- Alt-X:
- Why are you so prolific?
- Mazza:
- I think I'm always writing. And I have been since I was
16 or 17. (Not that anything I wrote was any good then.)
I work a lot and still feel guilty that I don't work
enough. But the reason I seem so prolific is backlog.
Publishers suffer from it. I have it too, but for me it's
not a predicament. I'm not convinced its an asset either,
but I don't know why I say that.
After writing only 5
or 6 short stories of any quality, I finished the first
draft of my first novel MS in 1981. It was (is) Exposed,
which was published last year by Coffee House Press -- at
the time my 5th published book. Back in 1981, it needed a
series of major revisions (not that I revised it steadily
for over ten years -- it was boxed and forgotten for
years at a time). Then, after 5 or 6 more stories, I
started How to Leave a Country, finished in 1984
and won the PEN Nelson Algren Award for book-length
manuscript, but no publisher wanted it for 8 years. After
winning the award, commercial publishers thought they
would want it, and they all asked to see it, but ...
that's another question. Eight years was enough time to
finish 3 or 4 other book MSS ... considering all those
stories I kept writing between novels. Granted everything
needed (always needs) revision. My 1st two published
books, story collections Animal Acts and Is It Sexual
Harassment Yet?, were put together almost simultaneously.
(While writing individual stories on and off for 7 or 8
years, I hadn't even thought "these will some day be
collected in a book." One day I looked at my
inventory and said, wow! But more work went into
compiling and revising them than this sounds like.) What
I'm getting at here is that by the time my first book,
Animal Acts, came out in 1989, I had 3 other book
manuscripts already finished. And that condition of
having "finished" manuscripts has been
sustained. I still have 3 book manuscripts: one called
Girl Beside Him being handled by my agent; one called Dog
People being read at Coffee House; and a story collection
called Former Virgin just waiting here until I figure out
what to do with it. And you know what I went and did? I
started another novel yesterday.
- Alt-X:
- So much of what we hear about postmodern and avant-pop
narrative has to do with how the media has infiltrated
our lives to such a high degree that writers can no
longer honestly concern themselves with the steadfast
devices of narratives past, things like characters and
plots and settings. But clearly this is not the case with
you. In fact, your books succeed in large part because
they embrace these standard devices, albeit in
unconventional ways. Could you speak to that?
- Mazza:
- Maybe because media & technology hasn't infiltrated
my life yet? What does this mean -- I've been watching TV
since I was 3. Isn't that media infiltrating my life? So
why don't I have e-mail, nor any other hook-up to my
computer? I could say something stupid like I don't want
my computer to have unsafe sex with other computers, but
I've already broken my own rule about putting other
people's disks into my slot, so I'm already contaminated
that way. I also don't trust myself. If my computer had
internet, I might get hooked on that
talking-to-other-people-anonymously thang ... what do you
call it, bulletin boards? playgrounds? electronic bars?
The
apparatus that fiction cannot escape is, I think, time.
Whether it's durational time, imaginative time, content
time, defiance-of-chronology, hypertextual time (I just
made that up), there's still an unseverable relationship
between fiction and time. Linear narrative is not the
only way to represent time. And we may actually no longer
"represent" time in fiction but ... exploit it?
reinvent it? change its geometric shape? But we don't
deny it. As long as there's time, there's narrative --
maybe in some unrecognizable form. The steadfast devices
of narrative: settings, plots, characters ... what are
they other than content? Does avant-pop fiction have
content? Of course. I don't believe that avant-pop
writers don't concern themselves with settings. If
hyperspace is where they are, that's their setting. If an
electronic persona is who they are dealing with, that's a
character. So the key word in your question is
"steadfast" (i.e. traditional or conventional),
and, yes, those are no longer viable to many people, but
I think for many more reasons than electronic media
infiltrating our lives. I'm not denying that electronic
media has infiltrated our lives and has had a tremendous
effect on how we think and how we think about who we are,
where we are, etc. And it has spawned an exciting new
sub-genre of fiction -- yet another that I don't fit into
-- called avant-pop and/or cyberpunk. I think your take
on how media has effected literature has a lot to say
about life in general. Maybe we can no longer think of
life as linear?
