Chatting with Leo Oliveira

Leo Oliveira is a queer writer from Ontario, Canada, who harbors a soft spot for rats, pre-history, and flawed queer characters. Radon was Leo’s first published fiction story.

Leo is the author of “They Remember Faces” from Radon Issue 8.

Q: This is your first published work of fiction—can you talk about the broader submission process you endured on your way to publication and share any advice you have for writers seeking publication for the first time?

A year before COVID, I had something of a quarter-life crisis. Then there was quarantine. That mercurial combination of factors convinced me that if I wanted to be a writer (which was always my pipe dream, no matter how horribly I abused myself out of going for it). I had to . . . well, be a writer. And that meant more to me than just writing. It meant attaining my goals of publication, of creating stuff that people resonated with and reaching those people.

But getting started is hard, you know? I’d never suffered much professional rejection before. Part of that was me nursing a pathological avoidance of trying anything I wasn’t 90+% certain I could achieve, and the problem with that being your whole experience is that the world doesn’t work that way, and so I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop.

I submitted my first story ever to Clarkesworld about a year-and-a-half ago. I liked their quick turnaround. It gave me less time to stew in anxiety over it. When the inevitable form rejection came, it was almost a relief. The worst had happened, and I was fine.

Then came the next hurdle, and then the next: ‘Oh my god, is any of this good enough to be published? Am I good enough? After how many submissions should I give up? How often should I edit the story after a rejection? Do I have to submit everything I write? How many stories should I be working on right now?’ On and on, over and over again.

I almost gave up on “They Remember Faces” a few times. It was only the kind words from even kinder editors in their personal rejection letters and the promise of possibility that kept me going.

That’s the biggest piece of advice I have for any writer seeking their first publication: Don’t stop trying. If you want to be published, really want to be published, you better submit to every market you can until someone takes you. Don’t get caught in a spiral. Believe in the work, and someone else will believe in it too. You might even get lucky and be picked up by a venue you’re really crossing your fingers about (like me).

Q: We’d love to know more about your soft spot for rats—did it inform the affinity Sebastian harbors for ravens in your story?

Rats are just little guys, and I love my little guys. But Sebastian’s affinity for ravens mirrors my thoughts towards cetaceans more than anything else, believe it or not. They’re wicked smart, cerebral. They have culture and language and an avid curiosity for the world around them. They can be as selflessly kind as senselessly cruel.

Organizations like SeaWorld might’ve argued that their breeding programs were important for the species (thankfully discontinued), but I feel it’s a more difficult equation than that. They aren’t happy in those tanks. It wreaks havoc on their psychological well-being. What would torturing them (or any living thing as unhappy in captivity as them, for that matter, and triply so for any industrialized animal) accomplish for them, exactly? Their continued miserable existence for our peace of mind? Is that our way of apologizing for doing to them what landed them in that position to begin with?

It's one of the questions I wanted Sebastian (and the world he inhabits) to tackle with: What does conservation mean? What should it mean?

Personally, I think people are willing to wave aside the idea of exploiting other living beings so long as A) They don’t have to see it, and B) They don’t feel directly affected by it. I believe people are inherently good, you know? We don’t like suffering. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t willing to turn a blind eye, especially when there’s very little within our power to do about it.

When that line is crossed for Sebastian, he can’t go through with it. All his pent-up powerlessness and frustration hits its boiling point. We all have one of those. Lately more than ever, I feel that people’s lines are getting crossed. There’s a point where you become so touched by suffering and so appalled with the response of those in power around you that something inside you just breaks, and you can never get it back.

That’s the other question wanted to ask Sebastian, and of the audience: Where is your line, and what will you do when it’s crossed?

(Hopefully not cannibalism.)

Q: Can you talk about your decision to use the letter format in “They Remember Faces”?

The very first draft of the story was as part of an exercise for one of my classes. We had to write a piece with a strict 300-word limit every week, and my epic-fantasy-prone ass wept. But one week I just opened up a doc and the voice came to me, more or less. It started with a variation of the first line that made it to the end, not counting where some nouns were changed around (I had a tough time settling on the name of Jakobi’s company). A good-old murder confession. Very 300-word-able, I thought.

From there, it just made sense to have it be in a letter addressing . . . someone. That went through some names too. I felt compelled by the idea of a character who makes his grand confession, not to anyone of personal consequence, but a sensationalist rag he felt got it all wrong. I imagined the Jury and Ovil had some bad blood over the years, exposes and what have you. The fighting must’ve been fierce. One last jab at Jakobi’s legacy, maybe, giving a great enemy the keys to the kingdom.

Q: As a young rising star in the spec world, where do you hope your writing career ends up taking you?

That’s a very kind thing to say, ha. I hope I can live up to it!

