What We Tried to Bury Grows Here is a powerful debut novel that explores the weight of history, memory, and personal identity through the lens of the Basque experience. Set against the backdrop of Spain’s complex past, Julian Zabalbeascoa weaves a deeply personal and historically rich narrative that examines the ties between family, place, and the unspoken stories that shape us. With lyrical prose and emotional depth, the novel invites readers to reflect on how the past lingers in the present. In this interview, Zabalbeascoa discusses the intersection of history and fiction in his work, the personal discoveries he made while writing, and what it means to be a One Story Debutante!

—Michaeljulius Y. Idani

Michaeljulius Y. Idani: Where were you when you found out What We Tried to Bury Grows Here was going to be published? Who was the first person you shared the news with, and how did you celebrate?

Julian Zabalbeascoa: I was back in California from the East Coast for Thanksgiving, in my childhood home, the laptop on the very same table we gathered around throughout my life and that still bears the burn marks from the one time I tried to cook dinner for my family and was clueless about the effect of hot plates on finished wood. The first person I told was my mother, the person who initially encouraged all my wild dreaming (on the page and in the world). Next to walk through the door was my wife, Salamander’s brilliant editor Katie Sticca. My novel would not be what it is without her many notes. As for celebrating, it was somewhat short lived as I was summoned to help at my family’s sheep and cattle ranch just then, carrying heavier-than-you’d-imagine metal corral panels while mud jammed every tread in my boots.

MYI: How did you first discover One Story, and what inspired you to submit your work? Now that you’re a Debutante, how does the experience feel?

JZ: I can no longer recall how I first learned of One Story. Such is the distance of time between that moment and now. What I do know is that the first issue I read (as part of my subscription) was “Nadia” by Judy Budnitz, Issue #50. So we’re talking January 2005. My wife and I have a shoebox of back issues of the journal. Flipping through them it’s a who’s who of some of this country’s most exciting writers, so it feels humbling to be a part of this community and tradition.

MYI: In your One Story interview for “A Life Anew,” you mentioned your tendency to set fiction in historical contexts, particularly in the Basque Country and Spain. You also teach a course on the Spanish Civil War at the University of Massachusetts Lowell’s Honors College. How do history and fiction intersect in your work, both as a writer and a teacher?

JZ: The people involved in these past struggles were trying to make the world a better and more just place. They were viscerally concerned about their present and immediate future. Not necessarily about being a sort of funhouse mirror in which the people of some far-off time in a far-off country might be able to better understand their own fraught moment. Nevertheless, this is, in part, what historical fiction and the study of history allows, especially in these worrying days of ours where so much is at stake.

MYI: Your family has roots in the Basque Country, particularly in Gernika. While writing this novel, did you uncover any new personal or family revelations?

JZ: Very early on in my research I asked my aunts if we had anybody in our immediate family who participated in the Spanish Civil War. My family’s house is just outside of Gernika, and my grandmother watched the planes scrape overhead for the village on April 26, 1937, but I was curious if any great-aunts or uncles or third cousins or anyone of the sort had fought to defend democratic ideals against the fascist-backed Nationalist Movement. They were unaware of anybody who had. Instead, it turns out that my maternal great-grandfather, the severe Catholic that he was, was a vocal supporter of Franco. I wrote about this for LitHub. As I write in there, working on the novel, writing (hopefully honestly) about characters who oftentimes shared my great-grandfather’s political convictions, I learned to approach them with curiosity, empathy, and compassion, which allowed me new ways to see this person who I had long pigeonholed.

MYI: What do you hope readers take away from reading What We Tried to Bury Grows Here?

JZ: The Spanish Republic was abandoned by the world’s democracies. Meanwhile, Nazi Germany and fascist Italy lent the Spanish Nationalists material military support. Despite the odds being so heavily stacked against them, despite operating within the conditions of loss from the outset, those fighting to defend the Spanish Republic refused to surrender. They kept fighting for a positive vision of tomorrow, kept trying to wake the rest of the world to this global threat that was fascism. We find ourselves within similar conditions today—be it climate change, the uneven distribution of wealth and political influence in this country, state-sanctioned genocide, the swift erosion of our democracy, etc. If we give up, we can be certain how this will end. What is required these days then is the sort of shatterproof hope that animated many in my novel who were fighting to defend democracy in Spain in the 1930s.

MYI: Lastly, what are you most looking forward to at the One Story Ball?

JZ: Without a doubt, meeting my fellow Debs and the team that puts together One Story.