A lot has changed for Ana Reyes since she left Baton Rouge in 2015 with her master’s from LSU.
She moved back to Los Angeles for a while. She got married. And, oh yeah, she’s written a book Reese Witherspoon hand-picked for her book club. That book—her debut novel, The House in the Pines—stood on The New York Times Best Seller list for nine weeks.
When I meet up with her on an April afternoon, only a few months after the book’s release, she’s back at her alma mater for the Delta Mouth Literary Festival. The annual Baton Rouge event gathers local and national talent to celebrate literary art. Today, she’ll read from the now-famous novel that began as her thesis at LSU. Talk about a full-circle moment.
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An instant hit:
Shortly after the January 2023 release of Ana Reyes’ debut novel, Reese Witherspoon named it her first book club pick of the year.
Though she only spent a couple of years in Baton Rouge as a grad student, she says the festival feels like a homecoming.
“It was here that I really went through those growing pains of learning how to be a writer. Sitting in workshops, getting feedback, learning to cut what doesn’t work and not being too precious about it and developing a novel,” she explains to me. “I would say that I was kind of born as a writer here, and coming back just feels really exciting.”
Though eight years have gone by since her time as a Tiger, she remembers how to navigate campus like a pro. She meets me just in time for our interview at LSU’s quad. Now 40, Reyes still looks like any student walking through campus in her light-wash jeans, boots and orange top. She lugs a tote bag inscribed with the words “Read books” in all-caps, purple letters—a nod to her author persona.
Earlier, she even stopped at Allen Hall. That’s where Reyes took most of her classes as a student, where she began the first drafts of her first book. And today it provided a different service: a bit of air-conditioned relief. The dry heat she’s grown accustomed to in Los Angeles is a little different from what we have down here, after all.
“Walking here, I got a reminder of how humid it was,” she jokes.
Taking notes
Reyes and I find refuge from the setting sun under a stately oak tree and talk all about what has changed with her book since she began writing it at LSU. It took a total of seven years to build out the story before she was happy with the finished copy. She also briefly took time off from writing to gain a fresh perspective on her story.
The House in the Pines is a psychological thriller that follows a character named Maya and her quest to find out why two women mysteriously dropped dead in the presence of her ex-boyfriend, Frank. In the beginning, Reyes modeled Maya after herself, pulling elements from her own personality and her half-Guatemalan heritage. But as the story grew, Maya became her own person.
Reyes says a lot of what she came up with in Baton Rouge can be found in the final cut.
Today at Delta Mouth, she joins other authors and poets on stage and reads the book’s prologue—which is one part that hasn’t been touched since she wrote it at LSU.
She says working with LSU professors like her thesis advisor, Jennifer Davis, helped her with her writing process. She still remembers tips, tricks and writing advice Davis bestowed upon her.
“I think what she said was, ‘People just want to feel something,’” Reyes recalls. “The language can be beautiful, but at the end of the day, they want to feel something for your character. So you have to do that character work and plot work.”
Reyes has used that advice as a writer and as an adjunct professor at Santa Monica College, Occidental College and Cal State Dominguez Hills. She also has her own nuggets of knowledge to pass on to writers who want to evoke emotion in their writing.
“I tell them to hook the reader with questions,” she says. “To always be planting questions that you set up and then pay off later on. Every chapter should ask a question. And you have to answer that question, or the reader is going to feel cheated.”
Turning pages
Some successful authors might take the time to revel in their success, but Reyes is busy writing new chapters in the book of life. She tells me she’s reading a little bit of everything including, of course—“a lot of literary fiction”—attending more literary festivals and has recently moved closer to her mother in Easthampton, Massachusetts.
Reyes is also plotting another novel—she says she’s about a third of the way through it. It’s unrelated to her first, but she reveals it will also be a thriller that is “a little more horror leaning” and set in Texas.
Reyes says she’s still taking it day by day, or in this case, page by page.
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As for any other future LSU appearances, she welcomes more homecomings.
Who knows? She might even have a new story to share then. anareyeswriter.com
This article was originally published in the July 2023 issue of 225 magazine.