Fiction Spotlight: Interview with Cerissa DiValentino
Cerissa DiValentino, author of our November fiction selection, "Safe Distance," discusses the visual inspiration behind her writing, navigating complex family dynamics, and how grief and trauma shape her storytelling.
Can you talk a little bit about where your idea from this story originated? What sparked the idea? Or is it something that you had been thinking about for a while?
I’m a visual thinker. I have an inner monologue as well, but almost exclusively it functions to kick my ass. So I predominantly experience life through images, which means my projects are often born from something I saw inside of me or out. I might not understand right away why I felt drawn to it—maybe it made me feel safe or confused, uncomfortable or hopeful—but that’s how the rest of the story follows. I relate to Joan Didion when she says, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” I’m like a chicken with its head cut off without writing. I wouldn’t be able to function.
As expected, this story began with an image. I was only a couple of months out from moving to Boston for my MFA in fiction at Boston University, and I was having a hard time. I’ve involuntarily lived a nomadic life. I’m not the biggest fan of the word “nomad” because it conjures for me the early 2000s Tumblr girls making those kitschy graphics with the word “wanderlust” splayed over some blue-filtered photo of an airplane window or the Eiffel Tower. It’s certainly not that pretty. Although Marina and I have different trauma, come from different places, the discomfort in her character is certainly influenced by my own experiences.
I filed a Child Protective Case against my mother when I was thirteen. Since then, I’ve lived mostly out of a suitcase. My first relocation was to my grandmother’s, but as generational trauma goes, I’d only unexpectedly landed myself in another volatile situation. I moved between more relatives, halfway houses and friends’ couches, psychiatric hospitals and spare rooms. A religious family once took me in thinking they could save me. They told me to leave when they realized it didn’t work that way. When I’d lived with my grandmother, she’d often travel to sell her art at craft fairs, so she hired a nanny for me and my younger siblings. That same nanny showed up in a U-Haul as I was frantically filling trash bags with my clothes to flee the house I’d been tossed from. We threw the bags into the back and took off. I slept in her living room the entire summer, then I was back on the road. Only this time I was heading to college, where, for the first time, I’d be learning how to write better.
Seven years later, I was in a familiar situation. I’d be moving soon for my MFA, but for the summer I needed a place to stay. A mother very dear to me volunteered the loft above her garage. She lives near Syracuse, a three-hour drive north from where I grew up in the Hudson Valley. There are no beaches up there, but there are plenty of lakes, so we decided to have a lake day before the summer ended. We strapped the kids she nannies into their car seats, packed a bag of snacks and toys, and when we arrived, we laid down a blanket. For a large portion of the day I felt like a shaken soda pop because I’m still incredibly, and always have been, uncomfortable with staying in other people’s homes. But then I started to focus on her and the children playing in the lake. She was flicking water at them with her foot, and like two little boomerangs, they’d run away laughing and then come back. The story started there.
Tell us a little bit about the process - how long did it take you to write the story? What was revision like?
Georgia O’Keeffe said, “I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.” I’m exactly the same way, both enamored by people, and living, and fearful of it all, but I always feel determined, despite wanting to hide in my bed forever, to do the frightful thing. So I volunteered to be workshopped first at BU and submitted this story to them. I got pummeled, of course. The story was originally twice the length it is now because I’d weaved a lot of scenes from Marina’s childhood with her mother alongside the present day at the lake. It didn’t help that I’d written those memories in present tense; a lot of people ended up confused about the timeline, and once the reader starts asking questions like—wait, when did this happen? And was that moment in the past or present?—you’re screwed. I still enjoy work that plays with time, creatively toying with tenses as I did with the ending of this story, but I understood then that I needed to play it simpler, put the damn backstory in past tense and leave it at that. I moved all of those backstory scenes and what I’d learned from them about Marina into summary and then picked one to expand in this final draft. Thank god I’m really good about throwing away thousands of words. It comes as a relief to me. The hard part isn’t that but when you have to whittle down what you already know is working.
You weave in a speculative element so seamlessly into the work. Can you talk about how it came about and how you were able to blend it into the story?
