Fiction by Corinna Vallianatos, reviewed by Lennie Roeber-Tsiongas
ORIGIN STORIES (Graywolf Press)
On a rainy February evening in Los Angeles, I made my way to Skylight Books. Like many LA residents, I don’t own an umbrella, so I scurried under overhangs to minimize exposure to the rain. Slightly soaked, I darted into Skylight, where mud streaks marred the floor like stray pen marks. Inside the warm bookstore, its air heavy with the slightly astringent odor of pressed paper, I followed cozy rows of books past shoppers browsing Valentine’s cards and joined the audience of fellow readers who had braved the rain to hear Corinna Vallianatos, winner of the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, discuss her new book, Origin Stories.
Vallianatos greeted the attendees, wearing a sweater in the same turmeric shade as the cover of Origin Stories. She chose to read “Falconer,” a story that fell right in the middle of the collection. In conversation with Xuan Juliana Wang, an author and UCLA professor who moderated the event, Vallianatos discussed how she used point of view in “Falconer” to better convey the story’s essence. Originally written in third person, Vallianatos explained that she eventually rewrote the story in first person to offer immediacy and resonance to the reader.
The conversation illuminated one of Vallianatos’ key tenets: to approach your writing not as a writer, but as the person you are hoping to reach. Origin Stories is a particularly good example of how this philosophy can succeed. With its multi-dimensional characters and complex, unresolvable conflicts, the collection renders the honesty of human experience—from the ineffable to the utterly mundane. For a reader, it can be validating, even comforting, to encounter such moments that might otherwise go unnamed or even unnoticed.
Origin Stories follows a series of characters with multi-pronged and occasionally conflicting identities. Vallianatos’s narrators are wife and artist, mother and writer, observer and lens. Through these POVs, Vallianatos makes precise conclusions that offer continual surprise and that often arise from the most simple of experiences. The conflicts in Origin Stories are muted and highly relational. In pursuit of closeness, a mother moves to her daughter’s city, where the two continue to misinterpret each other; a boy forms a vengeful romantic attachment to his mother’s friend; a jaded writer assumes an artificial identity with unexpected consequences.
Many of the pieces in Origin Stories lack a conventional narrative structure or a clean resolution. Rather than coalescing in one nucleus, the “point” of these stories remains diffuse; dense cells of observation are dispersed throughout like the brain of a jellyfish. Every story contains moments of acuity. While reading, I feel like my own behaviors and experiences are being plucked and polished, given a name. For instance, in “Love Not,” a teenager witnesses his mother’s personhood— her desire for validation and approval—in an overeager text response: “It was from his mother, a swifter reply than he’d expected and for that reason vaguely dismaying. He didn’t want to think that his mother could take on this tone of false modesty, this quick coyness that meant she was human and greedy for praise. But she could, of course, and had.” Despite the story’s specificity, Vallianatos touches on something universal here: it’s disappointing to revise your image of someone to include a trait that you may have expected—or hoped—would be absent.
Another key element of Origin Stories—revealed in the title—is the collection’s emphasis on setting. The collection is split into three sections that explore relationships, creative life, and place. Corinna Vallianatos splits her time between California and Virginia, and both places imbue the stories with their particular atmosphere. In the titular “Origin Story,” Vallianatos follows a narrator and her partner from house to house across the United States, from Arizona to Wisconsin to Florida to Washington, DC. The occupied physical spaces, a “vinyl sided rental” or a “white stucco box,” commune with the reader through vignette, across years, occupations, births, and deaths. This piece is one of my favorites because of its ability to capture an elusive duality; life contains both stagnancy and relentless motion. When you live somewhere, you might leave and enter thousands of times, walking down the same hallway, flicking the same light switches, but the familiarity of that landscape can—and will—be uprooted. The structure of “Origin Story” is insistent motion, but each vignette is picture-still. The narrator watches a grapefruit wither into decay; her toddler son ages into a tween. We don’t witness the moving boxes or the turmoil of uprooting, but they hover at the edge of the story, just as the same inevitability hovers over our own lives. Soon, we’ll be in motion again.
Grief is another spectre that permeates Origin Stories. At times, the sense of loss is palpable, like in “A Lot of Good it Does Being in the Underworld,” in which a woman grapples with the sudden death of her friend and the rift it opens in her life. In other stories, grief appears less directly, lingering in the bedrock of the piece, a gnawing toothache. In “A Neighboring State,” a mother fends off grief over her runaway daughter with the same regimented application of reason that drove the daughter away. In “Dogwood,” a new mother realizes the perpetual grief of parenting in a series of vibrant vignettes. In “New Girls,” grief zaps the story’s end and fragments its collective narration.
While grief is present in Origin Stories, it does not overwhelm. Loss reveals itself after the fact, when all there is left to do is name it. That naming is what Vallianatos does best, approaching with both incision and humor, replacing absence with recognition. In the collection’s final story, “This Isn’t the Actual Sea,” the narrator navigates a competitive friendship that verges on implosion. Like the other pieces, it contains fragments of brilliant description. Vallianatos is able to name a vast expanse of loss with its echo, writing,
The darkness outside was now complete and I was reminded of a sensation from early childhood, of waking from a nap and feeling that the heart, the dense bud of the day had disappeared and I was left with misplaced time, an hour I didn’t recognize, silty and mournful and gray.
The rendered experience is truthful in its specificity, but it also speaks to a larger sense of loss, one that time reveals our capacity for. Towards the end, the narrator observes an aquarium and wonders if the fish know that the aquarium is not the sea. So close to the end of the collection, this question returned me to Vallianatos’ meditations on writing itself. If short stories function as a fish tank—a microcosm for the larger world—how do we parse out reality from fiction? Is it even necessary to do so? Although the short fictions of Origin Stories are necessarily hyperbolic, the feelings they leave us with are utterly real.
Near the end of the reading event, the floor opened to questions. I had a few rattling around, but I was most curious about Vallianatos’s thoughts on POV, hoping to learn how I might jostle something loose from my more stagnant pieces. She advised the writers among us to try a POV switch for ourselves, to enter the story through a window rather than a door and see what we could find. In Origin Stories, we find truth through humor, wisdom in observation, and identity across a web of relational selves. Vallianatos reveals a series of epiphanies that transcend the mundanity of their circumstances in this triumphant and compact collection.
Lennie Roeber-Tsiongas is a writer based in Los Angeles, CA. Her work contends with themes of obsession, absurdity, and the layered complexities of illness, and has appeared in Vernacular Journal, the Kingfisher Magazine, and Hobart, among others. She was a finalist for the 2024 Sewanee Review Fiction Contest, and received an honorable mention in the 2024 Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition.
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