Hi! It’s been a minute, and this lovely little bookish corner of the internet has grown from 7 people who know me personally to more than 140 of you. Thank you all so much for subscribing and reading my words - we’re inundated with media, and I’m so incredibly grateful that you take time out of your day to read mine.
Given the fact that it’s been a while since I’ve done a proper introduction, I thought I’d take the time to describe my background, how I got into writing in the first place, and what I do here at The Chaotic Reader. The last time I did it was *checks notes* the first post I launched on Substack back in September, and according to the stats, as of this moment there are readers from 25 states and 18 countries here (!!!) so I can no longer assume you know me personally. So! Here’s what’s up.
About Me
My name is Marissa and I’m a writer. I decided I wanted to be a writer when I was 9 and realized that every child in my grade knew what they wanted to be when they grew up and I needed to get on that.1 It was a snowy day, and the rest is history.
We’ll get the professional stuff out of the way before we get into the writing bit. I graduated Cum Laude from the Loomis Chaffee School, Tufts University with a B.A. Cum Laude in Political Science and French, and Salve Regina University with a M.F.A. from The Newport MFA. I worked in tech for 10 years, and speak fluent (enough) French. My background is varied - at any point in college I could have had a history, psychology or econ minor.2 I also started out as a math major, and am currently the group calculator in my DnD group.
I currently am a freelance writer/teacher/petsitter extraordinaire based out of Providence, R.I. For the folks not from America, it’s the smallest state in the country, and is in the Northeast, part of New England. I’m a born and bred New Englander, other than a brief stint in California. You can take the girl out of New England, but you can’t take the New England out of the girl. I teach at a few universities as well as my community library. I also offer one off classes and am thinking of doing online courses, too. So if you’re interested in that kind of thing, let me know!
I have both an anxiety disorder and EDS, which is short for Ehler-Danlos Syndrome. I wrote more about that here.3 By definition, having these conditions means I’m disabled, but that’s a label I’m still navigating and I’m a fairly functional disabled person within that. But both of these things affect how I show up in the world (and on the page) so I wanted to be transparent.
Within my analytical writing, of which I include The Chaotic Reader, I often combine my interests: books, social science, and languages. So you’ll often see footnotes and outside sources cited. I veer towards more research rather than opinion. I believe in giving you the context of my opinions when I express them. While I am working on sharing more of my creative writing, I don’t publish a whole lot of that here at the moment. Mainly because I am working on a science fantasy novel. It’s about people who can control gravity and came to me in a fever dream on New Year’s Eve 2017.
It took me a while after my childhood revelation to get into fantasy and science fiction. I wanted to be a ~serious~ and ~respectable~ writer (I was 10) and decided that did not include fantasy or anything beyond the realm of the ordinary. Then I saw The Two Towers with one of my best friends, Emily. I had no idea what was going on and asked halfway through the movie where Bilbo was (because I had read The Hobbit, after all) but I LOVED IT. And so a very obsessive fantasy reader and writer was born. I made my family take me to the Museum of Science in Boston to the Lord of the Rings exhibit for my 13th birthday and lemme tell you that was a great birthday. I also made them watch the extended editions multiple times, to the chagrin of my long suffering brother. (Hi Chris.)
All of this to say - despite wanting to spend time in a galaxy far, far away, I do have analytical interests and this newsletter allows me to have an outlet for them. Especially when working on a longer project like a novel, it can help to have smaller things to work on.
Some assorted fun facts:
If you connect the freckles on my left arm, they form the Big Dipper. (Or the Pleiades. I don’t know my constellations very well)
I have grapheme —> color synesthesia, which means that I associate colors with numbers and letters automatically. I was 16 before I realized that not everyone thought in color.
Despite my exorbitantly Italian name and the fact that I’m working on obtaining Italian citizenship, I’m half Polish and have family in Poland. My cousin Iza and I were pen pals as kids, and I still have those letters. I was able to meet her and her family in person when I studied abroad in 2012.
(Iza is not in the below photo; she took it, but that’s her mom and grandfather. If you’re wondering why my feet are a different color than my face, they would not let me leave the house without stockings. Also we’re in a cemetery because Poland. But you can clearly see where I get the pale people genes from.)
While my curls are now my calling card, I was born with black hair and it was straight. As we’ve already established, I’m on the weird end of the gene pool, so I cannot explain this.
I really, really, really hate doing dishes and will do almost anything to not do them.
And speaking of Emily, there are about 6 of them that will get mentioned at various points. They are all different people I swear and not one person masquerading as all my friends. The 90s just really, really went hard with the name Emily and I happen to know a lot of them.
About The Chaotic Reader
is something I publish twice a week on Tuesdays and Fridays. I named The Chaotic Reader as such because I cannot be contained to one genre. While many Bookstagram or Booktok accounts focus on only one type of book, I read everything. I also find joy in reading everything, so it’s not just a bit! Maybe it’s because I’m stubborn and refuse to be told what to do, but trying to force myself to stick to one genre or type of book, fiction, non-fiction or poetry alike, is a recipe for disaster. Or maybe it’s just because I’m nosy and want to know what’s going on in all facets of the publishing industry. Who’s to say.
What is to say is that I like to have a plan. And that despite my impish streak, I do have some organization going on in the background. So here’s what you can expect on Tuesdays and Fridays when I pop into your inbox.
Tuesdays
On Tuesdays I tend to rotate between 4 separate topics. I usually have my own internal logic going on, so if you were to track these, they wouldn’t quite appear in this order month after month, but you can expect at least one post along these lines every month. I’ve linked below the most recent post of each type.
Book review - where I review a book I’ve read recently, usually because it relates to some kind of anecdote in my life.
List - where I give you a list of books on a certain topic, cemeteries I like, or something book or writing related.
Writing Advice - where I investigate some craft topic as it applies to your or my writing, or how it’s shown up in a book I’ve read.
Book adjacent - where I want to write about something that’s not really one of the above three options but does relate to books.4
Fridays
On Fridays we wear red. Kidding. On Fridays, you’ll get one of the following:
Weekly Roundup - a recap where I review what I’m reading/writing/listening to, as well as documentation of my mugs and my adventures in not buying books.
Artist Interviews - in depth interviews with a working artists. I am particularly interested in how working artists make their lives, well, work. I want to know how they balance their creative pursuits with the reality of being alive and supporting themselves, and what education and training led them to this moment. These usually appear once a month.
Like with the Tuesday posts, I linked the most recent version of each.
And that’s all folks! At least for now. I’ve got a running document of what I’m interested in writing, and folks I want to interview. And, I’ve got an interview coming out soon with Shinjini of
soon! If you have any questions, I’d love to hear them, and please feel free to introduce yourself in the comments.I was a very weird child.
I never officially did one because it became obvious towards my senior year that it wouldn’t really make a difference.
I probably also have POTS, MCAS, and Dysautonomia, all EDS related side conditions. But that's more doctor’s appointments that have yet to be completed.
Technically the most recent book adjacent post is this one, but tomato tomato.