Marie-Helene Bertino: On Precise Language, the Blessing of Rejection, and Death-Shaped Entities in Her New Story Collection ‘Exit Zero’

To anyone who still believes that fiction must be realistic to be serious or poignant, I submit Marie-Helene Bertino’s work. The author of three novels and two story collection—the second of which, Exit Zero (FSG Originals, 2025), releases April 22nd—Marie-Helene is a master of using the strange and speculative to cut right to the heart of a story. Though her writing often deals with topics like alienation, heartbreak, and death, Marie-Helene holds them gently, with humor and humanity.

I discovered Marie-Helene’s writing through her debut collection, the Iowa Short Fiction Award-winning Safe As Houses. The collection includes one of my all-time favorite stories, in which a girl brings Bob Dylan home for Thanksgiving—a premise that sounds absurd, until you discover why the singer is the perfect catalyst for the story. Exit Zero, similarly, is full of premises that, from another writer, might feel unserious. Its characters encounter unicorns, haunted peaches, and errant paintings of Cher. They get trapped in TV shows, receive mysterious messages via balloon, and navigate dating as ageless vampires. But nothing about Exit Zero is flippant or cliche; throughout the collection, Marie-Helene tells stories with the utmost care, taking her characters and readers alike on a journey of discovery and acceptance that leaves no one untouched. It was a privilege to interview her and to receive her generous advice on matters of craft and endurance in the writing life.

Corinne Cordasco-Pak: To start, when you get an idea, how do you develop it into a story? 

Marie-Helene Bertino: I figure it out through the writing. I’ve been telling my students recently, when they ask, “how do I write about this [topic] or this particular craft element?” that writing is the way you diagnose what you need to diagnose. I have fun playing around and getting it wrong. The “is this an idea?” phase is really exciting and important; I don’t always write during that phase. I drive a lot—several hours a week at this point—so driving is also a way I figure it out. Sometimes it’s through running or walking. Low-impact, repetitive motion is a really good way of figuring out an idea.

CCP: You read my mind, because I wanted to ask: what non-writing things feel essential to your writing?

MHB: Definitely moving my body, which I am fortunate enough to be able to do. Moving weights. I’ve become a devotee of the “walking cure.” I would walk twelve miles a day if I could, because it clears out anxiety and everything that battles my creativity. Singing, watching movies, taking myself on art dates. Tomorrow, I’m going to see a movie for the second time by this brilliant director named Michael Roemer, called Dying. It’s just been rereleased. He’s ninety-five years old, and he spent time with terminally ill patients and sewed together this absolutely transcendent documentary. It’s joyful, it’s packed with meaning, it’s funny and also harrowing. I’m going to see it again because I can’t stop thinking about it.

CCP: Now I really feel like you’re in my head, because I wanted to ask you about death. Death is all throughout Exit Zero, and your novels, too. I remember reading that you trained as a death doula. Could you tell me how your relationship with death influences your writing?

MHB: Until I started writing fiction in my mid-twenties, I had written poetry. Poetry is a form that holds hands more overtly with death all the time, because poets kind of commune with the dead. I thought, if I’m going to write fiction, I want to write everything that is in life, because I noticed that novels leave a lot out. That includes happiness, joy, and dancing alongside more serious things like death. I wanted to write death itself and not the issues around death—like grief, which is written about a lot. I wanted to look directly at how the human body dies.

Then, in my life, I also wanted to turn toward that, so I started my death studies. I’ve always been drawn to it; I’m more curious about it than I am fearful. What really knocked the fear out of me was having a few experiences that, to me, were just “as bad as” death. Essentially, having my heart broken into a billion pieces made me less scared. I was like, I’m going to study it so that maybe it can teach me something too, which it has. End-of-life studies is essentially using the end point of our lives to learn how to live more meaningfully and joyfully.

CCP: That brings to mind a phrase that’s repeated in “Lottie Woodside and the Diamond Dust Cher:” “in the presence of death.” It’s a neutral, gentle phrase and very different from how our culture usually handles death.

MHB: By no means would I ever seem to encourage anybody to be pro-death, but I think there’s a way of asking questions so that you get to the thing that you’re actually scared of. When working with someone at end of life, we were trained to ask, “What is the fear? What are you scared of?” Many times it’s not necessarily to die, but to be in pain. Then, we can help the pain. Or it’s “I don’t want to leave without settling this business I have with my uncle or my friend or my partner.” There’s usually something else in the pocket of that fear that’s useful, important information.

In Exit Zero, I think that there are things that are as bad as death, like cruelty, and distance during life. Characters are separated from someone they love by very literal things.  In ”Kathleen in Light Colors,” lovers are separated by a parenthetical expression that exists on the page as a literal form. In “The Night Gardener,” she’s at a distance from people she doesn’t know who are sending her messages. These death-shaped entities in the [collection] are actually the things that scare me the most. The shapes of estrangement become literal on the page.

