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Self
Storage and Other Stories
The
1998 Banta Award BOOK Her characters, so well drawn that we recognize them as ourselves or people we know, wrestle with moral choices, with the knowledge that they are connected to others and that what they think and do makes a difference. They try to follow the angels' advice to the poet Czeslaw Milosz, quoted at the book's beginning, "day draws near/another one/do what you can." Their efforts to do what they can are depicted in beautiful, deceptively simple prose, peppered with images so vivid they can startle. In the title story, the manager, whose gender is intriguingly never revealed and ultimately irrelevant, of Nutty Squirrels Self-Storage Mini-Warehouse, collects "the orphaned things, the homeless goods, the forgotten objects of America" in vacant storage units. These are not material goods but runaway teenagers, illegal immigrants, the homeless whom he- or she- has kindly allowed to live there. A human community is created in the most unlikely of spots. In "On the Coast of Bohemia," a fourth grade girl, playing hooky from the after-school day care program in which her mother has placed her to keep her safe, pedals her bicycle "down Dewey to enjoy the way the cobblestones made her handlebars tickle the palms of her hands," a route that leads to an encounter with an old woman resisting her son's efforts to place her in a retirement home to keep her safe. These two kindred spirits at either end of life's spectrum forge a friendship that survives the well-intentioned interference of their families. In "The Lonely Seat," another set of parents, each in their own way, struggle with the knowledge that they cannot keep their children entirely safe when a neighbor boy accidentally drowns. In "Voyeurs," Stefaniak slyly invests with lessons on the meaning of loyalty and responsibility what appears, at first, to be a comic coming of age story about a young girl's first sight of a naked man. In "America, the Beautiful," a Croatian grandmother, now resettled in Milwaukee, refuses to adapt to her new American life while her grandson is anxious to be accepted, particularly by a pretty schoolmate "with an all-American lisp." Despite their cross purposes, the two learn they are tied by bonds that go beyond words. In "Dear Mike the Mechanic," Stefaniak makes rare and accomplished use of the epistolary form to tell a poignant story of an elderly widow. Her letters to a mechanic to try to find out why the red light keeps coming on in her car are a metaphor for all the menacing changes in her life. Stefaniak is a masterful technician: she can depict either gender and all ages convincingly; she can use first and third person narrative with equal skill; she paints stunning word pictures. But the beauty and the importance of these stories go far beyond technique. They demonstrate a belief in the essential goodness of people coupled with an indulgent understanding of their weaknesses that make the reader feel connected to the human race and glad to be so. The
AUTHOR A true Wisconsin author, Mary Helen Stefaniak was born and raised in Milwaukee, which has been the setting for some of her fiction. She graduated from St. Mary's Academy there and went on to earn degrees from Marquette University and The Iowa Writer's Workshop. She has taught literature and writing courses in a variety of Midwestern settings: an all-girl Catholic high school in Milwaukee, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the University of Iowa, the Summer Writing Festival at the University of Iowa, Grinnell College, Eastern Iowa Community College, the University of Nebraska at Omaha, and Creighton University. Now a professional writer, she brings an interesting array of life experiences to her work. In addition to her academic positions, she has been a sales clerk, a model, a US Census interviewer, a volunteer soccer coach, a French teacher, a European tour guide, a Fiction Editor for The Iowa Review, and a commentator for Iowa Public Radio. Self Storage and Other Stories is her first book, but her short stories and non-fiction have appeared in Redbook, EPOCH, The Yale Review, The Iowa Review, Short Story, North American Review, The Crescent Review, and the anthologies Bless Me Father and A Sweet Secret. Her work has also been published in translation in Croatia. Her fiction has won awards from Iowa Woman magazine (1992), the Second International Conference on the Short Story in English (1992), New Rivers Press (Minnesota Voices Project, 1997), and the University of Illinois at Chicago (Editor's Fiction Prize, 1997). Since 1982, Mary Helen Stefaniak has lived in Iowa with her husband and three children. 1998
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