To celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15 through October 15), I’m featuring some rising writers of Hispanic heritage in these Friday Five interviews. This week’s spotlight is on Melissa Flores Anderson, a Latiné writer and native Californian whose debut full-length short story collection, All and Then None of You, came out earlier this month from Cowboy Jamboree Press. This collection of 21 stories and a novella is praised for its portrayal of the “universal yearns, hopes, and griefs of everyday working people.” I’m about two-thirds of the way through the collection, and at every turn of the page I’m encountering surprising and intriguing prose, much as one might find unexpected sights on a drive along California’s back roads. Sights that make you want to pull over and have a look around.
Melissa’s flash and long-form fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in over 50 literary magazines, anthologies, and reading series, including swamp pink, Chapter House, Roi Fainéant, and HAD. A reader and editor for Roi Fainéant Press, she also co-authored the 2025 novelette Roadkill (ELJ Editions) and the chapbook A Body in Motion (JAKE). Read on to learn more about Melissa’s new short story collection, how road trips and country music play a role in the book’s formation, her literary influences, how her Mexican American heritage informs her writing, and a fun, buggy Easter egg contained in the book.
1. Your debut short story collection All and Then None of You takes readers on a road trip through California’s hidden corners with a cast of memorable characters. What inspired this collection, and how did you decide on the road-trip motif to tie together these stories of yearning and discovery?
I grew up in south Santa Clara County and worked as a reporter in San Benito County for nearly a decade in an area that is a mix of suburban and rural landscapes, but also lived in Southern California for undergraduate and graduate school. Many of the locations in the collection are familiar places to me. Californians in particular are fond of road trips and backroads, and that way of traveling opens us up to stumbling into interesting places and engaging with people we might not normally meet. Amy Marques read the collection to blurb the book and pointed out that a map of all the out-of-the-way destinations would be cool. It turned into a postcard that I used to promote the book and it’s also published in the front of the book.
That said, the collection actually came together around music. Cowboy Jamboree Publisher and Editor Adam Van Winkle often puts together anthologies inspired by music, and I’d written a few stories for his calls as well as other magazines that have done musical-focused calls. When I started reviewing the stories I’ve written in the last few years, music emerged as a theme and I ended up organizing the collection into four sections based on musical genres. As I put together the stories that had the strongest music connection for me, it just happened to be a lot of stories about traveling and out of the way places. There also emerged a theme of longing and discovery that makes sense to me because the earliest stories in the collection were written during the pandemic when many of us were searching to feel connected to other people.
For me, road trips and playlists go hand in hand. My friends and I used to make CD mixes to listen to on a Sony discman we plugged in with an adapter to an old car stereo when we were teenagers. So the combination of music and road trips seems natural, even though it didn’t happen on purpose.
2. Which two or three authors or literary influences have most shaped your voice and storytelling approach, and how?
In high school I wasn’t a big fan of the classics taught in my AP English classes, but I enjoyed Amy Tan. Her stories tend to be multi-generational, and about characters who are trying to resolve the past so they can move forward, and that’s a theme that comes out in my collection. Some of her writing delves into the experience of being stuck between two cultures, which I relate to as someone who is half Mexican and half white, and also trying to forge one’s own identity outside of the expectations of family or society.
Another writer who I discovered more recently is Daphne Palasi Andreades, the author of Brown Girls. The book breaks all the rules. It doesn’t have a clear narrative, or a main character, and is told from a “we” point of view, but it tells a story that was so familiar to me, again of trying to straddle different cultures. I would also add that someone from the indie press world I really admire is Katy Naylor, the editor of voidspace. Before I discovered void space, I hadn’t written anything interactive or experimental, but through pop-up calls I started playing around with narrative and taking more risks in my writing. A few of the stories in my collection originated as interactive pieces for void space.
3. From the stories in All and Then None of You, which one is your personal favorite, and what makes it stand out to you as a writer revisiting your own words?
