Choosing your major as a college student can feel like choosing the trajectory of the rest of your life – but it’s not. Brenda Peynado, a novelist who majored in computer science, is proof of that.
On Monday, author Brenda Peynado read excerpts from her two books to an audience of students and faculty in Bobbitt Auditorium. This event was sponsored by the English Department and the Office of Belonging and was the second reading of the 2024-2025 Albion College Reading Series.
The Road to Writing
In an interview before the reading, Peynado said she’s been writing for as long as she can remember – at least since second grade when she wrote a short story about a unicorn named Prancy. In high school, she wrote the first chapters of “quite a few” long-since abandoned novels and was more interested in reading than paying attention in class.
Despite this early and continued love for reading and writing, Peynado was a computer science major in undergrad.
“I was still taking fiction classes, I just wasn’t an English major,” Peynado said. “Honestly, it’s because I didn’t want to take Shakespeare.”
Peynado wasn’t sure what she wanted to pursue post-grad; deciding between a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in creative writing or a doctorate in computational neuroscience. Then, she got some advice from a teacher:
“If you want to get an MFA, go do something else for two years, so that way you’re not always writing about being a student.”
So, Peynado worked a job in computer security for two years – and then she reached a breaking point.
“I realized I didn’t care if every server in the world went down, though the rest of the world really would, but I did care if I kept writing, even though nobody else in the rest of the world would,” Peynado said.
Stories ‘All Over the Spectrum’
Peynado’s first book was a short story collection called “The Rock Eaters,” published in 2021. She described the book as “all over the spectrum,” containing stories in the genres of realism, magical realism, science fiction and fantasy.
She read excerpts from two of these short stories at the reading: “Thoughts and Prayers” and “What We Lost.”
“Thoughts and Prayers” is the first story in the collection, and is about a school shooting in a world where angels live on people’s roofs.
“What We Lost” is about a place where people lose their body parts as the price for living in a “great nation” led by a leader who “promised to fix what was broken.”
In a Q&A after the reading, Peynado answered a question of if “What We Lost” was based on anything in the real world. In response, Peynado said she wrote the story in 2016, and “it’s relevant again.”
“One of the things I think that science fiction and fantasy can do really well is take something that normally in the world looks like slow violence, and speed it up, and say, ‘what if it wasn’t slow at all, what if it was fast, what if it wasn’t taking a piece of you a little bit at all, but it was your limb just up and walks away,’” Peynado said.
Peynado has also written a science fiction novel, “Time’s Agent,” which came out in August 2024, and read an excerpt from it at the reading.
Before starting, she said that she wrote the novel after she had just given birth to her daughter. The novel explores “what it means to give a world to someone who’s going to inherit all of the mistakes that we’ve made.”
Weaving the Magical With the Mundane
In the interview before the reading, Peynado said that while she writes across genres, she enjoys writing more “when magical things happen.”
Peynado said she uses elements of fabulism and magical realism to externalize the internal conflict of a story. She has stories about gun violence, colonization and overconsumption – but angels, multiverses and time travel are in there too.
“One of the reasons why it’s important to be writing magically about difficult topics is it’s a way of skirting the readers’ preconceptions about whatever the topic is,” Peynado said.
Peynado said she doesn’t necessarily know what genre a story will be when she starts writing it, but she goes along with what the story seems to need.
“There have been stories in the past where I have tried to write them as realism and they haven’t worked until I find the magical conceit that concentrates what I want to talk about,” Peynado said.
Imagining Possible Futures
Peynado is currently writing a historical science fiction novel that takes place during the 1965 Dominican Civil War. Peynado’s parents were born in the Dominican Republic, and she said her family has lots of stories about the Dominican Civil War.
It was a very quick war, Peynado said, and the U.S. interfered to turn the tide of it.
“When I tell the story or explain to other people that I had family in that war, I’m not sure to say whether ‘they’ invaded or ‘we’ invaded, as an American or as a Dominican,” Peynado said.
The in-progress novel is about a girl who can see all possible timelines, and her mission to save the life of her mother, a soldier in the war.
When reading at a college, Peynado said she likes to read excerpts that make students think about what kind of world they want to live in, and how they’re a part of that world. She said young people are “the ones who are gonna open doors, for not just you and the people ahead of you, but also the people behind you.”
Jocelyn Kincaid-Beal has a major in the English Department.
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