Review by Mack Hassler
A beautifully-designed chapbook by Amy Hansen, Superior Stories is the product of workshopping for creative writers and chosen by chief judge Brian Gruley as the latest of this long series of chapbook winners. I have not reviewed any of the series previously, but the work of Raica=Klotz is very impressive. She herself has published her creative non-fiction ot expository work in important journals, and she has taught writing courses at Saginaw Valley State University near Central Michigan, where she earned her M.A. in English. She credits this award-winning Chapbook to a couple years being mentored in this program and as she says, “…in learning about the wild and wonderful world of fiction.” (p 34) Bryan Gruley blurbs about his judging choice of her work as “…painting a [hard but enchanting landscape of] … up North characters … a travelogue of human hope and grief, aspiration and desperation.”
She has learned a lot from the workshopping to create characters and to tell stories in what she calls above “the wonderful world of fiction.” Her cast of vivid characters, all set in the Houghton/Hancock region where she is living now range from old women “drowning” in dementia to many other examples of loss. A couple of friends talk in a bar about one of them each morning having “to introduce himself to his mother “ before caring for her. (p 3) His drinking friend counters with a story about a guy in a bad marriage who “was a drunk…drove off the road and ended up in the canal, probably trying to cross the water to get to the next bar.” (p 6) Each story is about loss and, in a sense, the drowning of personality. One of my favorites is a story told by Raica- Klotz of a good Lutheran girl who ends up tearing up all her images of Jesus until “…all she can see are the pink pale roses curving up her wall like Jesus was never there. (p 23)
Superior Stories also provides the best expository writing that I have seen recently of the canal between Houghton and Hancock (Raica-Klotz reports that the path of the canal is along what the native Americans had called “the crossing” to get from one side of the Keewenaw to the other. She also writes good reporting about the drawbridge (pictured well on the cover by the book designer) that connects the two towns so that Hancock is no longer a part of the Keewenaw Peninsula but, actually, an island. As the famous early modern poet John Donne had written “no man is an island.” Therefore in my reading, Raica- Klotz adds great resonance with her expository writing to her newly learned skills of storytelling. The Bridge itself, which is one of her titles. Resonates well with the other “Bridge” we always think of when we think of the UP. Most of the srories have “weather” titles and these resonate both with the bitter sense of loss in the storytelling as well as with the harsh winters in the Copper Country. The opening paragraphs of her first story “The Canal” are, in fact, just very clear and evocative expository writing about the construction and the geography of the Region. Even with a little bit of dementia, which many of us have, we will not forget those paragraphs. Raica-Klotz is just a good writer, now transformed by this Chapbook contest into a fiction writer
I would say that we ought to watch her work as she develops further, probably to her first novel. She is very good and seems to be still learning.
Superior Stories by Helen Raica-Klotz (First book chapbook winner of the Writers Cooperative Press series, 2025 , Traverse City MI 49685), 38 pages, pbk, n.p.
