Works by
Cris Mazza
(Writer)

Fiction

• Trickle-Down Timeline : Short fiction of the 80s (2009 release)
  In the spirit of her critically acclaimed story collection Is It Sexual Harassment Yet?, Cris Mazza has completed a new collection titled Trickle-Down Timeline. The eleven stories and three micro-fictions in Trickle-Down Timeline are focused glimpses into individual lives subtly influenced by the political and social milieu of the 1980s. The title-story, “Trickle-Down Timeline,” which swims within a timeline of carefully selected items from the Reagan presidency, sets the tone for the collection: The “new” conservativism in American politics, which essentially began with Reagan, is a backdrop designed to color these stories about individual people struggling with their own lives 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 book’s format allows this title story to tint and launch the rest of the collection, arranged with each corresponding to a year from the 1980s.
  
  By now, nostalgia for the 1980s is an established sphere dedicated only to reminiscence about music, movies, TV shows, fads and styles of the decade, geared toward those who were in junior high or high school during the 80s. What this kind of nostalgia seems to say is that to these “children of the 80s” (who were, after all, children in the 80s), the only things that concerned them were music, movies, TV shows, fads and styles. In this way, most popular observations about the 80s tend to support mainstream media’s generalized summary which refers to the 80s as the decade of excess, of consumerism, of superficiality, of the “me-generation.” What is missed, forgotten or disregarded by this kind of accepted emblematic synopsis is that there were other people in the 80s who were struggling, and not just financially. For some people, the surplus and glut 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.
  
  Lovers who become born-again Christians, childhood heroes beginning to disillusion and disappoint, the strain of women’s careers leading them to abandon their social ideals, divergent careers leading to long-distance relationships; characters grappling with negative body image, resentment of a spouse’s career success, and even a character whose development from childhood can be paralleled with the history of an inauspicious professional baseball team.
  
  Some of these stories were actually written in the 80’s. A very few in the 90’s. Several were written in the 21st century. This allows them to each have their own way of offering an element of the 80s. Whether it is because their narrative style is the voice of a developing fiction writer in the minimalist-crazed 80s, or whether it is because they have the sharper (or sadder) eye of retrospect.

• Waterbaby: A Novel (2007)
  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’s quest to transcend self-imposed limitations is superbly crafted and richly satisfying.

• Disability:: A Novellas (2005)
  Told in a broken shorthand voice, Mazza's language is acute, evoking a place where the patients, the caregivers, and the system are all disabled. Teri and Cleo are minimum-wage nurse-aides at a state ward for severely retarded and physically handicapped children. They are expected to feed, bathe, clothe, and carry out the required therapies for their patients in a 4-hour shift. They're working within a system where money for therapy is only continued if therapy shows improvement--and yet the state-paid therapists who oversee the ward know the patients will never show any improvement. To keep the money coming in, it is up to the minimum-wage caregivers to "see" and chart important improvements, thus keeping the therapy program alive.
  
  Blinded in their own way by their pet-like adoption of favorite patients, Teri and Cleo struggle to remain both optimistic and realistic. As their personal failures mount--and even transpose or emulate the travesties within the state ward--Teri and Cleo, with their own unseen "disabilities" in dealing with their lives and pasts, react harshly to the breakdown in the emotional balancing act.

• Many Ways To Get It, Many Ways To Say It (2005)
  In the 80's a young woman advertises her services as a model to photographers; she discovers their weaknesses, seduces them, then extorts them by claiming to be under-age...In the 90's a 40-something man is married to a doctor who only views him as a sexual object. In these two reversals of sexual harassment, Mazza explores such issues as the language of bodies, sexual desirability as an innate urge, latent adolescence, plus what the genders share...and what they can never share.

• Homeland (2004)
  A woman takes her stroke-victim father out of a geriatric hospital to go look for the site of a family tragedy that happened over three decades before. By the end of their journey, they not only experience but are influential factors in a brushfire inferno and a Columbine-like attack on migrant workers -- both part of an apocalypse of hate, but which stand in sharp contrast to the woman's visceral yet pastoral memories of love and death in a secluded, devoted family. In a story about contemporary survival and familial bonds, a family secret reveals how random tragedy was allowed to benumb idyllic family unity -- even debilitate the foundation of a family's strength -- but ultimately it never destroyed the potency and power the woman discovers in the bond that remains.

