By Samhita Chitturi

On Thursday, October 5, 2023, at 6 P.M., Michael “Mike C.” Czyzniejewski gave a reading of three short stories from his latest collection “The Amnesiac in the Maze” as part of the Fall 2023 Smith Reading Series.

He read the following three stories in this order: “The Hemophiliac Engages the Glass Eater”, “The Nudist Contemplates Cannibalism”, “The Vegetarian Eats the Vegan: Five Scenarios”. From the titles alone, I think you can tell that this collection is a wild one. Descriptions that come to my mind include: absurd, weirded out, and what the ****.

Czyzniejewski tells us that he came up with this collection by following a pattern. Every story began with thinking of the title. Tropes with unlikely relationships. Tropes whose main purposes are subverted. From there, the stories grew. When asked where some specific ideas came from, like the notion of nudists becoming cannibals, he says, “I was sitting around one day and thought they go together well.”

While his joke alludes to the very real simplicity of initial idea origination, his stories are far from random absurdities put together for the sake of it.

Czyzniejewski says that “every character has to face what they least want to face” in his collection. In fact, he advises other writers that they should attempt to deliberately have their characters’ lives progress this way. “Make your characters do things they don’t want to do,” he says, “because that makes it really interesting.”

George Looney, in his introduction, described Czyzniejewski’s stories as “contemporary parables” which I can affirm as an accurate description. Each story is a metaphor. Each story makes you question the way the world works and the realities of what occurs in our lives on a day to day basis as well as what it really means to be human in the messed up world we live in.

If you like to read, then definitely check out “The Amnesiac in the Maze”. I guarantee, it is worth the read.

Czyzniejewski grew up in Chicago, Illinois, earned his M.A. in Rhetoric at the University of Illinois and an M.F.A. in Fiction at Bowling Green. He has worked as an editor for the “Mid-American Review” and currently is an editor for the “Moon City Review” and a professor at Missouri State University.

For more about  Czyzniejewski and his career, read the interview article I wrote about him for the “Erie Reader” at https://www.eriereader.com/article/an-interview-with-short-story-writer-michael-czyniejewski.