CCP: The collection is full of unexpected language. “The bliss of the weekend” is described as “husking away” and a parakeet “surprises into the air.” How have you honed that precision?

MHB: Because I wanted to be a poet for so much of my life, I have that relentless desire to find new ways of articulating things. Articulation is a way of bridging distance between you and the object, so it’s important to me to find what my friend, the poet Angel Nafis, calls, “not the right word, but the only word.” If I’m writing about a very important moment or describing a very important object, I push through the image. I’ll think about what it looks like, technically and literally. I’ll think, how have I ever heard this described? and then I’ll try to find attendant ways to describe it. I’m allergic to cliché and to common forms of phrasing. So I’m always trying to push through them to find something that feels more true to the character’s experience.

CCP: Speaking of developing that skill, I love the writing prompts you post on Instagram. How do you come up with them?

MHB: I began teaching at Yale two years ago, and I started posting those prompts because the idea of a big institution feels impenetrable to many of us. I liked the idea of posting them so that everybody has access. It’s been great fun because I’m so surprised by how many people have said to me, “I love your writing prompts.” They’re reaching a lot of people. 

Yesterday I was rushing to class and I realized I hadn’t thought of one. I’ve been doing a lot of procedural ones— number one, do this, number two, do this—so I thought what’s the opposite of that? and thought of “a figure emerges from the sea.” I try to allow for all different kinds of writers and learners. Before Thanksgiving break, I asked my students to think of some, and they thought of the most brilliant prompts. My student Gha Yuan Ng thought of “the turkey screeches in protest.” I posted the list, and so many people were like, “’The turkey screeches in protest!’ That’s amazing!” This discreet, strange snatch of an image and a sound really captured the imagination of a few people. I noted that and was like, okay, I can do prompts that are a little more out of the box.

CCP: Shifting gears, let’s talk about revision. How do you know what to prioritize, or when to share your writing?

MHB: I have guiding questions that I put to my stories. Exit Zero, all in all, took twelve years. Over those years, I returned to the stories again and again with fresh ways of noticing. One of those ways were these questions. Have I been as honest as I can? Have I inhabited whatever person I’m in all the way? If I’m in first person, inhabiting someone’s body, can you feel what it is to be in their body down to the nervous system? The waste systems? Have I gone all the way with the voice and the tense? I drag these questions through the work over and over again. I also leave the work for periods of time. I call it “the proving drawer.” I’ll put the work in the proving drawer and I don’t think it’s the work that improves over that time, but my ability to see it and to help it. When I return, it improves. 

I’ve always been private about my writing for as long as I can be before letting people in. They have to be very close, trusted people. It’s easy to derail a project at those tender early stages, so I wait until whatever anybody says won’t derail me. Then, I read it out loud at least twice before I send it out for any kind of publication, to make sure that the sound is there. You can hear so much more when you read it out loud.

CCP: I’m glad you mentioned how long this book took. Twelve years is a lot of lived time to bring to a project!

MHB: My first collection was published in 2012, and ever since, I’ve been collecting like a magpie. I was fortunate because I was in Novel Land for a lot of it. When I was frustrated or worried or scared of the novel—which was like Wednesday afternoon, and Sunday, and all the time—I could find refuge in the stories which, in many ways, have always been my first love.

I think it’s important to allow ourselves to be affected by our life experiences and by the work of others. In those twelve years, I fell in love with Yoko Ogawa and Charles Yu. I watched shows that cracked my mind open, like Russian Doll and Say Nothing. Then, when we return to our work, we’ve gotten better; we don’t really know the origin, but if we’ve allowed ourself to stay open to change, that’s how it happens.

CCP: On that note, what was it like to return to short stories after publishing three novels?

MHB: Well, I never left, so I’m not actually coming back, but I will tell you what I am coming back to: the rejection of story writing. In the past two weeks, I’ve been rejected ten times. As I was writing the stories of my first collection, I would send them out and get thirty to forty rejections on one story. And my friends who were writing novels, who had yet to send anything out, would be like, “how are you dealing with that? That’s so many rejections!” But the truth is, you develop callouses. This time around, I was sending stories out here and there, and they’d get placed after being rejected. But the last batch went out all at once, and then I was getting rejected like I used to, in that regular, consistent way. Even as I’m sitting here, I probably have rejections in my inbox. Whatever anybody thinks about what it might look like to have written a novel and then a short story collection again—I can’t believe it—but the rejection is the same, if not compounded in some way. I’ve got to get my callouses back.

