various publications since 2006, and was featured as one of Ten Writers to Watch in the October 2015 issue of Texas Monthly. I spoke with Flores about defamiliarization, the ubiquity of violence and the experience of writing fiction versus nonfiction.

Mesha Maren

I wanted to start by asking you about language. Tears of the Trufflepig occurs in a time and place that are a lot like our current time and place but are also significantly different. It is set on a border that is recognizable—the U.S.-Mexico border—at some point in the not so distant future. Some things have changed, though. Drugs are legal and smugglers are trading synthetically generated animals.

These changes are reflected in the very language of the novel. Most of the words are familiar but some of theFlores

You know, I’m the kind of person who, maybe because I’m an immigrant, always feels like an outsider everywhere, even in the places where I supposedly belong. I was raised in South Texas, but lived in Mexico until I was five, and when I visited the place growing up it was always very apparent I wasn’t Mexican in the way my relatives were. And in South Texas, I could see I was also different from my non-Spanish-speaking Mexican-American friends, who came from many generations living in South Texas. Later in life, when I began reading voraciously, I read all the border/regional and Mexican-American writers, and though a lot of it was good writing I never really felt like it spoke to who I was in any way; it