• Indigenous: Growing Up Californian (2003)
  Cris Mazza delivers a spirited rebuttal to pop-culture stereotypes about growing up female in Southern California. Coming of age in the 1970s and '80s, Mazza's memories aren't about surfing, cheerleading or riding in convertibles. Though her story has its exotic elements-her family hunts and -gathers food in the semi-arid coastal hills well into the early '70s-she sets herself in the context of familiar Americana. Repeating motifs-gender issues, the California landscape, dogs, musicians, plus the perplexing melancholy of a sexless marriage-thread through these very personal essays, as Mazza confronts madness, disability, sexual dysfunction and death, speaking to the drama of ordinary lives.

• Girl Beside Him (2000)
  A wildlife biologist named Brian, observing a group of relocated cougars, attempts to repress the desires that he fears may make him a sex killer. In his struggle to understand himself, he finds an answer, but not without putting another at risk. A cougar is set free of her collar and the bonds of human oppression; a woman is freed of her dangerous obsession, and a man is freed of his deepest dread-though freedom comes with a price.
  
  Near Rawlins, a town of truck stops, bars, and one taxidermist, Brian and his assistant Leya track the cougars by helicopter. Working in isolation, a dangerous intimacy develops between them. Brian is forced to confront his role in the death of his sister, one he threatens to repeat, while Leya's perverse fascination with his guilt leaves her vulnerable. When the locals, suspicious of environmentalists, threaten Leya's life, Brian must decide whether to intervene or to satisfy his craving for sex through violence.
  
  Girl Beside Him probes the limits of human relationships, testing their mental and sexual extremes. Mazza's complex characters define their own reality. Through letters, dreams, memories and innovative dialogue, she invents two separate unsettling perspectives and makes us believe in both. Transgressive and addictive, Mazza once again takes her readers beyond the mainstream, and into a region of dark sexuality, torn between love and destruction.

• Dog People (1997)
  As a bizarre array of '90s characters "couple" and "uncouple", they discover they can't communicate with people anymore, and turn to their dogs for solace. Some find the ability to take charge of life others follow their dogs into complete isolation and even madness.

• Former Virgin (1997)
  More postfeminist short fiction by the author of Is It Sexual Harassment Yet? and editor of our popular Chick-Lit anthologies. This new collection of stories explores problems and situations caused only by the ordinary people who suffer through them. The stories in Former Virgin circle a question many women have begun asking themselves lately: What have I DONE to myself?

• Your Name Here (1995)
  Ten years ago Erin Haley was a young woman named Corinne Staub who was possibly gang-raped. She changed her name. She changed cities. She thought she changed her life. But there is no getting past her strange dreams and oddly distorted memories. Compelled to return to her stored-away journals for the truth, Erin confronts what really happened to the person she once was - discovering a subtly absorbing story of desire and betrayal, weakness and deceit. And, in the process, she recovers a part of herself which she had abandoned.

• Exposed (1994)
  Connie Zamora assumes that what she captures on film is a preservation of her memory - until one of her news photographs sets off disturbing accusations. In an illogical attempt to normalize her life, she takes a job with a theater group. As Connie struggles to belong to this new world, the lines separating truth from perception and dream from delusion become precariously blurred. Faced with another controversy over a photo, one that may prove arson, she is swept into the mystery at hand. But unraveling what took place only leads to the unraveling of Connie's own life - and possibly her grip on reality itself.

• Revelation Countdown (1993) with Ted Orland, Illustrator
  Short fiction.

• How to Leave a Country (1992) -- Winner PEN / Nelson Algren Award
  Winner of the PEN Nelson Algren Award for Fiction, this first novel closely examines a relationship that poses questions about the nature of love, reality, and the power of the imagination, with the captivating nuances of a born story-teller.
  
  Phelan, a sculptor, and Tara, the painter he lives with, are engaged in a strange relationship. She remembers the events from his life, but not her own. He remembers the impulse for her paintings, but she cannot remember painting them. As she recalls significant episodes from Phelan’s life - childhood seductions, adolescent obsessions, and adult disappointments - the intensity of his emotions is apparent, but the reality of his perceptions remains in question. Deft strokes and haunting images distinguish this luminous first novel.

• Is It Sexual Harassment Yet (1991)
  A dark comedy that undercuts that shaky compromise of sexual desires.

• Animal Acts (1988)
  Eleven stories describing characters navigating an unsteady course through the turbulence of sexual desire.

Other

• Chick Lit Postfeminist Fiction (2000), Cris Mazza and Jeffrey DeShell, eds.

• Chick Lit 2: No Chick Vics (1996), Cris Mazza, Elisabeth Sheffield, and Jeffrey DeShell, eds.
  Post feminist fiction.