CCP: Rejection can feel so lonely, so that’s a meaningful thing to hear from someone who has accomplished so much! I had a story accepted after 83 rejections, and some of them were at such brutal moments. I was in the emergency room with my toddler and got a rejection.

MHB: My gosh. I was rejected on Christmas Eve the year that my father passed away and the journal who was sending rejections on Christmas Eve—I will never submit to them again, because it was so brutal. I’ve been being rejected by the New Yorker since I was eleven years old. Unfortunately, it’s part of being a writer. It’s especially part of being a story writer. My novelist friends would work on their novel for eight years, and then send it out and then get rejections on it and have no reference point and be totally flattened by it. Whereas, not to brag, but I have this ongoing consistent practice of being profoundly rejected. It still hurts, but I am a little more accustomed to it.

CCP: I’m sensing a theme here of being willing to sit with hard things, like death and rejection. 

MHB: Can I tell you something that I believe a hundred percent? Rejection is protection. It protects us from a place that we were not supposed to be in, or a person we were not supposed to be around. One of the things I love about rejection is that it deepens my relationship with other writers—even you and I, right now, swapping stories. We share this common practice. I’ll be honest—this week has not been the easiest. But it does offer me a laugh with other writers, which is all I’ve ever really wanted. So I’m grateful for that. It forces you to recommit to the premise a lot too, especially when you’re writing speculative work. As the stories in Exit Zero were tested and protected by the blessing of rejection, it forced me to ask, do I believe in this story? And the answer had to always be “Hell yes.” Yes, I believe in gesturing outside of realism. This is an act of survival for me. Yes. This is important. This exists.

CCP: How do you protect your creative practice amidst all that? 

MHB: I employ different methods at different times, but I really believe that you should protect the sacramental space around your writing. Even if it’s five minutes a week. If you can have that time and get down a word, that’s incredibly useful. Also, to combat how many obstacles I’ve had to write around, I have developed an expansive idea for what writing is. It’s not just the actual act of my pencil on a piece of paper, but also thinking while I drive to work, or conversations I have with students or friends. It’s the art dates I keep, where I go see a movie. And it’s also stuff that has nothing to do with writing: being there for my mom when she needs me, or trying to keep this little air plant alive. These practices of belief and endurance are ways in which I teach myself that I am able to show up for my writing. I haven’t had the ability to write every day for a year ever in my life, so I don’t need it. And that’s good, because life intervenes no matter what.

Another way I protect it is by saying no. Since I don’t have a lot of time, I prioritize things that I really believe in. A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to speak to a book group of female physicians at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and they asked me to come down on a weekday. I teach during the week, but when I heard that they were heart doctors and heart surgeons and heart anesthesiologists, I needed to get down there. It was important to me to sit with these women, to hear their stories and talk about Beautyland. Saying no frees you to say yes, so I try to put my desires and beliefs at the center when I make decisions.

CCP: Do you have a set definition of what success looks like?

MHB: It changes all the time, and I’ve recalibrated as needed. Honestly, the first thing that comes to mind is actually something that has never changed, which is absolute, uncompromising creativity on the line, so that every single word between the covers of any book I write is exactly the word I want it to be. And making sure I am writing from the unshakeable voice inside of me—the voice that Kermit says, “calls to young sailors”—and not toward any fad or money or prestige that, in the end, amounts to nothing. 

CCP: Finally, if Exit Zero were having a dinner party and it wanted to have the best conversations, who would it invite?

MHB: It should absolutely invite Adolfo Bioy Casares, who wrote The Invention of Morel, because it owes a debt to that writer. It owes a debt to so many people: my friend Ramona Ausubel’s work, Russian Doll. Can the country of Ireland come to dinner? It would be so charming; we’d never run out of things to talk about. What else? The sea. The beach in Cape May. My mom can come and make her homemade pizza. And not the cast, but the idea of the show Severance. We should probably have some animals there: let’s invite a couple rescue dogs, and get them rescued by people who come. If I’m allowed to transcend time, I would also like to have my grandparents there. They’ll have to come through the non-existent scrim of death. I think they would have fun. And we should have the moon there, because the sea will be there and they’re kind of married. This is a really enigmatic, metaphysical table, but that’s wonderful. Why not?

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Marie-Helene Bertino is the author of Beautyland, Parakeet, 2 A.M. at The Cat’s Pajamas, and the story collection Safe as Houses. She was the 2017 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellow in Cork, Ireland. She has received the O. Henry Prize, the Pushcart Prize, the Iowa Short Fiction Award, the Mississippi Review Prize, and fellowships from MacDowell, Sewanee, and New York City’s Center for Fiction, and her work has twice been featured on NPR’s Selected Shorts. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and Mississippi Review 30. She is the Ritvo-Slifka Writer-in-Residence at Yale University.