The Writing Life: An Interview with Matias Travieso-Diaz

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Recently, I've had the pleasure of exchanging emails with Matias Travieso-Diaz, whose writing will be featured in our upcoming Winter: 2026 issue, next January.

We went back and forth for awhile trying to find the right story for The Literary Fantasy Magazine. Matias is a tenacious writer who continuously submits his fiction until it is placed—and I'm so glad he kept rolling the dice with us.

As an editor, sometimes it's difficult to see the human behind the email address; but Matias is one of those authors you can't ignore. As I said, he's tenacious, and TLFM had become a go to in his rigorous, and admirable, submission cycle.

As his name continued to show up in the submissions, we sparked a dialogue. He even sent a digital thank you card, which was genuine delight to find waiting in my inbox on a rough morning (writers, take notes!).

Through our interactions, I soon learned Matias only became a writer eight years ago—two years after he retired from his law practice at the age of 72. He's recently had his 200th accepted writing submission (someone else claimed that milestone, unfortunately. TLFM might be 201 or 202...) and I needed to know more about his process.

So I asked him some questions about his life and how he came to be a writer.

Matias is living proof that it's never too late to find your passion. He was 72 when he became a fiction writer, but as evidenced by our conversation below, he has been living the writing life the whole time.

Q: Tell the readers a bit about who you are and what your background is—specifically experiences that have led you to becoming a writer and motivate you to live a creative life.

My life history is described in detail in my autobiographical book Cuban Transplant, available from Amazon and other retailers. In a few words, I was born in Cuba in 1943 and grew up as a poor boy in Havana. I was on track towards getting an Engineering degree until my life was put on hold by the Castro regime and its conflict with the United States. After a series of miraculous events, I came to this country in 1963 as a refugee, and was able to complete my education – thanks to assistance from the U.S. Government – through the receipt of a Ph.D. in Engineering. I worked in the aerospace industry after college, then enrolled in a major law school, graduated with a Law degree, and practiced as a partner in a Washington, D.C. law firm until my retirement forty years later.

I always enjoyed writing and, as a lawyer, I had many opportunities to write professional briefs and law review articles. However, my interest in writing fiction began in 2017, when I had a vivid dream about a plot by extra-terrestrials to take over the Earth. I turned the dream into my first short story, “Something in the Water,” which was ultimately published a year and a half later. The bug had bitten me and I began writing short stories and sending them out to magazines in the hope of getting them published.

Q: What were the biggest barriers to becoming a writer later in life? Was it something you always wanted to pursue, or was it something that you took interest in later on?

I cannot recall the first time I wrote something that was not generated in response to an assignment from school or part of a school-related project. I became the editor of the student newspaper at my high school when I was in the tenth grade, and I wrote editorials, articles and even gossip columns for every monthly issue for two years until my graduation; however, I thought such writing was enjoyable but did not take it seriously and did not consider writing as a potential occupation. I did not have writing in my mind during the difficult early years of my life in the United States, or during my short career as an engineer.

While I was practicing law, I was always too busy to consider extra-curricular writing. I retired at age 72, and at first inertia prevented me from getting started on any new projects. It was only when, after two years of having free time but doing nothing with it, that I opened myself to the idea of writing as a potential area of activity.

Q: Congratulations on your 200th accepted story submission. What are some tips you can give to aspiring writers who are struggling to find placement for their work?

I have the same advice to all writers: Review and revise your work time and again, not only to catch typos or poor choices of words, but also to pare down the text as much as possible to make it more appealing to the reviewers. And send the work out to as many potential outlets as you can find, for the market for creative writing is very competitive. Also, do not be discouraged by multiple rejections of your work. Rejections are the daily bread of writers, regardless of talent. The list of rejections of my stories run for over forty single-space pages.

With respect to writing style, everyone has his or her own rules; I have two rules that I try to apply as much as possible:

• (1) use few adjectives but many verbs, and

• (2) avoid adverbs like the plague.

I also find that the first sentence of a story sets the tone and often serves to predict whether the story will meet favor with the readers, so I make an extra effort to assure that the beginning of a short story or a chapter in a novel as interesting as possible.

Q: Why do you write? Is there a driving motivation behind it, or is it more of a pass time? Has writing helped you in some way?

Some people have asked me: “Why do you keep writing? Haven’t you had enough by now?” The honest answer is that I write because I cannot help it. I enjoy too much taking an idea, a concept, and turning it into a story that may not always have literary merit but will (hopefully) be appealing to readers now and some years into the future. In addition to the satisfaction of doing creative work, I write to convey my thoughts and feelings to my daughter, friends, fellow Cubans, and other current and future readers. The process of writing also helps me to retrieve from the recesses of my memory the recollection of important events that otherwise might have been lost forever.

Q: What are some projects (novels, stories, or anything else) that you are especially proud of and would like us to direct our readers to?

First, I am particularly proud of my short stories, not only because of the number of publications they have gained but because of their variety. I am an eclectic fiction writer: about one third of my short stories can be classified as some kind of horror tale; another third can be said to be other types of speculative stories, in the genres of fantasy, science-fiction, animal tales, and alternate history; the balance fall in the literary fiction category. I take pride in never repeating myself, and have not needed to do so because the world is like an immense summer meadow, full of interesting stories ready to be plucked. As of this writing, I have published four collections of some of my short stories, which can be found by referring to my Amazon author page.

A fifth collection of stories is in preparation, and I am hoping to get at least two more collections published in the next couple of years. I love all my stories as if they were my little children, though I recognize that some of them have turned out better than others.

I have written a brief autobiography, which I mentioned earlier. The work has been well received and I commend it to anyone who wants to know more about my personal and professional history.

I have written three historical novels that track the history of Cuba since its discovery by Columbus in 1492 to the latter part of the Nineteenth Century. The first, The Taíno Women, takes place during the first century after Cuba’s discovery by the Europeans. It traces the lives of three generations of Taíno Indian women during the difficult early years of Spain's colonization of Cuba.

The second novel, The Travels of Lázaro Serrano, has two parts. The first half of the novel is written in the form of a Bildungsroman that describes the growth and coming of age of a multi-racial fifteen-year-old boy, perhaps a descendant of a Taíno woman, who is a witness and participant in the historical event that marked the decline of the Spanish colonial empire in the Americas, the capture of La Habana by the British in 1762.

The second part of this novel opens with Lázaro’s escape from indenture to the British Navy in Kingston, Jamaica, and continues with his travel to Cuba’s Oriente Province, where he settles and raises a family. In the third novel, When Cubans Went to War, Lázaro Serrano’s direct descendants settle in eastern Cuba to engage in the burgeoning sugar trade and increasingly interact with those marginalized by the colonial society, becoming marginalized themselves as Cubans yearn for freedom from colonial rule and rise in an inconclusive war lasting a full decade. The novel dwells on the growing influence of the United States on Cuban affairs and the complex interaction of race, patriotism, economic development, and culture in the formation of a national Cuban identity.

The first two novels are still unpublished, but When Cubans Went to War is scheduled for publication soon and your readers may want to be on the lookout for its release.

I expect I will spend much of my time during the balance of 2025 working on a fourth novel about the life of the Serrano family during the period leading to Cuba’s final independence from Spain in 1902. I do not know if I will live long enough to finish it. I am impatient by nature, and the research and writing of a three-hundred-page manuscript requires a concentrated effort over a relatively long time that I may not be able to muster at this point. At any rate, I will take occasional detours to write other short stories and essays and engage in other literary ventures.