke anywhere–means you can build a weapon at any point anywhere. For me it feels more like a branding style and there was a conversation about whether it was okay to put a weapon on a Young Adult cover and I think the answer is yes. If it is okay to kill teenagers through government oppression, then it is okay for teenagers to fight back. A Coca-Cola bottle is a symbol of capitalism, a symbol of this thing that's accessible almost everywhere. How is it that you can buy a Coke anywhere, but you might not have access to education anywhere in the world? You can take it and you can throw it back and you can say fuck you, so that's the branding choice.

Something that's very important here is that they lose, the president stays in power. Her brother is dead. Nothing's going to make that go away, the president will stay in power for four more years, and then there will be a change of government later on but it doesn't matter, things stay the same. And the book ends with my character reading her political poetry to her family and friends. My character loses, but that's not the point. Being committed to a revolution, being committed to change, being committed to people having access to basic human rights, it's not about winning one fight. It's about how many times you're going to get up. So I think that's what I wanted my young readers to get out of this, is that yeah, you'll lose that election, sometimes it's just true, even if you try everything. There is not one single battle. It is a war. We are at war with getting access to everything we need.

ID: What are you working on now? And how will you incorporate what you've learned from writing Libertad into your new project?

BFZ: I have a second YA novel in the works with Penguin Random House. It's very different, it's more magical realism. I got my MFA from Virginia Tech, so it takes place in that area of the country and also Honduras. It's about curses and hurricanes. But I'm also transitioning out of YA. One of my frustrations with the writing industry is being branded as a YA author or a Middle Grade author. It's fiction. I don't see myself that way. I see myself as an artist. I wanted to write a YA novel and I did, and I got myself into a deal to write a second one. Now I want to write [for adults]. I'm writing a memoir that's about queerness and abusive relationships and the life of an artist in the United States. It's also about music and Bad Bunny and Spider-Man and all the things that I love put together. After that, I want to write a poetry collection. I'm also working on that. I'm just trying to get my hands in everything.

How does writing Libertad carry into those projects? You know, when Libertad came out I was scared. It's such a personal book. I kind of lied in an earlier question when you were like, any real people. One of the main characters, the crush, is based on my crush. Everyone who read it from my school knew who I was talking about. We do follow each other on Instagram and I wonder sometimes if she knows, like she has to know. I got shy, and so I felt scared when it was going to come out because of that, but also because of using the real names of politicians. There was a part of me that thought, how stupid of you to write this book that calls out the government and you live in the U.S. but your whole family lives in Honduras. It's been okay. The Ministry of Media hasn't approved the book, and I don't think it will be approved to be ever sold in Honduras. I remember the night before it came out I was like, either it comes out and it blows up my life, and your crush reaches out to you, and my family is exiled, or worse, no one cares, no one reads it. What do you prefer?

And the reaction has been so positive and beautiful, but the most beautiful thing has been learning to be brave. I wrote Libertad because I thought I was very brave and Libertad made me braver. And that's what I'm carrying into this new project.