Origin Stories

Their characters perceive more than they can explain, want more than they can have, and contend with the bounty and frugality of their relationships. In This Isnt the Actual Sea, a woman considers that her friends failure and sudden success have given her the material she needs to write something of her own, if shes willing to risk the friendship to do so. The Artists Wife describes, in a painting stowed in a bowling alley broom closet, the chasm between seeing and being seen. Dogwood is a piece of lyric reportage on beauty, family, and survival whose sections range from the narrators childhood to her sons new adulthood. And Origin Story acts as an accounting of the many different states where a woman and her husband have lived, and what it is theyve been searching for. In this keen, meditative collection set in Southern California and Virginia, Corinna Vallianatos dramatises the bonds of mother and child, the self-destruction of young womanhood, the thrill and bewilderment of friendship, and the power of place. Origin Stories is filled with humour, longing, beauty, and belief.