Interview with Cris Mazza
Cris Mazza is the author of 20 published works of fiction, nonfiction, and hybrid. Her first novel, How to Leave a Country, won the PEN / Nelson Algren award for book-length fiction. Mazza’s work has always explored the dimensions and intersections of gender, sexuality, place, retrospection, and family. This is certainly true for her newest work, a hybrid “memoir in artifact” titled, perhaps a little cheekily, “it’s no puzzle.” Passages North’s Lauren Sparks sat down with Mazza to talk about making the work.
Passages North: Where did the concept for this project first originate? Was this always a book project in your mind, or did it simply begin in the personal and practical place of sorting through what’s left behind after the loss of your parents?
Cris Mazza: This project was not always a book project in my mind. The second essay, the one about Nuremberg [“Ask the Depot Commander”], was written prior to 2018, when my father was still alive. I thought it was just going to be a one off—a stand alone thing, and certainly not a book. And why I started it: probably because it was getting late to begin asking him questions. And I knew I needed to do that. And what I had was all of his army records, which are not as fascinating as you might imagine. But I also had all of the black and white photographs he took while he was in Nuremberg, plus I had some negatives that he had never printed. Black and white negatives. So I took those and had them digitized. But that was just a project in and of itself to get his stories, which weren’t really stories. There was really no story there. Then I started researching the actual occupation and what the roles were and what the situation was and what was happening during the occupation. And just started comparing it to his stories and making those segments. While I was using the artifacts of his photographs, the research I did was put in context for me. And then I found, every once in a while, the narrative sort of rose to the surface on its own, the way a fish touches the surface of the water.
PN: Yes, I love those pictures. They add such a patchwork effect to the narrative.
CM: Exactly. So, for example, you have the story about the orange that my father gave, as a small kindness, to somebody during his time in Nuremberg, and then the story of my siblings and me getting oranges in our Christmas stockings. I started seeing details like that and realized a memoir doesn’t have to be something that is directly about me, about something that happened to me. This is me looking at my father before he was a father. He had a different identity then; and some of the things from that identity had reached over into our lives when we were a family.
PN: I’m curious about what sets that essay apart from the others in the book. It seems like you’re saying there’s this “me” as an author—this persona—that’s putting all these different fragments together and from that, the story is born. What I noticed about that particular essay, was that there wasn’t the same sort of “I” persona that there is in the accompanying essays. I’m curious about that choice and the choice to—in some of the essays—refer to him as your father, but in that one, you refer to him only as “the depot commander.”
CM: Right. I use a plural when I use the first person in that essay. I did remove myself on purpose, as a sort of an instinctual thing. It wasn’t about me and I didn’t want my non-objective stance—even though it was a non-objective stance—to be overwhelming. Especially on the history side, because I knew I had spun and cherry picked how I wanted it to turn out. In other essays, I might say my father and my mother, but other times, I say our father, our mother. Sometimes an experience is a plural experience, of what we as children experienced—like having pictures as a family. So, the plural comes in when I felt that it just wasn’t my own. I mean, first of all, I wasn’t alive when my father was in Nuremberg, and these are his experiences.
PN: You seem to lament the distance between yourself and your parents emotionally, ideologically, and now, existentially. What was the experience like for you, going through all of these familial and historical artifacts? Do you feel like you were able to bridge any of those gaps?
CM: Well, this is one of those things. Of course going through the artifacts (and especially going through the writing and research), I felt closer to them, during the process. But then that process was something that ended too, and was difficult to end. I wished that there were more things I could have done, because siblings have different memories. When you’re one of five, your parents are never yours alone. When I gave them all a book, their reactions (which were all positive) differed, and they responded with some stories I wish I’d had. I saw how everybody has their own connection with our parents, and how we had a group connection as well, group memories. So, to answer your question, I was able to bridge some of those gaps, but some of those gaps are regrets, and those you can’t undo. Like, that I never went to my mother with my problems in the sixth grade. And how much I didn’t talk to my father. I can’t undo that. Maybe this process made some of those gaps wider, because it made me hyper aware of the things I can’t go back and fix.
PN: On a craft level, I was also curious about your choice to use text boxes in certain places, but not in others. Did you have firm rules with yourself about what did and did not go in boxes, or was it a more intuitive process?
CM: It was and it wasn’t. My main guiding principle was that anything that was—what am I calling this? Proof? Evidence? Went into text boxes. Receipts to back up what I'm saying in the essay. What would you tell your freshman writing students? That they have to give concrete examples in order to say something, right? So my concrete examples, my research to back up my assertions, went into boxes. But also anything that was an aside or that I wanted side by side with the main text of the essay. Now, of course, people are going to read one first and then the other, but it's the visual that gives it that feel, that contextualization.
PN: You’ve mentioned how your family always had pictures—took them, shared them, looked at them together. Cameras and photography loom large in this book. How were you thinking about memory in relation to the photograph, how one affects the other?
CM: Some memories remain sharp without having been photographed whereas others that were recorded, you can only barely recall. Anything that affects your psyche or sense of yourself sharply is going to be remembered. You know, I can remember the maybe one time my mother went crying to her bedroom. I can remember the fight that caused it and that my father went outside and sat on the swing set, and I can remember what that felt like—but nobody took a picture of that. So, things like that, things that threaten your sense of security as a child or your sense of identity. Those are the things that stick, picture or no picture. Like the time my mother pushed me away when she was reading to us or the spatter of mustard across the pavement a night we didn't actually have a cookout. But see, the cookout in this picture here is one of many similar cookouts. I don't remember this particular one, but I remember that splatter.
PN: So what about the difference between a memory and the real experience? Between a photograph and its subject?
CM: When my partner and I take a picture and it doesn’t come out how it looks in real life, I tell him these cameras (digital cameras) can't get colors like they really look. They cannot do it; they can't do the looking for us. And he says, OK, we'll have to take a picture of it with our souls. That's what we do. That’s what we say.
Lauren Sparks holds an MFA from Northern Michigan University. She spends most of her time writing experimental poems and essays, dancing in her kitchen, and taking short walks in the local bog. She holds a BA in Creative Writing from Knox College, interned for Copper Canyon Press in the fall of 2019, and was recently a finalist for The Cupboard Pamphlet’s annual chapbook competition. She loves the associative and the lyric.
