What makes someone a freak? For Alyson Mosquera Dutemple, it has less to do with how strange someone might appear on the surface, and more about how alone someone can feel in a crowd. In her debut short story collection, Marvelous Freaks of Nature!, outsiders, eccentrics, and oddballs move through a world that is at times grotesque, hilarious, surreal, and surprisingly tender. Dutemple’s characters may feel cut off from the rest of the world, but they aren’t without desire—for connection, belonging, or love. It’s fitting that a former screenwriter who spent years writing romantic comedies before pivoting to fiction, would find, to her surprise, that loneliness was what kept emerging.
I had the pleasure of talking with Alyson about loneliness, screenwriting, mixtapes, and the pleasure of letting a story surprise you.
This interview has been condensed for length and clarity.
Kim Weldin: Congratulations on your debut book! I love all the characters, the freaks and geeks and outsiders. I’m curious about the idea for the title story, “Marvelous Freaks of Nature!” Is the picture book of freaks in the story based on a real book from your life or something in your background? Or was it an idea that emerged?
Alyson Mosquera Dutemple: The book took me by surprise when it appeared in the story, so it wasn’t premeditated at all. But I feel like it had to have been influenced by a lot of those children’s books with all the gross stuff, like Ripley’s Believe It or Not. My kids were kind of young when I wrote that story, so I feel like having those kinds of books lying around on every surface of the house probably seeped in a little bit, but it wasn’t at all something I was thinking about. It just kinda bubbled up when I was drafting. I drafted that story really quickly, and I tried hard not to second-guess anything that came up and just get it all down on the page. So, it was a surprise, but you could probably connect it to my coffee table clutter.
KW: The characters in these stories are often outsiders, eccentrics, obsessives. People who simply don’t fit neatly into the world around them. What interests you in these kinds of characters? What does “freak” mean to you in terms of this collection?
AMD: I’ve given a lot of thought to that, and I think I would say that, in terms of the collection, a freak is a person who’s alone in a crowd, who ostensibly is part of the mix, and maybe looks like they fit in, but who has this thing on the inside that makes them feel like they’re not truly accepted, or like they’re not truly the same as everyone else. That internal otherness affects everything in their lives, not just the actions that they take, but also the way other people perceive them. They become standoffish because they feel like people are treating them like they’re standoffish, so it becomes kind of like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
KW: A current of loneliness runs throughout this collection. The characters often seem desperate for connection even when they’re surrounded by other people. What draws you to loneliness as a subject, and is this something you find yourself returning to in your writing?
AMD: It wasn’t something I realized that I was returning to in my writing until the collection was done. When I read it back, I was like: “Wow, this is a collection full of really tragically lonely people.” I say tragic because some of them have the potential to not be so lonely, but they keep getting in their own way. Some of them are actual oddballs. But others are just self-perceived oddballs, which is almost worse, because they don’t have to remain at arm’s length.
This collection grew with my fiction career. Before I started writing fiction, I was a screenwriter for many years. When I wrote screenplays, they were almost all rom-coms—totally different end of the spectrum. Fiction was what I secretly wanted to try for all those years, but I felt like I wasn’t ready, or I didn’t have the chops. Or I was just being self-defeating. But when I finally started to write stories and turned that valve on for fiction, it seemed that nearly everything that came out was about loneliness. Make of that what you will! I don’t think I’m a super lonely person. If anything, I would say it’s the opposite. I crave solitude but I rarely get it. But I gravitate toward those types of stories, for sure. Even in the media that I consume, I like a heavy dose of loneliness and melancholy.
KW: It’s so interesting how sometimes we don’t realize what our obsessions are, what we’re drawn to, or what we’re trying to make sense of in our lives, until we see our work as a one body. How did this shape up to be a collection? Were there particular stories that helped you kind of recognize the shape, or how did it come to be?
AMD: I wrote a portion of these stories in my MFA program. Five of them made up my thesis because they felt like they were in conversation with each other, but even so, I wasn’t thinking about the stories in terms of a collection yet. After I graduated, I put the stories away and concentrated more on flash fiction. It wasn’t until about three years went by that I decided to go back and look over my body of work. Between all the flash and regular length short stories I had written by that point, I realized that I had way more material for a cohesive collection than I thought. The stories were all already there. In fact, I only drafted one story specifically for this collection, and that was because after I put it all together, I felt I needed to end it with a little bit more hope, a little more lightness, so the final story I wrote specifically to round off all the rest.
