O Street

by Corrina Wycoff

Raised in poverty by a schizophrenic single mother who self-medicates with heroin, Elizabeth Dinard’s childhood was fraught with emotional and financial insecurity and dark exploitations. Now living a fragmented and desperate adulthood, Elizabeth continually attempts to outrun her brutal past, but proves unable to let go of her love for the charismatic, lawless mother who continues to haunt her. This debut collection of tightly linked stories introduces two of the most memorable characters in contemporary fiction, and Elizabeth’s gritty determination to survive—to simply exist—is an enormous, if bittersweet victory.

Corrina Wycoff’s fiction and essays have appeared in Other Voices, New Letters, Coal City Review, The Oregon Quarterly, Brainchild, Out of Line, Golden Handcuffs, and the anthologies: Best Essays Northwest and The Clear Cut Future. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Oregon, and an MA in English from the University of Illinois, Chicago. She lives with her son in Seattle, Washington, and teaches English and writing at Pierce College.

“O Street makes you think of great writers in strange combinations: Dreiser and Welty; Wright and McCullers; Joan Didion and Stephen Crane. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen naturalism this honest, accurate and unapologetic. …None of this ‘emerging writer’ stuff—this writer is here.“
—David Bradley, author of The Chaneysville Incident

“In O Street, Corrina Wycoff paints a harrowing portrait of familial pain, mental illness, and the sometimes cruel tenacity of love. Hers is a world, undone, through which mothers and daughters falter and fall, yet Wycoff never lets us forget the redemptive power these women hold for each other.”
—Aimee Liu, author of Cloud Mountain and Flash House

When love and anger live together in a bottomless hole, the only way to escape one is to also give up the other. Stripped of sentimentality and sanguinity, Corrina Wycoff ’s O Street is a relentless stare into the dark yawn of brutality. From her birth through early adulthood, Elizabeth Dinard follows her mentally-ill mother into the dark extremities of an at-best confusing, often tortured, always indissoluable relationship. This is White Oleander blown into A Million Little Pieces.
—Cris Mazza, author of Disability and Many Ways To Get It, Many Ways To Say It