But back to utilizing standard literary devices: all I
try to do is create, while writing, an experience for
myself. I mean, I experience it -- whatever it is --
while writing. In so doing, I hope to be capturing &
capitalizing on other avenues of narrative which will
ultimately create a "real" experience for the
reader. Again, this is simply toying with time. Or, I
suppose, using my brain as a virtual reality machine.
Then when the reader straps it on, they'll have their own
experience in the world I've created. I've never been
famous for writing good plots -- someone's definition of
plots -- so I just call it an experience instead of a
plot.
Has the infiltration of media been an anti-individual
movement? Is that why character is no longer an honest
concern? Well, you're talking to someone who cries when I
hear "Over the Rainbow." Am I a mawkish
postmodernist? No, I don't think so, my content is too
often called cynical or pessimistic. But I'll have to
make up my own label and be the only member of my club.
The individual, the ego, the human need to be special
& unique, these are still complicating my life, so
how can they not populate my work?
- Alt-X:
- When I see a new Cris Mazza book, I'm coming to it
prepared to deal with the fictionalized world of emotions
as experienced by lovers. This seems to be a niche you've
carved out for yourself. Why do you write about things
like love, need, and the complexity of human lives caught
in the throes of libidinal confusion?
- Mazza:
- Anything that involves relating to another person is
probably the least understood experience we have, the
more intimate and/or personal, the more perplexing and
complicated. And we're always doing "it," even
when we think we're not! Almost every fucking thing we do
and think is, in some way, linked to a connection with
another person, and a vast majority of those connections
are going to be in some way more "intimate"
than an exchange of words on a computer screen -- even
when that's all the two people have done! Intimacy does
not have to mean sexual involvement or contact, it
doesn't even mean eye-contact anymore -- any time the
"who we are" is contacted (rather than merely
the "what we are"), the communication -- i.e.
relationship -- is reaching a form a intimacy. Personal
involvement with other members of our species is a fact
of life. It's the "personal" part of the
equation that becomes complex because it can mean and not
mean so many different things, even ultimately (or
especially) the inexplicable, the unarticulatable, the
undefinable relationship. Like in Your Name Here: ____,
he's not her peer, not her friend, certainly not her
lover, yet he's made her his confidante. Sometimes he
touches her, sometimes he doesn't. Each time it's in a
totally different way. The completely undefinable nature
of the relationship makes it more complicated than if he
and she "simply" became romantically involved
(and, working together, that would be complicated enough
in itself). But that undefinable relationship becomes
something that pervades and entangles every corner of the
work they do, even when they know it's inadvisable to
allow it to do so. This is also the complicating factor
in inappropriate sexual behaviors and the huge grey areas
of sexual harassment: Wanting to be noticed as more than
a name & title & set of functions; wanting to be
personally known & understood & accepted; wanting
to be sexually desirable to the opposite sex / same sex /
or both -- I think these have become fundamental
instinctive drives in our species. A need almost as basic
as food, shelter and reproduction. A need that probably
grew when mere survival wasn't a question any more, thus
the growth of the ego and the notion of the individual, I
don't know, I'm not a social anthropologist! But as a
basic need, the need to "be loved," (in all its
various meanings, not just romantic) is the most
interesting because it brings with it the baggage of
conflict, confusion, complexity, & the potential for
disillusionment. Which of our other "basic
drives" have the potential for disillusionment?
Disillusionment is only possible if there's the potential
for illusion -- imagination. In this case, naturally, I
don't equate the instinctive drive for reproduction with
sexual desire, because obviously imagination is the
largest (most important) part of -- and the biggest
problem to -- sexual desire, isn't it?
