by Thomas Johnson
February 4, 2025




Origin Stories by Corinna Valliantos; Graywolf Press; 192 pages; $17.00.



   I think there’s a lot of discussion throughout popular culture and general discourse that somewhat flippantly asks, just how the hell did we get here? Doesn’t really matter which side you’re on because the feeling, that sense of unease, sells as much to one as the other and so permeates just about anything we come across, including our lives. Corinna Vallianatos puts her stories and characters in direct confrontation with that crossing, that singular point where what was and what might yet be come to meet at what is. This is the living state and the place where each of the fifteen selections included in Origin Stories rests: right here, right now .
    These are classically crafted stories, but this is not once upon a time. Writing free of deep running exposition and instead letting her stories carry their own water, Vallianatos puts her readers square in our contemporary space, dropping them in medias res half the time to watch as scenes drift into action and consequence to finally rest in the proverbial moment of repose. These are characters in the present moment standing on infirm ground and looking back, looking forward, trying to get a grip. Protagonists include young women in college in “New Girls,” professors and educators on leave in “Traveling Light” and “Shifting Occupancies,” and mothers looking in their homes from “Something in Common” to “Love Not” and “Neighboring State,” but everyone slips into their own moment of action and thought in real time.
    The fictive situation never extends past a few weeks, occasionally a couple months, but almost always tells the whole story in only a handful of days, sometimes fewer. By moving free of the past and future, limiting the world of her stories to only those characters and sequences necessary, the author is asking us to look at what we’re living through where we stand. And by that position, we lean backward into the past and forward into the future only the through tender, broken, sincere longing of each character as they freeze in place to ask: where did all this come from?
    Time is both the answer and the question for Vallianatos, and she gives physicality to its presence in the many entrances and exits of her various players, the protagonists left standing on stage alone wondering where everybody went. The author seems tragically aware of just exactly where all our mortality ends, sifting through the memories of the many people we knew and loved that have left the earthen plane. 
    Vallianatos zooms in on this liminal state of existence with “Something in Common.” Written in present tense to figure the reader into the action as it happens, an aging mother decides to move closer to her daughter and relocates from Virginia to California, the big leap. The action, if there is much, rests in the pressing immediacy of the narrator’s new life and the rising loneliness she possesses in her new home, in her daughter’s proximity but still a world apart. How did she get here? In seeking the answer, Vallianatos writes for us what I think is among the sentences of the year, the pondering existential reflection on the simultaneous presence of what was, what is, and what could have been:
        “But I’ve decided to start swimming and eat no meat and let myself tan a deep, pebbly tan, to buy an old Saab         and pee with the bathroom door open and eat gelato straight from the carton and go to matinees and concerts         in the park, take a blanket and spread it out on the grass and lie back and listen to children tromping around         me, wailing with glee, and wonder what I did with my daughter all those years we lived together, how we         understood each other, if we understood each other, if I scolded and lectured too much and didn’t ever convey         what I truly meant, if I had, by some fatal lack of tenderness, squandered the chance to shape her, to make         her into an image in my mind, or if, worse, my mind was like the hailstone that had fallen once during a freak         summer storm the year she turned eight, a strange, gray, clutched thing, not beautiful like a snowflake but a         fist of cloudy ice unable to imagine, unable, in the way of objects, to know anything but itself, and I let tears         snake out of my eyes and down my temples to wet my ears as I listen to the entertainment, the Misty         Mountain Mamas, croon and shoulder-shake and play the banjo and tambourine.”
We’re there with the mother crooning and shaking for the life of her daughter, experiencing in real time the joys and miracles of parenthood, the aching remnants of the past now gone, and the reticent longing to hold the future back just a little longer. This is the human moment of recognition, the rueful pause rendered complete by the author.
    The author is telling us that everything does come from somewhere, but it remains wholly and complete right here, right now. It’s only our memories and desires that link us, longingly, to some past that was and some future that might never be.
    I think what hurts most, and what Vallianatos has a firm grip on, is that we just want someone to experience that longing with us. I can’t take what’s inside of me and put it inside of you, but that never stops anyone from trying. “No, no, I say, it’s going to be all right,” the mother intones at the end of “Something in Common.” “Someone else is out there and you could meet him tomorrow or you could meet him in ten years. The only thing that stands between you is time, and time is built to be traversed. Look at me. I was so far away from you. Now I’m here.”
    Origin Stories is Vallianatos’s second collection of stories and though it might be about this minute, this minute happening right now, it’s got an astute lens pointed at the long slippage of time across days, weeks, months, and whole lives. By standing in this one place and coming to peace with just how the hell we got here, Vallianatos takes us to the one real place we need, a place of understanding and hope.


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Everything Leads to Right Here, Right Now in Corinna Vallianatos’s Origin Stories
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Thomas Johnson lives in Hoboken, New Jersey and writes in the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at The New School, New York, New York. He is founder and editor-in-chief of Union Spring Literary Review and works as Reviews Editor for West Trade Review. He received a Master of Arts in Writing from Johns Hopkins University. Johnson first graduated from the University of Texas at Austin before enlisting in the United States Army. His work is available in the Museum of Americana Literary Review, Cleaver Magazine, Valparaiso Fiction Review, and West Trade Review.
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