I want to be able to tell the stories I have to tell for as long and as stress-free as possible. I’d love to be able to write full-time, comfortably. But above all else, I want to reach more people. My dream would be to improve myself to the point where my major personal project can be shared with the world, but that’s a while out yet. I think if a complete stranger felt moved to make art for my work, I’d die happy. That kind of cross-space connectivity feels deeply human to me, and I love it. It’s like you’ve made it in a way.

Q: When writing a story, how do you determine if it will have a happy versus horrific ending?

That’s my secret, Cap: the default is bittersweet endings.

I consider them more on a spectrum from sweetest to bitterest. That’s what I aim for, at least. Sometimes the ending changes as I write. Most of it depends on the characters and what sort of finale I want to leave them with. I don’t find it interesting personally to leave a story with everything tied up nice and neat. For me, something ought to have been scorched clean by the end of things. The status quo must be broken, if not in the literal foundations of the world, then in the heart of the characters.

I find that world-shaking change clicks best with me in longer-form works, so with short stories I end up breaking the characters more often than not. But I still like to give them a glimmer of . . . something. A legacy, a future. Some philosophical awakening. I hope it’s usually at least somewhat cathartic. If not, I’m sorry.

Q: To better chip away at your to-be-read mountains, have you set an established reading schedule for yourself?

I’m pretty bad at setting established schedules for myself, as a general rule. I wish I could stick to them. Something I can (somewhat) manage are goals: spend x number of hours a day reading and/or writing, finish x number of books before x date rolls around—that kind of thing. Low-pressure book clubs are also a great way to chip away at the PileTM. I’ve always been better at sticking to something when other people are relying on me.

Q: What dreams have you by chance destroyed lately?

Lately? Real or fictional? If I’m writing, rest assured some character’s dream is getting ruined. I’ve been cooking up a few different terrible fates across the spec-fic spectrum. No spoilers, but I hope to have them out in the world soon!

Q: What brought about your love of pre-history and nature?

Oh no, you’ve found my Pandora’s Box. I was a dino kid, through and through. I’ve had these educational tomes for as long as I can remember, and my whole childhood I kept gathering more. Dino books, dino figurines, dino movies and documentaries—the whole lot. Prehistoric Park, Walking With, Land Before Time, even (and I’m not proud of this) questionable shows like Jurassic Fight Club were fair game. I wanted all of it. I remember watching Jurassic Park for the first time at like seven or eight, asking my grandma if it was fine to watch it even though I wasn’t yet thirteen (the movie’s PG-13 if memory serves), and she said it was. I’m glad she did. I love Jurassic Park.

But paleo-docs fed into a parallel love for nature docs. Animal Planet was my channel of choice. I remember catching every new episode of Meerkat Manor I could get my grubby paws on. Big Cat Diary, River Monsters, The Crocodile Hunter . . . I remember being a little kid and learning Steve Irwin died. It hurt.

Some of the first pieces of dedicated fiction I ever wrote were on my grandparents’ 2003 Word program, others secreted away within the family computer’s saved documents under inconspicuous titles like 'Leo 1’. Maybe they’re still there. One was a blatant Meerkat Manor rip-off I aped from my Warrior Cats obsession. Another was a particularly brutal novelization of the Great Wildebeest Migration in which several characters are ripped apart by crocodiles (in great detail!).

But my particular interests really culminated in a lost-world type story where a bunch of people on a plane crash land in the Bermuda triangle, which—gasp!—is home to a massive island where dragons and lions with maces for tails and dinosaurs roamed. Think Lost if it was combined with Jurassic Park III and Final Fantasy. It was terrible. I wrote a script like a trailer for it because the concept excited me so much. I love that for little me. He really embraced his cringe.

So, it probably isn’t a big surprise that I wanted to be a paleontologist growing up. Or a biologist of some persuasion (marine biologist had its moment in the sun, but it turns out my thalassophobia wasn’t letting that happen). But the latter didn’t project a stable enough income that I felt my parents would approve of, and the former asked for calculus.

So of course, I did the reasonable thing and went to school for psychology before switching track to the very monetarily stable passion of creative fiction.

Q: Have you fully embraced your anarcho-absurdism agenda?

Oh yes. It’s time for attack mode. When there are blips on the radar, setbacks to progress, the boulder slips a little further back down the hill.

The struggle for a better world doesn’t end. This is a good thing. It’s good that there’s a constant move to improve the world, to improve the lives of people. We don’t live at the end of history. The struggle continues regardless of who is elected or the decisions they make. The struggle continues even after we’re all gone. Anarcho-absurdism, to me, is about the essence of anarchism: the unkillable, inexhaustible spirit of leftist principles and the desire to create a world for the people rather than for a select few.

That’s a world worth fighting for, no matter the material conditions we must wade through approaching it. From that viewpoint, our struggles seem manageable. The idea is always alive.

One must imagine Sisyphus as happy.