- Alt-X:
- This is a loaded question: What are the connections, if
any, between your characters (like Connie Zamora and
Corinne Staub) and you? Or, if you prefer, speak to the
way you or contemporary writers in general are using
autobiography in a fictionalized format and how this
process of writing leads to a clearer or fuzzier image of
self.
- Mazza:
- My just completed novel manuscript, Girl Beside Him,
involves a wildlife biologist in Wyoming who is afraid he
might be "a sex killer waiting to happen." That
is not autobiography. But in some (preverted?) way, it
has to be an extention of me. Probably an extention of my
exploration of sexual dysfunction in its infinite
manifestations.
But how can I not reinvent my own
experience in my writing? Once I do so, I often can't
remember what "really happened" to me. That
doesn't matter -- what "really happened" to me
becomes what I've written.
Often what "really happened" to me is
confusing and that's why it stays buzzing in my head loud
enough to work its way out my fingers onto the screen.
That's a stupid way of saying the experiences that are
the most import to me, and worthy of being explored in my
work, are those I don't fully understand, or don't even
begin to understand. Your Name Here: ___ is a
perfect example because writing it, along with my story
"Is It Sexual Harassment Yet?", lead me to
understand my experiences with sexual power or politics
or manipulation (again, the grey areas of sexual
harassment). Your Name Here: ___ does contain
incidents of overt (criminal) sexual harassment, but
those incidents are awash with and complicated by all the
grey area of sexual manipulation which make up the rest
of the book.
When I was 22 I wanted to be respected for my
abilities and thoughts, for what I accomplished and would
accomplish, and I wanted to be noticed or desired as a
sexual being. That is a huge conflict. It is a conflict
one can intellectually deny, but that denial won't get
rid of it. I was in an educational / training situation
with a slightly older male mentor. He paid attention to
me in a way no one had before. So when he touched my
erogenous zones or took me home to smoke pot, I was a
participant, not a victim, even though I didn't
reciprocate. It's a story that happened to me that really
goes nowhere and largely means nothing. But what I'm
saying is that even though women (and men) really are
sincere that they do want & need to be respected and
appreciated for their abilities, ideas, philosophies,
achievements -- whether those are artistic, scientific,
political, or social -- women (and men) also want to be
appreciated as sexual beings, whether by the opposite or
same sex. Bluntly, women (and men) want someone else to
be turned on (sexually) by them. I'm not saying that
sexual harassment doesn't exist, that there aren't
actualy victims who deserve compensation and victimizers
who deserve punishment. Fuck me or no promotion. Sleep
with me and I'll notice your intellectual capabilities.
These are crimes with a distinct victim. Women who are
touched when they don't want to be. Body parts pointed
out and discussed in the workplace. Crimes. But what
about the huge grey area I've been talking about? What I
experienced in my early 20's would be called sexual
harassment now, but I can't call myself a victim of
anything other than a civilization that created the
conflicting need in people to be noticed as both
intellectually able and sexually desirable. When it
happened, I stopped caring about anything else, put no
effort into the particular work at hand, I showed no
abilities or intellectual capability. Being
"desirable" turned me into a weak, needy
adolescent. No one did that to me. Yes he was wrong for
overtly acting on his need to be recognized as a sexual
being. He led and I let myself be led. I never said
"don't do that anymore," or "let's keep
our conversations focused on work." (But I never
initiated those non-work conversations myself.) What
finally made me angry: not that it had happened in the
first place, but that it suddenly snapped off. His
behavior ended abruptly. I was angry at being led
someplace and then left there by myself. Confused,
frustrated, disillusoned, unable to concentrate,
obsessing .... What was I really angry about? I couldn't
articulate that at the time. But it was that I suddenly
felt unimportant when I was only being noticed for the
work I was supposed to be doing. The thing we're supposed
to want in the first place. Yes, he was a prick. But the
"libidinal confusion" I was left with became
fodder that energized my writing for years. That and
other experiences with undefined relationships, other
people's experiences, imagined experiences, I explored
and explored and am still exploring the possibilities. In
a way, Connie Zamora and Corinne Staub are more focused,
more "real" than Cris Mazza, because their
experiences are reinvented versions of the mish-mash of
experience in my memory. And they've come to moments of
epiphany, however small, which I never had.
