An Interview with Cris Mazza, Author of Yet to Come

Kristina Marie Darling: Your novel, Yet to Come, will launch soon from BlazeVOX Books. What would you like readers to know before they delve into the work itself?

Cris Mazza: I’d like readers to assume that Yet to Come can provide different gratifications or provide different responses from different kinds of readers . . . and that any kind of response or take-away is interesting to me. Among the various elements — for example the “setting” of the characters’ mid-lifespans being from the 80s to 2010, the aspects of male-victim spousal abuse, or the subplot of female sexual dysfunction — will come to the forefront in different orders for different readers. I wish I could hear from every reader to see which parts, characters, or story-lines spoke loudest. Basically, I always tried to write books that my mother could read and also my English professors could appreciate.

KMD: You’ve worked with many outstanding literary publishers over the course of your distinguished career.  What drew you to BlazeVOX Books for this particular text? 

CM: First, one of my former PhD students had a recent novel from BlazeVox, so I knew there was an appreciation for literature-off-the-beaten-path. Also, when I looked at the books, they each had a personalized size, shame and design, appropriate for the book itself and not a standard for all of their books.  I knew I would need a publisher sensitive to the repeated postcards in the book, which required the use of different fonts, an image of a postcard, etc. BlazeVox is open to a writer having a mental image and actual production input for what a book looks like as a finished product.

KMD: I admire your experimentation with form, which frequently encompasses templates that are not germane to literary texts:  postcards, lists of problems, handwritten notes, and more. What do these non-literary or found forms make possible within a given narrative? 

CM: I began doing this in earnest in my 2014 memoir Something Wrong With Her because my college journals were essential to the book containing a “me-then” who was not the same person writing the “real time” text. I realized I had to use images of the journals rather than retype the passages I wanted to use — to prevent myself from editing the earlier me. While researching my own cache of artifacts for that book, I found more: the handwritten notes, yearbook inscriptions, hand-drawn cartoons, etc., that I knew had to be seen and not just described. I think the book was able to be urgent and alive in more than one time-zone, from the “real time” text to 40 years earlier.

KMD: Relatedly, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the gender politics of genre. Is experimentation with — and challenging — received forms of discourse an inherently feminist act? Why or why not? 

CM: It traditionally largely hasn’t been. In the 70s and 80s when so much literary prose experimentation was disproportionately by male authors, a simple explanation was provided (I can’t recall the source): these men were rebelling against the established canon; but that canon, being predominately male, was not what women writers were moved to rebel against — they had to create their “canon” first. Instead, the mere act of speaking out at all, having a published written voice, was the initial “rebellion.” Then when I co-edited the “chick-lit” anthologies in the mid-90s, the publisher launched the project as a talent search for unknown or emerging women writers who were beginning more and more to challenge popular expectations of writing-by-women.

It’s difficult for me, personally, to say how the forms in my own writing is or might be a feminist or gender-related gesture because most of the writers who influenced me in terms of form were male since most of the writers taught to me in college were male; and yet the work of one of the female inclusions, Kathy Acker, for whatever reason did not speak to me. Female writers who later participated in my development, from Erica Jong to Alice Munro, were not experimenting so much with form.

KMD: As you promote YET TO COME, what readings, events, and workshops can we look forward to?

I plan to be in my car heading west, to California where the novel is set, and making as many stops along the route was I can manage to arrange. Anyone interested in an event can feel free to contact me. 

KMD: What are you currently working on? What’s next?

CM: Related to my answer about the insertion of image-artifacts in my work, I’m working on a series of linked essays that make further use of this technique, or using form to “concretize” what the essay is saying. This concept is best characterized by “Ask The Depot Commander” in which the narrative of my father’s recollections of his experience in 1946 Nuremburg, Germany — plus original photos he took there — is formatted to lie side-by-side with researched historical details that correspond to the substances of his memory. For example, he described giving an orange from the Army mess to a German man, whose wife and child ate one segment a day and made the orange last two weeks; this personal anecdote is juxtaposed beside original text of a different tone, explaining U.S. occupation policies that stipulated sharing food with German citizens was against military orders.

Each essay, with a different topic but involving my family, will have a form that suits its needs.