A Review of Origin Stories by Corinna Vallianatos

In her second story collection, Origin Stories, Corinna Vallianatos charts moments of ordinary life marked by the pressures of transition. Throughout the collection, characters navigate periods of change ranging from relocating to settling into new familial roles to contemplating shifts within themselves and the people around them. What emerges are stories whose protagonists contend with the unease of impermanence set against the promise of a new phase. Vallianatos explores this tension with precise, luminous prose that captures both the persistent desire for certainty and the inevitable creep of doubt.

Of the fifteen stories, many include characters peering into the opaque inner world of friends, lovers, and family members in an attempt to decipher what can and cannot be known about another person. In “Something in Common,” published in Story, Issue 12, a retired librarian relocates just outside of Los Angeles to be closer to her adult daughter, a childless children’s book illustrator. As she eases into a new routine, she wonders how her failures as a parent can—or need to—be remedied. Through strained, often humorous interactions, she inches closer to a deeper connection with her daughter and settles into this next phase of parenting. In “Traveling Light,” a woman returns to her college town while pining for an ex-boyfriend from that period of her life. She stays with a former close friend, visits old haunts, and hopes to bump into the ex around town. As the protagonist considers the nature of her friend’s marriage and examines her own romantic relationships, she traces different “visions” of herself, finding that what was once certain has shifted. Who she was and what she wanted are no longer who she is and what she wants now.

These rich interior landscapes, shot through with curiosity and insecurity, feel fresh, complex, and deeply relatable. Who hasn’t wondered about a friend’s motivation or compared themselves to others in matters of art and artmaking? Who hasn’t fantasized about being someone else, if only for one day? In “Old Poets,” a writer attends a literary conference after her novel fails to publish. Feeling the pressure of her unmet ambition, she steps behind the unattended table of a writing program and assumes a new identity as an instructor at the school. In this imagined version of herself, she meets a prospective student with whom she establishes a mentor-like relationship via email. The story is comedic and tense with anticipation until she is inevitably found out, yet the temporary escape from herself and her doubt opens a new creative window.

From families recalibrating to friendships waxing and waning with distance and time, Vallianatos’s characters search for insights into others that illuminate parts of themselves, exposing the absurdities and discomforts associated with change. In “This Isn’t the Actual Sea,” a woman reconnects with a friend after a falling out to celebrate the screening of the friend’s new film. Their friendship is charged with both fondness and rivalry. Heading to her friend’s house in anticipation of the film’s review, the protagonist admits, “I did so with a mean need for it to be panned. If her movie was panned, I would find some fuel for myself, a jagged pleasure. It wasn’t panned. It was well reviewed, and I felt, too, genuine happiness for my friend, and shame at my animal thought.” Vallianatos’s ability to mine her characters’ competing impulses brings them to life as she works in the messy, uncertain spaces that feel the most human. Her characters—entangled and lived-in—endure the uncertain moments in which we find them, sometimes ready, sometimes not, for what comes next.

Along with new beginnings, memory anchors the collection as the stories wind fluidly between past and present. In the titular “Origin Story,” we come to know a couple through a series of intimately observed vignettes that track their moves from home to home across the United States. Each section brings a vivid place—a “vine-scrolled back house” in Arizona, an “old carriage house” in Florida, a “bungalow beside a battlefield” in Pennsylvania—into sharp focus. The accumulation of resonant details drawn from large and small moments in the couple’s lives creates a roadmap through their evolving relationship. Similarly, “Dogwood” is told in fragments of memories and ruminations on loss, death, and parenthood. In one section, the protagonist asks a group of her writing students to do an exercise in “radical truth telling” by writing “I remembers” quickly without overthinking their responses. The students offer memories that become increasingly visceral. Other stories, like “The Artist’s Wife” and “A Lot of Good It Does Being in the Underworld,” unfold as strings of recollection, their narrative propulsion fueled by each scene recalled. In these stories time feels elastic, expanded, and compressed in the way memory functions—associative, nonlinear, and deeply sensory.

One of the great pleasures of reading this collection is the language. Vallianatos’s textured sentences move with quiet precision, edged with the humor of human behavior. Simple images—two friends looking out at the smoggy LA skyline; a teenager scraping stickers off his bedroom door; lemon seeds pooling at the bottom of a water glass—take on emotional force that is felt more than explained. Vallianatos writes with equal parts beauty and observational wit, demonstrating that the act of looking closely is a form of art. Here is a collection that begs to be read with a pen. One can revisit these stories and find sentences that once spoke to a version of them, others that sing newly upon each subsequent read.

The world is sad and funny, challenging and lovely, miserable and full of joy: The true power of Origin Stories is its unapologetic certainty about life’s uncertainty and its acceptance that these conditions can coexist at any moment. Vallianatos’s characters face many disappointments in their lives without sugarcoating their experiences, yet they still manage to chase beauty and welcome the endless possibilities of what may come—they begin again, which allows them to flicker and pulse with life.

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A Conversation with Corinna Vallianatos

Corinna Vallianatos is the author of the novel The Beforeland and two collections of stories, My Escapee, winner of the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction and a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and Origin Stories, out from Graywolf Press. She teaches at the University of Virginia and lives in Charlottesville, VA.

Fiction Editor Jacqui Reiko Teruya and Corinna Vallianatos conversed via email to discuss the craft and inspiration behind the stories included in Origin Stories.