- Alt-X:
- A recent article in the L.A. Reader spoke at length about
your work's tendency to deal with the fine line between
truth and perception and the way we all end up
manipulating reality to suit our own purposes. Your new
book, Your Name Here:____ investigates these
themes as well. I'm particularly interested in how you
use narrative forms to investigate the role of memory and
self-creation. What is at stake for the writer concerned
with these kinds of issues?
- Mazza:
- What's literally at stake is it's damn difficult to
promote, in American media, a book that's about
"perception & reality." Can it be made into
a TV movie?
I believe that the fine line between truth
and perception may not exist, and perception is the only
truth. I'm not really a philosopher either, so going much
further will expose me as a poseur. But technically, the
POV in Your Name Here: ___, as well as in Exposed
and How to Leave a Country, is an exploration into
the issue of "what really happened?" without
being an answer. And when it comes time for an answer, it
circles back on itself: what does the character think
happened? The POV doesn't attempt to provide a universal
"reality," only the character's reality -- and
this is possible to do in either 1st or 3rd person
narratives. The character's perception is the only
reality important to me.
I think memory is the only self-creation. The
narrative forms I've used are often simplistic (journal
entries that turn into direct-address one-way
discussions; letters that turn into journals; personal
writing as conversation with another person that'll never
be heard, shared or answered), but it is the role of
memory that complicates the experience that these
semi-epistolary narratives create, because memory is both
unreliable and it's the only reliable creation of self.
Basically I've got a character being influenced by
herself of ten years ago -- a self she thought she
abandoned and remade -- as she reads an old set of
journals and responds (spontaneously creating a new
journal) on her laptop computer, inserting both older and
newer memories to complicate those she finds in the
journal. Her current set of experiences is also being
impacted by the zigzag of memory. That's a circular
self-creation, all made of memory, but structured in a
dueling-journals form. And yet there's something
happening, something that happened, something that
might've happened -- the events involving sexual
manipulation and/or harassment -- all happening
simultaneously at the moment she perceives and/or
remembers them. Again, toying with time. The pearls of
crises strung on a linear plot have, for this character,
all knotted together when the straight necklace got
tangled by memory & retrospect, which are the only
places we sustain a view of ourselves.
- Alt-X:
- When I was reading Your Name Here:____ there was
this sense of being in another world, like the movie Last
Year At Marienbad. And yet, it was very accessible. This
isn't an easy thing to do. For me, what you've done is
successfully create a form that I associate with
independent film-making, the ability to use sentence
structure, dialogue and punctuation to create an
alternative rhythm that feeds into the complexity of your
characters' inter-relationships while simulataneously
slipping in moments of crystalization. The poet Wallace
Stevens talked about this too: the difference between
seeming and being. Any thoughts on this?
- Mazza:
- Of course my experience reading (or writing) the book is
going to be different from experiences of readers. I'm
understanding part of what you're saying to be that these
moments of "crystalization" are like epiphanies
for the reader, when suddenly you see things in a
completely different way -- as though given a flash of
viewpoint from outside the perception of the character.
And it's not done by breaking POV nor with giving the
character an epiphany. But it's also not something I can
plan and create at will. The intensity of the character's
world is something that becomes the sentence-structure,
punctuation and rhythm. If I tried to create the ideal
sentence-structure in order to evoke a character's world,
I would fail misterably. It would be too self-consciously
crafted, unnatural, you'd see "author" all over
it. So, while I'm always delighted (and flattered) at how
other people describe what I've done, or how the
techniques have fed into the tonal complexity, I can't
let myself think about it much while writing.
But I
have some observations about seeming and being.