Many of the stories in the collection have a firm basis in reality with real people doing ordinary things, but a few of the stories have some magic realism elements to them that were fun to work with. I especially like “Entomology,” which is one of the few pieces in the collection that is brand new for readers as it hasn’t been previously published. The inspiration came from the start of the semester where I work when I went to college meetings with the leadership team. Our provost at the time was new and he gave the same speech five times where he said he was an entomologist by trade. I started thinking it might be interesting to write a story about a kid who has these “bug marks” appear on his skin and he doesn’t know what they are. Not bug bites, but images that look like tattoos almost, and he ends up studying entomology to try to understand what is happening. When I put all the stories together and began editing, I realized that a lot of the stories mentioned bugs in them, probably because they take place in such rural places, so that inspired the cover design. And its sort of an Easter egg for readers, to try to find all the bug references.
4. How does your background influence the themes and characters in your fiction?
As a writer, I try to write pieces that are authentic to my experience and I think that’s what resonates with people. For everyone, identity is multi-faceted and it can change over time, but my writing reflects a lot of my core identity from childhood. My characters are often mixed ethnicity or Mexican, from lower-middle class or blue-collar families, living in rural or quiet corners of California, awkward or uncomfortable in their skin, and unsure how to accept the love that others offer them. Lots of other bits of my life show up in the stories, too, like jobs I’ve had, places I’ve visited or where I went to college. Pieces of my experiences are woven throughout everything I write, sometimes subtly in the fiction and sometimes fully on display in my CNF, such as in my chapbook A Body in Motion (JAKE).
5. For aspiring writers, especially those of Hispanic/Latine heritage or from other underrepresented groups, what key advice would you share based on your own path to publication?
When I first started submitting stories for publication, I got a whole bunch of form rejections and no thanks before I got my first yes. And then the publication that said yes went under and never published my piece, so it took even longer to get my first publication. I began submitting stories in October of 2020, and my first publication ended up being with Rigorous magazine, a journal for people of color, in August 2021. (Note: Rigorous has since ceased publication.) So my first bit of advice is that it can take time to get a story just right and also to find the right place for it. A no doesn’t mean a story is bad or that you should give up. Since then I’ve received more than 150 acceptances from online magazines, print presses, anthologies and reading series.
My second piece of advice is to be open to feedback and critiques. I worked as a newspaper reporter and editor for a long time so I am used to having my pieces edited and editing others. It’s important to see that others can offer valuable advice and to be open to it. That doesn’t mean it’s always easy to hear or digest. In my collection there was one story I wrote that started as a flash piece and I got negative feedback from an editor who rejected it. I was upset in the moment, but after sitting on it, I realized the story needed to be much longer and it ended up turning into “Tall Tales,” which was originally published by Marlakey’s King Ludd’s Rag. So that rejection led to a better story, and one that I got paid for.
The last thing I would say for Hispanic/Latiné writers and other underrepresented groups is not to limit yourself. I know when I first started writing there were some magazines or editors I thought wouldn’t like my writing because I’m Mexican and a woman or because I’m a middle-aged mom who lives a boring suburban life. But the more I wrote, l saw that my writing is versatile and can appeal to many different people and audiences. Take chances in where you submit your writing and don’t count yourself out.
BONUS QUESTION: As a reader and editor with Roi Fainéant Press, how has immersing yourself in others’ work shaped your own creative process and the stories you choose to tell?
Roi Fainéant Press was one of the early magazines to publish my work, including two of the stories in the collection, “White Knight” and “Rich Girls.” In fact, “Rich Girls” was rejected 25 times before it was accepted by RF. I was honored when they allowed me to be a guest editor for two special issues, and then invited me on board to be a regular reader/editor. The biggest influence of editing for a literary magazine is just remembering the sheer volume of people who are writing and submitting. It’s a reminder to make sure my work is polished and clean before I send it out because most volunteer editors don’t have time to do a heavy edit so a messy manuscript can be an automatic no. I also consider if my piece is saying or doing something unique, and if the story is authentic to me.
Follow Melissa on X/Twitter at @melissacuisine or on Instagram at @theirishmonths.
Andy writes! 