KW: There’s a good balance throughout the book between the bizarre and the deeply human. Your stories can be funny, surreal, grotesque, and genuinely moving, sometimes even within the same scene. How do you accomplish that balance between humor and tenderness?
AMD: I feel like humor is always easier for me because I have a gallows sensibility. I’ll crack a joke at an inappropriate time in real life or say something jokey when I’m anxious. It’s just my nervous reaction. When I’m writing characters who are feeling angsty or troubled or unsettled in some way and I give them a line that’s a little bit sardonic, that feels a bit like my own voice creeping in. The tenderness balance is a little trickier for me. When I was first starting to write, my stories tended to veer into a little too much tenderness. But that wasn’t always what I was going for. So, I worked on pulling back the tender, making the emotion more spare. And I got really energized by the paring down process because I learned that it didn’t negate the tenderness, it just changed the way it’s transmitted. Often, I feel like the more an emotion is repressed on the page, the stronger it comes across, but in a backdoor kind of way, which I love.
KW: There’s a playfulness in your prose, but it never feels ornamental or overwritten, and it often reveals something about the characters or the world of the story. Who are some of your favorite writers, and are any imprints of your favorite writers in this book?
AMD: My book has two “parent” writers. One, the dad, is William Trevor. I love William Trevor so much. I think he does tenderness so beautifully, but also with a light touch. He doesn’t ever hit you over the head. And his characters are always kind of struggling, or unsettled and searching, but he treats them so tenderly. Reading Trevor feels like witnessing a very delicate, open-heart surgery, where you get to peek inside and see the workings of someone quiet and reserved. I thought a lot about him while I was writing. Then other “parent,” the mother and patroness of flatness and spare writing for me, was Joy Williams. I read a ton of Joy Williams when I was working on this, and she just knocked my socks off. I’d read some of her stories before, but when I sat down and read the entire collected works, I was like, oh my goodness, this is genius. I love how she’s so dark, but I don’t feel super heavy when I’m reading her. And if we’re going back one generation further, I would say Flannery O’Connor is like a writer “grandparent” for me, because she really loves the grotesque, and that’s obviously all over my book. I mean, she was, like, Southern grotesque and Southern Gothic. I guess I’m New Jersey Gothic, but I’ll take it.
KW: Why did you decide to divide the collection into 3 different sections? Do you think organizing it into those three sections affects the way that readers read the stories or interpret them? Or what was the intention behind that?
AMD: I thought of putting the collection together sort of like making a mixtape. I’m from the 90s—mixtapes are my love language. And I was thinking of how I always have these sections in each mix tape that have discrete vibes. And that got me thinking about how there are groupings of stories in the collection that feel like discrete sections within the collection too. The “Marvelous” section, in my mind, is all the characters who, when they come to terms with their freakishness, for lack of a better term, actually thrive more. They come into their own. And the “Freaks” section and the “Nature” section also have characters with things in common. Those three words “Marvelous,” “Freaks,” and “Nature” were already there in the story I knew I wanted to be the title story, so once I settled on using the words as an organizational template for how I’d arrange the rest of the stories, everything just kind of clicked. I barely fussed with the ordering again after that.
KW: “Three-Season Room” has an interesting structure with three different voices. How did you decide who should tell that story? Did you experiment with other points of view before settling on those three?
AMD: There was a fourth voice that got excised. Darren, the husband, had his own section originally, and it was the second to last of the story. I was working at the time with my faculty advisor in my MFA program at Warren Wilson, Michael Parker, who was wonderful, and he said: “I love all of these POVs, but I actually think you don’t even need Darren and that it might be stronger if you kept with the three women only.” I was like, oh my god, he’s right! The three women are all in different seasons of their lives, and without Darren it almost becomes like a meditation on different stages of womanhood. So then that became my focus for subsequent drafts. But I did not see that at first, so that just goes to show how important it is to get feedback from other people, trusted readers!