Basically, I wonder if there even is a difference. Or:
seeming is being. Isn't it? I can explain this by playing
with the meaning of "virtual reality."
"Virtual" means existing in effect though not
in actual fact. What does "virtually perfect"
mean? That something's as close to perfect as it can get,
but still not perfect because perfection may be
impossible, so "virtually perfect" is still not
perfect. So is "virtual reality" an experience
as close to reality as you can possibly get because
actual reality is impossible to experience? God, I hope
not. If my book is a virtual reality experience of sexual
manipulation, does it mean a real experience of sexual
manipulation is impossible to have? Does virtual reality
mean there's no such thing as reality? I don't think so
-- I think "virtual reality" should be called
"another reality." I think a "virtual
reality" experience is as real as any experience a
person has. An experience one lives in memory, in dream,
these are real experiences as well. I have clearly
dreamed that I can flap my arms and fly, and the
experience has been so vivid -- the use of muscles, the
strain to get more than a foot off the ground, the
freedom of being in air -- that for all intents and
purposes, I have flown. I perceived the experience. So I
"really" had it. I do categorize it differently
from my experiences during conscious hours, but I still
"really" experienced it. If you thoroughly
believe something happened to you -- say you believe you
were raped -- then, in fact, you were "really"
raped, because the chemical reaction in the brain --
horror, invasion, betrayal -- these are "real"
reactions and "real" experiences, even if the
rape happened in a dream. (Usually the relief upon waking
up negates all those "real" emotional
reactions, so we don't go around accusing dream phantoms
of rape.) So how about a less volatile example: a large,
friendly dog gallops toward my nervous, territorial
Shetland Sheepdog. She goes into a fury of barking,
hackles raised, teeth bared, and the approaching dogs
stops, decides she's no fun, sniffs a tree, pees, and
leaves. My dog comes into the house triumphantly, fully
believing she has used her fericious ways to defend
herself from a marauding intruder. Her brain files the
information and uses it to instruct her on future
behavior. It's "real" information. The brain
doesn't care what the other dog's "real"
intentions were. It remains a "real" incident
of self protection against invading forces. She's not
going to take him to court, so they don't need a standard
reality (as we do) for all individuals to recognize. I'm
not sure I could live that way, without a "standard
reality" in everyday life, but I love to explore it
in my work.
- Alt-X:
- I've been tracking your writing career (excuse the word)
for quite some time and, although I'm very well aware of
the unusual circumstances many writers find themselves
in, that is, it's virtually impossible to make a living
as a novelist because the mainstream publishers just
won't support mid-list writers anymore, your case seems
unique in that you can't be easily categorized as
cult-writer (cyberpunk, avant-pop, minimalist, etc.) but
at the same time the mainstream presses would probably
say your work is too dark for their tastes. And yet I
find the writing very accessible and think that if it
were taken on by a big publisher and marketed in the
right way, could find a much larger audience for you. I'm
sure you must have some thoughts on this...
- Mazza:
- Yes, of course, I think everyone could read my writing
and find satisfaction in it. I didn't mind if some people
read How to Leave a Country without realizing the
narrator was a character invented by the other character.
They read an interesting story about desire for family
and disillusionment when a young man works in a geriatric
hospital then leaves to find his own life in Brazil. Exposed
is intense and dark and interior, but not inaccessible
nor without character and conflict, and even has a
mystery unfolding. Your Name Here: ___ may be
complicated in its use of folded time, but it has plenty
of road maps, you always know where you are as you
experience the character's self re-creation through
memory, and there are characters to be attracted to,
repelled by, suspense, tension paced and breaking at
satisfying moments. Hey, it's got it all! I think the key
would be in marketing and promotion, and it might take a
marketing person with a lot of imagination to see beyond
whatever has worked before for more mainstream writers.