 

INTERVIEWER

Throughout Origin Stories, many of the characters are in transition—moving or relocating, taking trips, searching for answers or new ways of being. They face disappointment, restlessness, and the complexities of different types of relationships, often navigating the tricky ways roles or expectations change in a friendship, a marriage, or a mother-child dynamic. Can you start by telling us what drew you to these characters and situations?

CORINNA VALLIANATOS

I’m drawn to characters prone to restlessness and disappointment because they contain all this tumult and longing and volatility, and it affects how they see the world. There’s always something to talk about with a restless, disappointed person. They have ideas, needs, plans, theories, rituals, secrets, internal maps like you’d find in a subway. Disappointment is animating, in my view. Contentment leads to stasis. When a character is restless or disappointed, they have wanted one thing and gotten something else, the fabric of a story.

INTERVIEWER

One of the striking qualities of the collection is how often the characters’ interior worlds propel the narrative. Readers are immersed in the layered inner lives of your characters—their desires, insights, and curiosities—yet the stories unfold through external circumstances and relationships. How do you approach crafting interior landscapes while maintaining the forward momentum of the story?

CORINNA VALLIANATOS

“A story moves forward propelled by change: in time, place, the narrator’s state of mind, relationship to self, to others. The fall of sentences.” I wrote that before I was to do some readings, in case I was asked about the relative lack of plot in my stories. Like it’s something I have to act like I did on purpose, when really it’s just the way stories unfold for me, driven by interiority, observation, memory, language, curiosity. I love what Edna O’Brien said, that plot is for precocious schoolboys. Even in the most meditative of my stories, like “Dogwood,” something does happen. Walks are taken. The narrator remembers things. Maybe that’s how I maintain the forward momentum of a story, by having characters look to the past! You can go through a whole day remembering.

INTERVIEWER

In the opening story, “New Girls,” you use a collective first-person POV to portray young women in a disordered eating support group. In “Shifting Occupancies,” the narrative alternates between a husband and wife’s perspectives while they spend a vacation apart. How do you approach point of view when beginning and/or revising a story? Is POV something you have to experiment with and settle into or does it usually come to you right away?

CORINNA VALLIANATOS

“New Girls” is told from a collective first-person point of view, but then a singular voice does arise out of the group. I made that move on impulse—something about being curious about how a first-person narrator would distinguish herself from the uneasy camaraderie of the others. Either the group is righteous and everyone else is ridiculous, or the group is ridiculous and everyone else righteous. I think POV is crucial, and it changes everything. A collective first-person POV has the minor chaos and bloodlust of a crowd. The slight remove of a close third-person POV makes the intimacy stranger and more startling. A first-person POV is a direct line, an electric current.

INTERVIEWER

Your stories are deeply observational—capturing the absurdity, beauty, and sadness of ordinary life in ways that feel almost documentarian, even in a single image or fleeting thought. To what extent do you borrow from real life, and how do you navigate the intersection of the real and the imagined?

CORINNA VALLIANATOS

Sometimes my stories borrow heavily from my life, and sometimes they don’t at all. When I give in to the borrowing, I sometimes feel the thrust of the story fade a little, become quiet. When I don’t, it can start to feel like I’m faking it, archly arranging characters. I suppose I still haven’t gotten the balance right, but I tell myself that’s okay, because balance isn’t what I’m after in stories. I want imbalance. I want the stories to know some things well, and others not at all.

INTERVIEWER

All of your stories end at what feels like the exact right moment, settling in on an image, a memory, an insight. How do you know when and where to end things? How do you know when a piece is finished?

CORINNA VALLIANATOS

I’m glad you think so! I like an irresolute ending. To feel a sense of possibility, of mystery, rather than of certainty.

INTERVIEWER

Throughout the collection, protagonists grapple with what art and artmaking mean to themselves and others, what qualifies as accomplishment, and what to do with failure. In “Old Poets,” the protagonist longs for sensitive readers who might, upon arriving at the end of her (unpublished) novel, think: “You know how when you sweep spilled sugar off a tabletop into your hand & feel all the individual crinkling little grains? It was like that OR I don’t know how we got here but I like where we ended up OR EVEN What the hell?” Is there a part of you that has particular hopes or desires about what readers will take away from your collection? If so, would you share one?

CORINNA VALLIANATOS

Reader: “I don’t know why we’re sitting around sweeping spilled sugar into our hands when there are things called sponges. What the hell.”

INTERVIEWER

Do you have touchstone writers or pieces you return to for creative energy and inspiration? Beyond literature, do other art forms play a role in your writing or revising process?

CORINNA VALLIANATOS

Joy Williams’s The Visiting Privilege, Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, James Salter’s Light Years, Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires. For humor, strangeness, language, beauty, distillation, majesty.

I swim, and ideas tend to come to me then. But since my phone is in my locker I have to keep the idea in my head through the rest of my laps, repeat it to myself like a chant.

INTERVIEWER

At the end of the flash fiction piece “False Choice,” the professor-narrator reflects on an unrealized desire to begin each class with a poem or story passage, and she contemplates ideas about the act of writing from figures including Joan Didion, W.S. Merwin, and Christos Ikonomou. What advice, if any, do you offer to writers working in the short story form?

CORINNA VALLIANATOS

One sentence with air in it—beauty, wit, darkness, delight—will give you all you need. It’ll let you write the next.