Corinna Vallianatos’ latest book has been in the works for a long time.
The author’s “Origin Stories” was published in February by Graywolf Press, 13 years after her Grace Paley Prize-winning debut collection, “My Escapee,” came out to rave reviews.
“Some of these stories go back years,” Vallianato says. “A story collection is often a record of who you were as a writer, almost more than who you are now.”
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The stories in “Origin Stories,” which mostly take place in Southern California and Virginia, are wide-ranging and often surprising, following various characters, many of them artists of some kind, as they try to navigate their relationships with loved ones and figure out where they belong in a changing world. They deal, Vallianatos says, with “obsessions, influences, places of origin, people who may once have been important to the protagonist or the narrator, people who shaped him or her.”
The book takes its name from “Origin Story,” one of the stories in the book. “It seemed to me that many of the stories were grappling with where we come from, the sort of inexorable pull of memory, and that it really applied thematically beyond the boundary of the single story, thus the slight tweak for the title of the collection,” she says.
Vallianatos answered questions about her book via telephone from her home in Virginia. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity and length
Q: Some of the characters in the stories are writers themselves. Was that tricky at all to have characters that share your profession?
I don’t think it was tricky. I suppose I was grappling with a different issue, and that was when one writes autobiographically or dramatizes a character who bears some striking resemblance to oneself, it’s important to inject the story with the art and the life and the momentum and the surprise that the story requires, rather than the autobiography of the writer. So the fear is that it becomes too easy, actually, I would say. The stories that are perhaps written in a mode that might be more akin to autofiction have to find their own way to be free of the constraints of my autobiography. So there’s always that tension between taking perhaps what might be true and familiar in one’s life, and allowing the material to become chaotic and surprising enough to exist and do its own work as a story.
Q: Some of the stories in the book are about mother’s relationships with their children. What makes that such a compelling theme for you?
I suppose it’s a constraint, in that it injects the characters with such profound love and energy and connection and a sense of responsibility and caretaking and duty and attachment. Parents can’t ever quite understand their children the way they might hope to or want to or even think that they do, and that tension is so interesting to me. There’s this figure in a mother’s life that she loves with her whole being and wants to understand with her whole being, and yet can’t ever completely capture or understand. It’s that old adage about writing, make your characters want something and make that thing hard to get. I think that’s encapsulated in the mother-child relationship.
Q: In “Origin Story,” you write, “She thought writing came from seeing, and seeing came from never being seen yourself.” Is that a sentiment that you relate to at all as a writer yourself?
It’s absolutely a sentiment I relate to, and one of the reasons why I am not on social media. I am just not part of the machinery of self-promotion that very understandably many writers and artists partake of. I don’t judge, and I understand the need to be a voice in the world, and to be known, and to build a large following, et cetera. I’m sure I’m probably a nightmare for my publicist, but there’s a kind of view of the world that one loses, I think, when one is so much a part of the noise of it. I think being at the periphery, being a little bit invisible, affords you as a writer or an artist such incredible freedom. And I know that I wouldn’t have that if I were more seen myself.
Q: In some of the stories, the main characters go without names. What was behind that decision?
I’m always battling, as I compose a story, the feeling that what I’m doing is a little bit fake and fraudulent, and the artifice of the story is rearing its head, and getting in the way of my vision and my ability to grapple in the way I’d like to with language and structure and surprise and subtlety. An easy way to dispatch with a little bit of the artifice of the story, I’ve found, is just not giving my characters names or not naming the narrator. It’s funny, the weight that a name carries, It sort of harnesses the story to earth, and sometimes I’m just not interested in it being kind of fastened to earth in that way.