Pittsburgh native Jennifer Maritza McCauley’s new collection of stories features a fairy tale-like tone, straightforward and committed to her characters. Her first publication of speculative fiction departs from the realism of her earlier work that, the author notes, often portrays angst and loneliness. McCauley saw her anime-inspired tales about a woman of Black-Puerto Rican heritage, who comes of age in early 2000s Pittsburgh, as an opportunity for autofiction. And for McCauley, the change in style could help celebrate unity and empowerment.
No stranger to fantasy/SF, this author has been writing it since her teen years (including anime fan fiction). And yet, she never brought the stories to workshops or thought of publishing them. The author of the collections When Trying to Return Home (2023, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice for short fiction), Kinds of Grace (2024, poetry), and Scar On/Scar Off (2017, prose and poetry), McCauley at first considered publishing the tales on her website, as a fun ancillary project. But thankfully, they evolved into Neon Steel from Cornerstone Press, consisting of longer tales and flash pieces that follow Adrienne and others underscoring her journey. McCauley offers an honest voice that moves the desires and challenges of Black, Puerto Rican, and Asian communities – along with Pittsburgh – into a promising future.
The author checked in with Pittsburgh Review of Books over Zoom to discuss Neon Steel and how anime, cultural movements and figures, and her work in teaching have inspired and shaped her fiction.
MS: You teach creative writing at the university level and have discussed how important teaching is to your work.
JMM: It’s hard for me to write during the semester, since I’m so focused on teaching. I do all my writing during the winter and summer breaks, writing constantly.
But I always write with my students. Whenever I give them a prompt [in class], I always write along with them. And sometimes I really get into something. Once the semester is over, I’ll go back and find maybe two or three poems or short stories ideas out of [the previous weeks]. It’s good practice as I constantly take notes [throughout the year], and even have dreams about stories.
MS:I understand you really enjoyed Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime performance.
JMM: I adored every moment of it. It was very cleansing, in a way, since there’s so much going on in the world. It was nice to feel that sense of unity.
MS: It reminded me of African American children’s pageants, a form of theater during the Harlem Renaissance that W.E.B. Du Bois called for in his publication Crisis. Do you think they’ll be more storytelling like that, big dramatic theater incorporating epic and music?
JMM: I really think there should be. I think we’re really leaning in that direction. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. With Bad Bunny being a millennial, artists like him are going back to previous forms of storytelling. A lot of writers in my cohort are going into historical fiction, for that reason. My first (unpublished) novel, in fact, which was my thesis in my MFA program a million years ago, is in that style. I wouldn’t mind going back to that approach. I see Bad Bunny’s performance as a look back, and I sense it’s something in the zeitgeist right now.
Also, I find this approach important when we consider our parents, whether they’re first generation or immigrants. My mother was born in Puerto Rico to a very small family with not a lot of money. She came to the mainland U.S. and earned a master’s degree in social work, really working her way up. I’m always wondering how we’re going to preserve our parents’ traditions and what will be the best way of doing that.
MS: You are of both Black and Puerto Rican heritage. Do you have a certain approach to capturing both in your work?
JMM: I have lived experience of both and really wanted that representation in my fiction, since I didn’t find much of it in books growing up. It was more challenging to capture these traditions in Neon Steel, than it was in my previous short story collection, When Trying to Return Home (2023). That short story collection has as a variety of characters, some that are Afro-Puerto Rican, some Black American, a couple white ones, and many Latinx. In Neon Steel, however, the perspective stays close to my character Adrienne’s perspective. While there’s a Caribbean character, and mixed characters in the story “Vampires of Pittsburgh” and “Neon Steel”, overall the new collection has a tighter focus on the young Afro-Puerto Rican experience and Asian representation. I did intend it to be more fantastic and not as heavy.
MS: Your style in this collection sounds more honest and straight to the heart here, with shorter sentences, while offering a dreamlike tone.
JMM: Yes, I found the approach to be very accessible. Parts of my previous collection were less accessible, but with Neon Steel being a hybrid work, I wanted a sense of fragmentation. In the 90s, we received stories in pieces, as episodes, in serial television, but especially, when thinking of these characters, in the love of anime. I wanted to play on how memory works. For Adrienne, it appears very fragmented. She drops into places, then leaves them, living in fragments as she grows.
