Raica-Klotz

In her linked story collection, Superior Stories, Helen Raica-Klotz takes readers deep into the physical and emotional lives of regular people trying and often failing to do the right thing-for themselves, their families, their friends, their northern Michigan worlds. Raica-Klotz conjures evocative settings and richly layered up-north characters with language that is at once concrete and elegiac, painting a hard yet enchanting landscape of tarpaper roofs, black ice, and hoar frost-a travelogue of human hope and grief, aspiration and desperation.

Superior Stories explores a sociological frontier-Michigan’s upper peninsula, where human drama is always pressurized by the biggest, most alluring, and most dangerous of all the Great Lakes. Here, Helen Raica-Klotz shows tender, annoying, careless, and hopeful Yoopers grappling with their own decisions and with conditions forced upon them. In each case, the characters are real, their struggles fully dramatized, and their situations hard to forget. There’s also some aesthetic risk. Each title begins with a crisp informational passage that gives way to finely crafted and intimate storytelling. In marrying reportage and narration, Raica-Klotz makes two distinct writerly forms feel harmonious, even natural in their union