KW: All of these stories include really strong images. I’m thinking of the plastic six-pack rings in “Hazardous to Sea Life,” and the ants and the blender in “When the Daiquiris Flow,” for example. What tends to come to you first when you’re writing? Is it an image? Is it a voice, character, premise, or something else?
AMD: It’s always a voice. Always. I have a hard time writing with a premise first. I’ve done it a few times, but it feels so much less natural. It’s like trying to write left-handed. I could read what I’m writing, but I would need to pretty it up a lot more afterward. Whereas if I just listen to the voice, I follow it and it takes me where the story wants to go. That, to me, is the easiest way to work. That said, though, there was one image that was an early inspiration for a story in the collection, but the image never made an appearance in the story after all. But I ended up adding the image to a different story during revisions because I still liked the image and because I like to recycle things if I can.
KW: You’re very skilled at creating images that operate on multiple levels, both literal and metaphorical. In “The Grand Old Duke” there’s a scene where the main character, Helen, is longing for the next stage of life, to get married or engaged, when she encounters a limo full of women headed to a bachelorette party that catches on fire. I don’t know if you’re, as the writer, commenting on marriage, or if this is the fantasy that Helen has of marriage literally going up in flames, but either way, it’s darkly hilarious and genius. Do those sort of connections emerge intuitively as you write, or are you discovering them later as you’re revising?
AMD: A mix, I would say. Some of the images emerge when I’m drafting though I might not fully understand them when I first put them on the page. I’m not a fast, messy drafter. For the most part, I take a lot of pains in the first draft, circling around the image that bubbled up, trying to pin it down or understand it before moving on. I might leave the desk and think for three days about something I just wrote. But other times, I have an image in the first draft and I spend the second draft figuring out how much weight the image needs to carry, or whether the image needs to resonate in a different way for it to work. Sometimes an image doesn’t work on the first or second draft, and then I have real talk with myself and say: this image is a little phoned in, you need something a little bit more surprising.
I listened to an interview with Laura van den Berg a few years ago, and she was talking to the interviewer about how whenever she feels like she’s stuck on something, she’ll set a timer for herself and then write down just any ideas, far-fetched, mundane, whatever, that pop into her head for the length of a few minutes. And usually, the more she loses herself in the “anything goes” exercise, the more successful the exercise becomes. Sometimes something really unexpected emerges from the exercise that works on several levels, but it wouldn’t have occurred without that freedom to just jot any thought down. So I’ve done that sometimes, with the timer. It works!
KW: The world needs more short story readers. If you wanted to convince someone who doesn’t usually read short fiction to pick up Marvelous Freaks of Nature!, which story in the collection would you choose to convert a reader into a short story lover?
AMD: My more jaded answer would be one of the flash fictions because I feel like people don’t have patience for longer stories, and a flash story would be kind of easier to digest because it takes less time to read. But my real answer is probably “Marvelous Freaks of Nature!” because it’s about a breakup. Almost everybody has a breakup story, so they can’t help but put themselves in the character’s shoes and remember their own grief and then compare their own experience with the main character’s experience. It’s not that way with every story I write. I have some really strange premises in the collection. But someone who is trying to get over heartbreak is someone a lot of readers can relate to. Heartbreak is so universal. I’d use that hook to drag them on in.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER: Alyson Mosquera Dutemple’s debut story collection MARVELOUS FREAKS OF NATURE! is part of the Legacy Short Fiction series from Cornerstone Press. Her work has appeared in more than four dozen journals and anthologies including Colorado Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Salamander, Arts & Letters, Passages North, DIAGRAM, and Best Microfiction. Alyson has received a special mention for the Pushcart prize and support from Millay Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, where she was a 2024 recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship. Find her at alysondutemple.com and at alysonmosqueradutemple.substack.com.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER: Kim Weldin is the author of Disappearing Acts, winner of the 2026 Iron Horse Literary Review First Book Prize, forthcoming on Texas Tech University Press (Spring 2027). Her work has appeared in Appalachian Review, The Ana, The Rumpus, BULL, Michigan Quarterly Review: Mixtape, and others. She lives in Charleston, South Carolina, where she is currently writing her first novel.