New in March 2009
Red Hen Press



Trickle-Down Timeline


fictions
by Cris Mazza

In the era just before computers, at the dawn of “safe sex,” for a sub-generation of people who came of age without a war in Vietnam to unite them, the stories in Trickle-Down Timeline are glimpses into individual lives subtly influenced by the political and social milieu of the 1980s. For some people, the surplus and glut of the 80’s were part of some other world, not theirs; and it couldn’t be a “me-generation” if they didn’t know who they were or where they were going. They were often just finding out what they were going to want; or they were, in starting out, already where they were going to end up.

"Cris Mazza’s considerable genius is that she sees what the rest of us are unwilling to see and says what we are unable to say. The stories in Trickle-Down Timeline are bold, risky, and exhilarating. Mazza explores the brave new world of the eighties with unflinching honesty and with a narrative virtuosity that both entrances and unsettles. What talent, what nerve, what an achingly beautiful collection."

John Dufresne
Author of Requiem, Mass




2007
Soft Skull Press



Waterbaby


a novel
by Cris Mazza

A story of conquest over learned helplessness, over self-determined disability...

As children, Tam and her older brother were swimming when she suffered her first epileptic seizure. He pulled her from the water and was crowned a hero. Tam was labeled “disabled” and never swam again. And so began 30 years of vigilance, never allowing her body to betray her, never allowing her brother or her family or anyone else to influence her path.

Now, in middle age, a lifetime’s worth of control has taken its toll. Exhausted, she heads to Maine where, while working on a genealogy project, she falls under the spell of two dead women: an ancestor, Mary Catherine, who died at 33; the other, the town ghost. Through their cloistered, tragic lives Tam relives her own life over and over — until a distant cousin forces her to see herself in a new light. Tam and her distant cousin fabricate a fantasy version of their ancestors’ experience in the remote lighthouse, where it’s possible a shipwrecked baby washed to shore and irrevocably changed generations of lives.

Meanwhile, in the real world, Tam has “rescued” a baby who has been taken from his teenage mother, by sneaking it out from the small seaside hospital. She hides both mother and child with herself at the privately owned lighthouse where her ancestors once lived. There Tam goes on with her romantic quest to experience her ancestors’ tragedies and heartbreaks, until her alternate life is invaded, the events in her recreation of family history distorted, by the reappearance of her brother, a rescue-hero at the World Trade Center, now suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome. And Tam, in a commanding re-entry into the water, chooses to close the book on her life of self-imposed susceptibility.

A gripping tale of compulsion, obsession, and forgiveness, set so evocatively amidst the fogs and furies of the offseason Maine coast. Waterbaby is also an intriguing exploration of the ways in which our ancestral pasts echo within our own psyches.

--Lisa Alther
(author of Kinflicks and Bedrock)


"...packs a lingering wallop."

--Kirkus Reviews

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