I’m assuming you mean “speculative” in the sense that it was a risk, not that it departs from realism, but both are interesting to dissect. So much of my work stems from my belief that the present doesn’t exist without the past. “Safe Distance” is definitely a portrait of this belief, how easily the past seeps into the present, and how often without our permission or awareness. I’d also received two horrific phone calls this past year that altered me down to my atoms. Sometimes I’ll find myself thinking about the moment that prefaces horror, how naïve and innocent it looks and feels. You’re folding laundry on your bed or listening to your friend tell the same joke for the third time that week then the call comes and fractures the day, your life, into thousands of shiny, sharp pieces. Sometimes I imagine, retrospectively, that there was a third all-knowing person there who knew that phone call was coming and thought—You have no idea what’s about to happen. I play with the visual of this person all of the time without realizing it. They’re sitting on a couch with a box of popcorn as if I’m on their television screen, or peeking through their hands, bracing because they already know what this news is going to do to me. My decision to capture, in the future tense, what happens in the immediate aftermath of Marina receiving news that her mother has overdosed, is all rooted in those ideas. It would be fair to argue that the mental process I went through to make that decision is a cocktail of both realism and fantasy.
Overall I wanted to capture the moment when grief implodes the present and deconstructs the margins that hold time together. When we receive unexpected news that permanently changes our lives, we are all at once thrust into the past, forced into the future, and paralyzed in the present. Once Marina receives this news, she closes her eyes and doesn’t want to open them again, because when she does, the present and future she faces is one of which she’ll never be able to make amends with her mother. It was a risky narrative technique, to jump briefly into future tense at the end, but in my opinion there’s nothing more real than the exact moment in which we’ve spent our days absently assuming more time only to discover there’s none left.
What do you do when you feel stuck in your writing? How do you work through blocks?
If I’m actively working on a project and feel stuck, most of the time it means that I’ve gone down the wrong side street and need to make my way back to the main road. It can be helpful to think about it that way. It’s frustrating, of course, when you’re driving and make the wrong turn, but you’re not going to park the car, lie down and die. No, you’re going to say “damn it” or scream, whichever is fine, and then find your way back to where you originally made the mistake and try again. A GPS is a great tool, but unfortunately, writers don’t get one of those. Sometimes you have the beginning and know where you’re going to end, great, but you need to discover the juicy bits that make the story a story. Instead of slamming myself against the writer’s block and trying to push ahead from where I’ve landed, I’ll remind myself that mistakes aren’t a backwards movement but a step towards completion, and I’ll start looking for where I misstepped. What are you rushing for anyway? The process is the fun part. It’s gratifying to finish a project but it’s fleeting, and plus, having to start again is dreadful. Try to enjoy the mess, because you also never know what you’re due to discover amongst your fuck ups.
If I’m between projects and having a difficult time starting, I’ll go outside. Look around. Start a book I’ve been excited to read. I’ll continuously take jabs at ideas that interest me, write a few hundred words, more often thousands. It’s fine if it doesn’t stick. Eventually one of them will. It has to.
How did you know you were done with your piece? And when did you feel ready to submit it?
Nobody is going to show up with a flashy neon-green sign that says “DONE.” It’s a decision you make. You’ll eventually learn your own signals. For example, if I’ve already been working on a story for a year or two and then I start to expand it in a direction that leads nowhere useful for the whole of the story, or I end up unnecessarily toppling what I’ve already polished, then it means I’m done and can start submitting. A guiding question I can use too is—to the highest degree of my current abilities, did I give this story everything that it needed? Other people might come up with a different answer for you, and I promise, somebody always will, but at the end of the day, it’s your call.
If you could give writers one piece of encouragement or advice, what would it be?
Probably the same advice one of my early fiction professors told me. On the day of our first class, he said (to paraphrase), “if you can do anything else than write, do it, because the reality of this career is that it’s filled with rejection and most of us don’t make any money. This isn’t some fun little hobby but a purpose.” Some people dropped the course, and there’s nothing wrong with that. For some people, it is a fun little hobby, but I accepted the challenge because it wasn’t an option. I’ve known that I was a writer since I was nine years old, and I’ve never entertained anything else. I feel incredibly lucky to have found my vocation that early; it saved my life then as it does now.
So, if it’s also not an option for you, keep your resilience high. A lot of people are going to tell you “no,” and even when you get those wins here and there—publications, awards, residencies, an MFA, you name it—remind yourself why you’re really doing the work. I think most artists are working from a wound. In whatever shape that takes, we’re all seeking relief, no matter how brief. Writing will always be excruciating work, but it’s also pleasurable. I’d rather be a masochist than dead.