MS: It’s nice to have your brief tales and character profiles in between longer stories, to get a sense of the fleeting moments. Do the brief tales stem from your poetry, as short shorts?
JMM: For sure – I’m interested in the commentary by novelist Janet Burroway, whose theories have inspired me. She writes about fiction writing and how we can approach it in more of a human way. She focuses on going back to childhood, and the storytelling origins there. It’s a perspective very close to Adrienne, since she has her own little world, which connects to fiction. When she finds people who connect to her world, she’s very happy and inspired. Some of those “commercial breaks” are more prose poetry, while others are more humorous. I did want to tap into various styles with an episodic uniformity.
MS: Burroway appears to be inspired by Freud’s “Creative Writers and Daydreaming,” which you include as an epigraph in Neon Steel. Here Freud focuses on how creative writing grows out of daydreaming, playtime for adults.
JMM: Yes, that’s what anime did for me as a child. It was an escape but also showed me a new mode of storytelling. In anime, you have several episodes with various characters, not just one character as the focus throughout a season. Anime was a very selective, hush-hush type of fandom. You didn’t want to tell a lot of people you liked it. I used to get “subs” – bootlegged copies with English subtitles. And I would watch obsessively. They brought me joy, but I also learned a lot about storytelling from them, especially about sustaining a character for a long time.
MS: Were you interested in tributing anime in this book or was it just content that you wanted to bring in to illuminate your characters?
JMM: I really used it as a narrative framework. To me, the collection is a love letter to youth, more than just anime, though I use many anime structures. In my story “Afro Otaku,” I tried to capture a sense of magical realism in the form. I’ve always liked how characters expressed anger through something like a Dragon Z fireball. When Benedict feels angry as he defends Adrienne, he shoots similar fireballs.
I also like how anime reflects different types of childhoods and story modes, along with Pittsburgh itself, in a way. I wanted to capture a neo-Pittsburgh, but also one rooted in the past and present. “Neon” shows the city as a very modern tech hub, while “Steel” shows the city’s industrial past. And specifically in the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was tension between emergent technologies and late industrial. So, in a sense, this is also autofiction, since I lived in a rowhouse in Pittsburgh with interconnectedness when I was in college, while my friends and I enjoyed anime.
MS: And speaking of Freud, there’s a sense of wish fulfillment in many of the stories. Do you consider this approach a motivation when writing in speculative modes?
JMM: Yes, for me, I wanted to write a fun book, one that’s expressive in its fun. And I really wanted to end each story on a positive note. This idea came from my mother, who asked, “Why don’t you write something positive for a change?!” [Laughs] Then I thought, why not write something that makes me happy, and the speculative approaches grew from that. But it’s still rooted in realism, with a lot of cultural commentary, especially Black-Asian relationships, which I grew up with. You can’t extract anime without discussing Asian culture, something that Adrienne goes through in the beginning [of the story cycle]. By the end, she’s ingested the powers of anime and has grown from it, while I still wanted to incorporate experimental [elements]. But now, I’m enjoying going back to realism for the next story collection I’m working on.
MS: The stories [in Neon Steel] have a fairy tale tone, especially in comparison to When Trying to Return Home. That collection has an immediate and confessional tone, much like Jacinda Townsend’s searing novel, Trigger Warning. Meanwhile, “Girl in a Bomba Dress” [the first story proper in Neon Steel] feels mythical, like a call to adventure.
JMM: That story actually grew out of a prompt. I like to do writing exercises, like those with my students, but also on my own. And this one was, “Can you take a story you wrote in high school and rewrite it as you would now?” I had a story about a girl, looking out a window and dreaming about a girl in a bomba dress. Then, the daydreaming girl is late for class but finds a girl in the alley, doing bomba [dance]. That image stayed in my head as a kid. When I tried it as an adult, I had more knowledge of bomba and saw a girl who doesn’t fit in but discovers another who empowers her to be fully herself.