As
to those categories I never fit into ... it's a humorous
frustration to me. "What kind of writer are
you?" people ask, and I can't even confound them
with a snappy answer like "cyberpunk" or
"avant-pop" or "post-future
anti-colonialist." Do I want to belong somewhere? In
a way, yes. And in a way feel I've found a niche of sorts
in the "post-feminist" category, but am finding
I have to invent it as I enter.
- Alt-X:
- So what exactly is the Mazza method? How do you go about
writing a novel? Do you work on multiple books at one
time and if so, how do you stop one narrative from
crossing over into another or do you see some
connectivity between all of your books that essentially
make them all part of the same work-in-progress (a
Joycian idea, I think)?
- Mazza:
- For a long time I think my books were all part of the
same work-in-progress, as I explored both the nature of
perception & reality and the nature of sexual
confusion, dysfunction & manipulation, plus those
undefinable relationships. And yet the books are all
still separate entities. Dog People will be a departure
as I left the intense perception-style POV that pervades Exposed,
and, to a lesser extent, Your Name Here: ___. But
I used an almost constant flashback structure, with many
short scenes starting at a time advanced from the
previous scene, looping back to fill in the gap, and
ending only moments later than they started. And yet the
prose is quitely narrating in a straightforward manner.
But
how do I work? Something (someone) gets in my mind and I
can't get them out. I'm hell to live with during the
first third of a book. I carry a microcassette recorder
everywhere I go because if I start to think about the
character or what I'm doing in the book, I don't want to
lose any fleeting valuable ideas. I agonize over not
knowing them well enough, not knowing what I'm writing
about or why, agonizing over where I'm going with it. But
it's pleasant agony with a satisfying relief. Sounds like
giving birth. Which I've never done, but I've helped my
dogs.
- Alt-X:
- With all of the recent hype surrounding electronic media,
including the mad rush to produce electronic books, what
will happen to writers whose work reads so well in print?
Assuming books will be with us forever, and I think they
will, I'm thinking more in terms of writers trying to
build an audience that reads novels in print form. Do you
think there's any way for this audience to considerably
grow?
- Mazza:
- I wonder why the audience doesn't grow, considering the
almost alarming growth of students in writing programs.
Are they reading anything? Books have to stay with us.
They're easier to clutch in your armpit on an airplane,
when you can only stand to read a paragraph at a time
between fits of terror or nausea. They're more pleasant
to roll over on when you fall asleep reading in bed, and
less expensive if you crush the pages. But back to the
readers, we do seem to be fighting over a dwindling
valuable commodity, and I still look to those writing
programs and wonder if the students buy books, or, like
some of mine, wait for me to xerox interesting stories I
come across. To be fair, I xeroxed one Stacey Levine
story, passed it on to a student who shared it with her
friends, and they all went out and bought Stacey's book.
So maybe one answer is those of us teaching in the
writing programs can help "create" readers.
It's a small answer, because what about the everyone
else? But I'd rather feel mighty in a small arena, than
completely powerless to do anything to stop the decline
of reading.
- Alt-X:
- Our readers will notice that you have books out with both
Fiction Collective Two and Coffee House. Is there a
reason for that?
- Mazza:
- It's partly because of my backlog. If I waited for either
Coffee House or FC2 to publish everything I produce, I'd
be their most prolific posthumous writer. It is probably
coincidence that FC2 has done my collections and Coffee
House my novels. I think this is a good division because
I don't think FC2 does enough short fiction anymore, and
it had always been one of the biggest showrooms for
collections. Although Coffee House does short fiction,
they focus on novels and poetry, and their short fiction
series specializes in short-shorts, which I haven't yet
done a whole book of. Being with Coffee House has been
exciting as they've been experiencing a growth spurt and
receiving a lot of national attention as a literary
press, and imaginative marketing techniques are being
explored and put to use there. Your Name Here: ___
is being released with a reader's guide available, for
use with reading groups, to spur discussion and give
background information, similar to this interview.
- Alt-X:
- Can you tell us about your new anthology project? I hear
it's called Chick-Lit? Great title! What's it include?
