Michael Deluca - The Jaguar Mask - SSBA Fantasy Finalist

Good afternoon! If you're like me, you've been mainlining the Olympics for the last two weeks. I love all Olympics and will watch any event enthusiastically. But... I suppose... there are other things in life, like wrapping up my SSBA Finalist posts. Today, it's Michael J. DeLuca's turn, finalist in the Fantasy category.

As usual, more information on the SSBA can be found here, and links to all of my other SSBA posts can be found here. Side note, nominations are open for the 2026 awards - so send them in!

On to the author spotlight!  

 Michael J. DeLuca - Author Biography

Where you can find Michael J. DeLuca: 

I'm most active on BlueSky as @michaeljdeluca.bsky.social; I'm also on Mastodon at @michaeljdeluca.climatejustice.social. If you look back on my website The Mossy Skull, there's some travel writing I did about Guatemala and the Maya. And I also publish a literary magazine which deals with a lot of the same themes as THE JAGUAR MASK: Reckoning, a journal of creative writing on environmental justice.

Interview

1. How did your writing journey begin/come about?

I choose to approach this question from a writing workshop perspective, developing authors meeting like-minded people, wanting to know how they got where they are and where they're going. Everyone's path is different, everyone's goals change as they go, but every time I hear a new version of an author's bildungsroman, I learn something new. Here's mine.

I've been writing fiction since fifth grade and in love with the fantasy genre since third. I played a lot of D&D in high school, that certainly helped. In college I took every creative writing class they'd give me credit for. But I didn't seriously begin to think I might actually try to get published until I was in my early 20s. This was the early 2000s. I tried a few online writing workshops (including OWW) and local science fiction conventions, from which I learned of a local, in-person workshop (WriteShop, in Columbus, Ohio), from which in turn I learned of the six-week workshops, Odyssey and Clarion. I applied to both, got into Odyssey, and had a blast. That's where I met some of my oldest and closest writing friends. For years thereafter I participated with four of them, all of whom were focused on developing their short fiction, in an intensive critique circle, The Homeless Moon. The experience and education I derived therefrom, both in writing and reading broadly, set me up to get accepted into a volunteer position at Small Beer Press, which lasted for nearly a decade and was phenomenal, the best thing that ever happened to me in terms of developing my craft and understanding of the field. Each one of those experiences introduced me to more new writers, their work, and their own stories, and each one expanded my concept of what was possible. By the time I started working on THE JAGUAR MASK, my writing had appeared in dozens of short fiction markets, I'd designed and published four short fiction chapbooks with The Homeless Moon, and I was already thinking about founding my own literary magazine, which would become Reckoning, the journal of creative writing on environmental justice I still publish. 

2. Who are your biggest influences/favourite authors/books?

This is tricky for me, because I'm the kind of reader and writer who is far too easily influenced by amazing writing, amazing prose in particular; too often I'm trying to write like my favorite writers instead of finding my own voice. All the time as I'm writing, I think about Ursula Le Guin (The Tombs of Atuan in particular), Jorge Luis Borges and John Crowley (Little, Big is my favorite), asking myself how they'd do a thing I'm trying to do. Luckily I feel like I've learned from my mistakes at this point and so am a little better equipped to resist the siren songs of some of my less formative favorites like Miguel Angel Asturias, Kelly Link, James Baldwin, Gerald Vizenor, and Italo Calvino.

3. What are some recent books you’ve enjoyed and can recommend?

Kelly Link's The Book of Love is phenomenal, it's so much fun, six hundred pages long and I didn't want it to end. Nicola Griffith's Hild and its sequel Menewood are both masterpieces not like anything else I've read. Jedediah Berry's The Naming Song pulls off an incredible feat of fantasy worldbuilding. 

4. Please tell us a bit about some of your other writing/work

Aside from THE JAGUAR MASK, my work has until recently been a lot of very stylistically and thematically eclectic short stories, from sword and sorcery to horror. Lately, influenced by everything I read for Reckoning, I've spent some time working on ecological fantasy fiction in a style I might start calling "eco-fabulism" if no one objects. 

5. What’s next for you?

I should not yet mention a chapbook-length collection of my eco-fabulist writing which may or may not be coming out next year, so instead let me tell you that I am embarked on writing a big, ambitious Americana novel in which the devil trades a girl a banjo for her soul, and it turns out to be not such a terrible deal after all. 

The Jaguar Mask by Michael J. DeLuca

Felipe K'icab doesn't know who he is. He only knows he was born different than his human family, and he can't relax unless he's blasting reggaeton in his cab weaving through the streets of Guatemala City. The jaguar mask and his other human faces keep him safe - until El Bufo, a corrupt ex-cop, commandeers his cab and drags Felipe into a murder conspiracy investigation, trying to expose the foreign-backed regime's ecocidal and genocidal past.

Cristina Ramos knows who her mother's killers are. After witnessing the murder in a vision, she struggles to keep her grieving family from falling apart. When El Bufo's relentless vendetta throws Felipe into her life amid increasing civil unrest, Felipe and Cristina must overcome generations of institutionalized silence, uncover the secrets of their powers, and forge a path to justice, or else be swept away by another wave of violence.

Buy the book here!

1. What inspired you to write this book?

THE JAGUAR MASK is set in contemporary Guatemala, which, should you not have been aware, was the cradle of the ancient Maya civilization. I've been a huge Mayanist archaeology nerd since before I started writing fiction, but all that intensified when I helped convince my youngest sister to take up humanitarian work in Guatemala starting in the late 2000s, and I got to visit her there a bunch of times, climb volcanoes, explore Maya archaeological sites, and live and travel among the modern Maya, who are absolutely wonderful people I love and miss dearly. I wanted to write a novel that would let me play around with everything I'd learned--ancient prophecy, jaguar sorcerers, the aftermath of the Guatemalan civil war, and the incredible vibrancy and inherent contradictions of modern Maya culture.  

2. What was your favourite part of writing it?

The book ends on a deliberate and literal cliffhanger I absolutely love and spent years building up to ... but rather than spoil that, instead let me tell you about the scene in the Guatemala City dump. There's a great--if harrowing--documentary on YouTube about the people who make a living scavenging among the trash. In the book, I used that setting for an intense chase scene where my jaguar shapeshifter gets to really flex his powers for the first time. It's probably 3,500 words, and I was having so much fun with it I wrote the first draft in one sitting, faster than I've ever written anything.

 

 

 

Thanks for reading! 

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