I tend to write more poetically, but with these stories I pared down the language to get right into the action. It was a different approach for me, one I really enjoyed. I felt I was going back to my youth and tapping into my earlier life in Pittsburgh. In When Trying to Return Home, I asked questions of where home is. And I felt as if I never really had a fixed home, that I was popping up in different places. I lived in Pittsburgh and went to University of Pittsburgh. But then I did my MFA in creative writing in Miami, and then went to Missouri for my PhD, where my father is from. And while growing up, I went to Puerto Rico often, then would hang out at The Hill (District), back in Pittsburgh. I was also in Houston for a while, and now in Kansas City, Missouri.
But when thinking about what home means to me, I went back to Pittsburgh. There is a definite culture to Pittsburgh, some things that are only there. The cultural markers I rediscovered showed me a rich history. I wanted to tap into the history of the city, and specifically the Black history. There are many great books by white authors, especially on the history of steel, which I really appreciate. But I also wanted to talk about the marginalized groups in Pittsburgh, and the subcultures within those groups. It’s important to show that the Black people there, and throughout the U.S., aren’t a monolith.
MS: And speaking of Pittsburgh, it’s great that your collection cites the playwright August Wilson, one of the standout authors from the city. It’s great to see HBO produce adaptations of his work and see his plays produced throughout the country, but I wonder how we can get his legacy out there more.
JMM: I teach The Piano Lesson whenever I can. But as far as Pittsburgh goes, he is very present in the city. I read his plays growing up, and I visited The Hill, where a lot of them take place. He creates in such a vibrant way, with his symbolism rich and never cheap, and uses wonderful Black vernacular from Pittsburgh. I even have a colleague in Japan who is an August Wilson scholar. Wilson has a reach, but it could be greater.
MS: You use cultural ephemera so well, like AOL and dead malls. Do you like to play on their strangeness and familiarity?
JMM: I think that Pittsburgh is strange in a great way. But you see those things all over the country – just like how AOL connected us all over. When I was younger, I had a website where I wrote little parodies of anime and ended up growing a fan fiction following. I had to shut down the site, because the trolls got to me. But then a young woman wrote to me, asking why I shut it down, since it was so important to her. This inspired my opening flash, that and the experience of explaining what AOL is to my current students [laughs].
I really like to dig into the past and bring it to the future. And since speculative fiction imagines the future, I imagine one for Afro-Puerto Ricans, Blacks, Asians, and Pittsburgh, while giving credence to the past.
MS: Going back to your use of prompts, setting a story at an anime convention would be a good one for students. Have you ever used one like that?
JMM: I never used one at an anime convention, probably since anime was such a secretive thing. I never mentioned it to anyone unless they brought it up. I never even talked about it to my students when I started teaching. But then one time I brought it up, and they freaked out. So many of them loved anime. I realized how much the new generation openly loves anime, talking about it and watching on streaming services. It really emboldened me to write about it.
MS: Did you discover those sizable manga sections at big-box bookstores? I remember coming across one when Barnes and Noble opened where I grew up, in Freehold N.J.
JMM: I used to sit in Barnes and Noble, get a tea, and read through the manga books. I didn’t have the money, so I’d read as many as I could, and you can read them fast. I could read a $12 book in an hour.
MS: Your characters Benedict and Eldridge seem like doubles of each other. Have you used that motif often?
JMM: I love using mirrored selves and doubles. I do think they are mirrors of themselves, and coming from the same family, Benedict is fighting the other version of himself [in Eldridge], and he wins, but at a cost, by losing a relationship with his brother, with his father still dying.
MS: From a young male’s perspective, Eldridge seems like the brother that you just can’t help, especially as one matures and grows, leaving a sibling behind. For young women, the pair seems like the dual appeal and fear about men – the one the parents want to meet, and the bad boy.
JMM: Yes, it also questions who the safe people are, and who makes up one’s community. Benedict certainly is safe, but Eldridge certainly isn’t. I wanted to show some of the dangers that women face casually, such as an assault occurring because someone just feels like doing it. I also wanted to show Adrienne’s own power at the end of the book, by facing those dangers, and not always being saved by dudes.
MS: Finding your tribe is a strong theme throughout, along with the question of how young women deal with the men in that tribe. A lot of the action recalls hangout areas in the late 90s and early 00s, where a lot of fun but casual abuse occurred.
