Juncturing

Guest blogger, Marissa Matarazzo

In February of this year, my first book, a collection of short stories titled Drenched: Stories of Love and Other Deliriums was published. The stories are all connected. The connectedness happened first by accident. And I thought I’d made an idiot mistake. Eventually things got better.

I wrote the bulk of the book in grad school and at the start of my MFA program. I thought that collections of short stories should be a medley, a book of examples of the many things the writer can do. Like an actor’s reel, but in words. I had amnesia about reading and loving Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son and David Shickler’s Kissing in Manhattan, both collections of interconnected shorts. A handful of stories later, into what would become Drenched, I noticed that I kept writing about the same thing (love—finding, losing, longing for it, and the magic that occurs in the pursuit of it). I thought of Lorrie Moore’s short story “How To Become a Writer.” At a college cocktail party, the main character is asked what she writes about and her “roommate, who has consumed too much wine, too little cheese, and no crackers at all, blurts: ‘Oh, my god, she always writes about her dumb boyfriend.’” —a line I’ve always loved but then suddenly identified with in a caught and embarrassed way. I considered my stories and noticed that the narrator and main character in several of them (lazily? uninventively? persistently) felt like the same woman. I’d intended for her to be several characters, different in each story. For whatever beginner or scaredy-cat reason, I thought she couldn’t or shouldn’t be the same. That would prevent the collection from being varied. I panicked and my brain turned twelve and it said: never put too many songs by the same artist on a really good mix-tape. I felt like I was making the worst mix-tape. And what’s most horrifying about thinking I’m writing the wrong thing is the thought of having to dump everything and start over.

I eventually outgrew my panic. I reminded my brain it belonged to an adult and I told it to relax and to not confuse writing with mix-tapes. Then I experimented with this recurring lady narrator and imagined all the stories as parts of a whole—a single world where love and grief and water cause extraordinary things to happen. Like a discovery game, I found and developed the points where the stories could overlap or connect. This game stitched the stories together to give them what started to feel like a cohesive texture.

In the end, that character I was so worried about narrates three of the ten stories in Drenched, and makes a cameo in two others. All the stories are connected by character or event or place, and the second half of the book follows a genetic line through several generations. In the way that single short stories occupy a defined space and have a particularly satisfying heft and shape (like a bocce ball or a souvenir sack of ocean glass—this feeling of dense weight I can palm is something about short stories I love most), connecting all the stories seemed to do this to the collection as a whole. Made it feel solid and contained and like a point on a map I could find and visit. This felt really good.

Marissa Matarazzo is a fiction writer and author of the recently published Drenched: Stories of Love and Other Deliriums (Soft Skull Press, 2010). Her short stories have appeared online and in literary journals such as FiveChapters, The Nervous Breakdown, Faultline, and Hobart. She has won several writing prizes and earned her MFA from UC Irvine, where she was the recipient of the Dorothy and Donald Strauss Endowed Thesis Fellowship.