Why this anthology and why put it out now?
- Mazza:
- Chick-Lit is an anthology of alternative women's fiction
I'm doing for FC2 (with co-editor Jeffrey DeShell).
Chick-Lit is the title of the first anthology we'll do,
but it's planned as a yearly book called On The Edge: New
Women's Fiction Anthology. One reason for starting this
anthology was like a talent hunt, to discover new women
writers who could consider FC2 when they look for a
publisher. Doing a contest where I read 300 book
manuscripts and only one is published would've been too
monumental for me and more of a raffle for the writers.
This way, we're publishing 22 writers who are all new to
FC2, some well known like Jonis Agee, Carole Maso and
Carolyn Banks, others are newer "discoveries."
Why
Chick-Lit? This has to do with the "discovery"
of what "postfeminist" writing is (or the
invention of it, I suppose). It's not anti-feminist, but
it's sort of irreverant -- and funky, sassy, droll, &
frisky. Thus the name just popped into our editorial
heads simultaneously. (It's fairly post-feminist for FC2
to have a women's anthology co-edited by a man &
woman. But it was surprising how many submitting writers
thought -- and apparently accepted -- that both editors
were men.) I was looking for something different,
something that stretched the boundaries of what has been
considered "women's writing," something that
might be able to simply be called "writing"
without defining it by gender, and yet at the same time
speak the diversity and depth of what women writers can
produce rather than what they're expected to produce.
- Alt-X:
- You recently moved to Chicago after having spent a long
time in San Diego? What's that change of environment and
culture like for you? What's the writing scene like?
- Mazza:
- The writing scene in Chicago, for me, is the same as San
Diego or anywhere else -- it's the inside of my study
facing the keyboard for as many hours as I can. But
teaching in the Program for Writers at the University of
Illinois at Chicago is invigorating. I've discovered some
interesting students who've given me new energy when mine
wanes (mid semester, usually). There are a multitude of
literary magazines here -- Other Voices, Private Arts,
Another Chicago Magazine, Story Quarterly, Tri-Quarterly,
Chicago Review, River Oak, I hope I haven't forgotten
anyone. Plus the Northwestern University Press and
Tri-Quarterly Books. FC2 is just down the road in Normal
at the Unit for Contemporary Literature. So I don't feel
alone here. But I am a Southern Californian, and I don't
say that with shame. I wasn't a beach-goer or
roller-blader or frisbee tosser. Those are usually
imports. I was a "real" Californian. I miss
lying in my backyard in February trying to get warm
before going back into the icy (unheated) house. I miss
training my dogs outdoors year-round. And yes, I do miss
my baseball team ... also the dry brown hills in the back
county, the smell of Eucalyptus, and strawberries
ripening in March. Actually, maybe it's easier to
concentrate here because I can't go out so much of the
year, my house is warm and comfortable, I'm a regular
cozy suburbanite sitting here typing these words in my
white bathrobe. I return to San Diego during summers and
semester breaks as I am a member of a long-distance
relationship.
- Alt-X:
- What are you working on now?
- Mazza:
- I started a new novel yesterday, but it isn't titled and,
after 8 pages, I can't say much about it. It starts with
the word "funky," describing a smell. I'm
pretty busy finishing off logistical arrangements for the
anthology and preparing appearances for Your Name
Here: ___. I sort of just finished Girl Beside Him,
the novel about the wildlife biologist who thinks he may
be "a sex killer waiting to happen." It was the
first book I really grounded in a particular place:
South-Central Wyoming. I chose it as I zoomed through on
I-80 on my way to Chicago 2 years ago. The desolate,
clean, barren aloneness of the Great Divide Basin really
struck me, a pastoral quality I seem to find in deserts
rather than mountain lakes. So I brought together my
emotional response to the landscape, my life-long
fascination with mountain lions, and another sexually
dysfunctional character, and I lived with them for a
while. I kind of miss him, so maybe that's why I started
a new book.