JMM: I wanted a wide variety of characters, and I want the men to be liminal, not really predators or villains, but normal with all that possible good or bad.
MS: You had to write lyrics in “Viper/Sweet.” How do you find the experience of creating art within art, especially from another medium?
JMM: That was a lot of fun. I used to write lyrics when I was young, and I still write songs all the time. But I really wanted them to be an expression of the character [in “Viper/Sweet”]. She’s someone with some bite but has a connection to her mother. Also, I had a cousin who was a rapper, who passed away last year.
MS: I’m sorry to hear that.
JMM: Thank you. I went to one of his shows filled with expectations of how it would be, and it ended up being very different. It was joyous, with excitement, and his mother was there, so happy. I wanted to show the celebration there. Writing the lyrics was a challenge, but also a lot of fun.
MS: Your title story reworks The Terminator in a Black Caribbean womanist lens. Did you try to reclaim this 1980s archetype?
JMM: I did want to reclaim the story for Black and Caribbean women, since it fit into the arc of Neon Steel. But really, I wanted to consider what the film was saying about the ‘80s and the anxieties of the time. I really loved that The Terminator had a love story, and a beautiful one, even if so much of the film is masculine. I didn’t want my character to end up without love, but at least with options. She’s cold and robotic, literally, but a past love awakens something in her.
MS: She also blurs identities, as human and machine. Do you feel that identity comments on the blurring of nerd culture – if you are part of the mainstream, or an outsider?
JMM: I also feel that this character could be imagined by Adrienne, who imbues herself in this anime-type robot. Through a technologically powerful character, Adrienne can find strength.
The first scene is very important to me, as it recalls the opening moment of The Terminator, when the protagonist wakes up naked in a present-day city, just like Reese. But if a Black woman wakes up naked in an alley, it implies that something bad is going to happen. In a way, it connected to my first poem collection, Scar On/Scar Off, in which the narrator is assaulted. Though in “Neon Steel,” the character doesn’t get assaulted and ends up having control of the men in the alley. I wanted to have a Black woman reclaim a situation where she couldn’t experience assault.
MS: That’s fascinating, since the Terminator’s first appearance has birth imagery, as if the New Great Warrior has arrived. But now, your story reveals a new woman warrior, removing victimization. I wonder if you see her as the next version of humanity.
JMM: That’s a fantastic prospect. But overall, I see it as an element of speculative fiction that imagines the future, one where the marginalized and misunderstood are now centered.
MS: Are you drawn to romance?
JMM: I really wanted to bring that into the collection, since in my realistic fiction, characters usually end up apart or in angst. I love to write big emotional truths. But I love the emotional truth of connecting with someone, even if it doesn’t last. At least you had that moment. For me, speculative fiction can offer that.
MS: And speaking of Pittsburgh and horror, have you ever thought of tapping into George A. Romero and his zombies and vampires, like Martin?
JMM: I have thought about that a lot! My story “Vampires of Pittsburgh” (in this collection) grew out of a story idea from when I was a teenager. I had a series of vampire stories with Puerto Rican characters, which grew out of a random dream I had about a girl in a coffee shop and a man who lived there, who had previously been a vampire. So I tried another exercise of returning to a childhood story, and when I did, a lot of Night of the Living Dead elements came out. But I felt that the movie may be too closely associated with Pittsburgh. Eventually my story came out very differently, but if I ever try a sequel to “Vampires,” I want to go back to Romero and rethink his work more.
MS: I really like that story’s title – it has a tone of irony, like Vampire of Brooklyn, the Wes Craven horror-comedy film with Eddie Murphy, and the classic Warren Zevon track, “Werewolves of London.” Do you find yourself drawn to speculative fiction lately, instead of literary fiction? Do any of your upcoming projects involve the speculative, and that approach to Pittsburgh?
JMM: I have always written it but never published it. I loved creating these worlds and have as a kid but never thought of publishing them. I never even brought any to workshops, though I brought magical realism. So this is the first foray into published speculative for me. I have two poetry collections forthcoming and a literary novel with my agent that are more realistic. I do believe I’ll return to speculative fiction though [after my forthcoming projects].
