Staff Spotlight: Andrea Vassallo

Staff Spotlight: Andrea Vassallo

Interview

What do you write?

Many years ago I wrote fiction that never left my desktop. Now I mostly write per­son­al essay, mostly about family and pol­i­tics, although I still some­times fan­ta­size about fiction.

Is there an author or artist who has most pro­found­ly influ­enced your work?

When I was a kid, my parents had a copy of Nora Ephron’s Crazy Salad on the living room book­shelf. The sub­ti­tle was: Every­thing You Ever Wanted to Know About Linda Lovelace, Dorothy Parker, Breasts, Gloria Steinem, Bake-Offs, Fem­i­nine Hygiene, Sex Fan­tasies and Julie Nixon Eisen­how­er. So of course I devoured the whole thing. It was the first time I real­ized you could write pol­i­tics and be funny at the same time. When I got to college I dis­cov­ered Richard Russo’s The Risk Pool and Alice Walker’s Pos­sess­ing the Secret of Joy, both of which had huge impact on me for years. Russo because he helped me realize you can write sad and be funny at the same time, and Walker because of the way she told pol­i­tics through fiction, and the way she played with time and perspective.

Why did you choose Stonecoast?

The short answer is Penny Guisinger and Oren Stevens, two friends who grad­u­at­ed several years ago and got super swoony every time Stonecoast came up in con­ver­sa­tion. So I thought I should check it out. Other factors: Being in Maine with Maine writers. A low res­i­den­cy sched­ule that (mostly) fits with work and par­ent­ing. The oppor­tu­ni­ty to explore other genres. Also, the social justice focus is impor­tant to me.

What is your favorite Stonecoast memory?

Oh, this is tough! Maybe when Indigo Moor and Deb Mar­quart read Russell Wilson’s hilar­i­ous script during the follies about two parents whose son was stuck in a YA novel. Or when Tyler Margid chan­neled the beat poets during his first open mic and brought the house down. Or really just any given moment during the res­i­den­cy when I sud­den­ly realize, oh my gosh, I get to spend ten days talking about books and writing with all these smart, funny, tal­ent­ed people. It’s a total blast.

What do you hope to accom­plish in the future?

Writing and teach­ing. Actu­al­ly, with the help of a schol­ar­ship from The Office of Grad­u­ate Studies, I became cer­ti­fied this summer as an Amherst Writers & Artists group facil­i­ta­tor, and I’ll be running my first work­shop next month. I’m busy select­ing prompts for that first work­shop and have landed on five poems, includ­ing two by Stonecoast faculty member Amanda Johnston.

If you could have written one book, story, or poem that already exists, which would you choose?

I think I have to go with Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America or Jenny Ofill’s Depart­ment of Spec­u­la­tion. Or maybe Abigail Thomas’s What Comes Next and How to Like It. Or Marion Winik’s Above Us Only Sky. Oh, and I just read Beth Ann Fennelly’s Heating & Cooling and totally wish I’d written that, too! It’s too hard to choose just one.


Featured Work

Word Search

The fol­low­ing is a work of non-fiction exclu­sive­ly for Stonecoast Review.

We’re at the café, working on Mad Libs. I usually travel with some sort of game like this, Mad Libs, a deck of cards, or at least paper and pen for a game of Hang Man or Tic Tac Toe. When Isaac was younger, we played Mad Libs more often, but back then I’d still have to remind him some­times what an adjec­tive was, a noun, a verb. “Slimy!” he’d call out, or “poop!” Poop was a big one. Now he’s thir­teen though, so when I say “adjec­tive” he says “surreal.”

This is our first time at this café, where they serve you cups of three-dollar slow drip. We’re here with my brother, who’s just moved to this brick-lined city by the sea, an hour’s drive from our house up the coast. We’re not used to the hustle and bustle here, of cars not stop­ping in the cross­walk, of people in a rush. People are more stylish here, too, and gen­er­al­ly not as plump.

When we first sat down with our coffees, we were still talking about Trump, so all the usual Trump related words were being bandied about: scary, idiot, buffoon, Canada. So now when I call out “plural noun” my brother says, “fas­cists.” More nouns follow. Egg­plant, penguin, fungi.

“Is that Mad Libs?” asks a woman sitting next to us. She’s prob­a­bly in her early thir­ties, she has a cute bob haircut and a knit hat, and she’s working on a cross­word with two male friends who are also wearing knit hats. “Yes,” I say, “Wanna throw in a noun?” She’s think­ing on it, a noun just forming on her lips, when her friend calls out, “Cheese­cake!” I write it down. Now we’re getting pulled into their cross­word, too. “Aero,” I offer when they are looking for a four-letter prefix for space. “Shiny,” they say when we need an adjective.

I forgot how much fun this is, this working on cross­words as a group. We used to hover over the dining table on Sunday after­noons with friends, just like this, coffee in one hand, pen in another, calling out answers, puz­zling things togeth­er. My dad was always the super­star of these gath­er­ings, the puzzle master, the word game pro.

He carried his puzzle book every­where. The one he was working on when he died was the big yellow New York TimesOmnibus of 500 Sunday puzzles I gave him on his birth­day in Sep­tem­ber. Twenty days later he was diag­nosed. Cancer. Exten­sive. Small Cell. Seven months later he was dead. The whole time he was dying he kept joking that he was going to finish that book, he was going to get to puzzle 500 before he died.

Once, my aunt picked up the book, started working on one of the puzzles. “Stop!” he said, his blue eyes dancing, playing with the smile under his beard, “You’ll take a whole day off my life!” By the time April rolled around, he’d made it to puzzle 230. His last words to me were “18 across.”

“We never do puzzles anymore,” I say now to my brother.

“Well, yes,” he says.

We both know why that is, but it’s been almost two years now, maybe it’s time to start doing puzzles again, to start living in the world again, to get out from under this weight. I look over at these strangers, these nice people, who don’t know that we’ve lost our anchor, our mooring. They prob­a­bly think we look just like regular people.

“Adjec­tive,” I say to Isaac.

“Incor­po­re­al,” he says.

“What? Do you even know what that means?” I ask him.

“Intan­gi­ble,” he says.  “Some­thing you can’t touch, but you know is there.”


Andrea lives on the coast of Maine, where she works in non-profit devel­op­ment. She spends as much time as pos­si­ble on the Damariscot­ta River with friends and family, includ­ing her teenage son. Andrea is a second semes­ter student at Stonecoast. In 2016, her first pub­lished essay, “Breathe,” was nom­i­nat­ed for a Push­cart Prize, named a Maine Lit­er­ary Awards final­ist, and named a Best Amer­i­can Essays notable essay.



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