The stories in Origin Stories take as their subject the sources of love, marriage, motherhood, friendship, artistic ambition, restiveness, and shame. 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 Isn't the Actual Sea," a woman considers that her friend's failure and sudden success have given her the material she needs to write something of her own, if she's willing to risk the friendship to do so. "The Artist's 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 narrator's childhood to her son's 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 they've been searching for.
In this keen, meditative collection set in Southern California and Virginia, Corinna Vallianatos dramatizes 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 humor, longing, beauty, and belief.