From 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 18, the faculty and graduate students of the humanities department celebrated Dr. Stephanie Carpenter’s debut collection of short stories, “Missing Persons.”
The book was published by Press 53 and won the 2017 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction. There are 10 short stories in the collection which have been previously published in literary journals including Crab Orchard Review, Nimrod International Journal and The Missouri Review among others.
Dr. Dana Van Kooy, director of English and liberal arts section of the humanities department and assistant professor of English in transnational literature, literary theory and culture, welcomed the audience and introduced Carpenter.
Van Kooy congratulated Carpenter saying “we all are very proud of Stephanie”. She also revealed that Press 53 released the book on Oct. 10, which was Carpenter’s birthday and also the 12-year anniversary of Press 53’s founding.
According to Press 53, the stories in “Missing Persons” “offer readers a glimpse into the lives of ordinary people facing out-of-the-ordinary problems [such as] street sweepers sending incomplete messages that a young couple is compelled to decipher; a young woman travels back home with her boyfriend to help him sort through the lives of his deceased parents; a woman smitten with a living-statue artist; and a man finding himself with an unwanted house guest he met through a dating app” among others.
George Saunders, the 2017 winner of the Man Booker Prize, says Missing Persons is “inventive, magical, compelling, and strange in just the way life and people are strange. Stephanie Carpenter is a rare and wonderful talent.”
Carpenter read a short story from the book and opened the floor for audience interaction. There was an interlude during which she read a section of a longer short story. During the audience interaction, Carpenter was asked about how the stories came together. She replied “These are individual short stories that I wrote over time and eventually put together in a collection. The book’s title comes from the stories’ shared theme of disappearance.”
About the publishing process, Carpenter said, “there were some moments of uncertainty in the process, but it all worked well in the end.”
Speaking to the Lode about the book’s availability, Carpenter said the book is “not yet in any physical bookstore [in the Houghton area].” There are, however, copies available online at Press 53, Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
Carpenter holds a Masters of Fine Arts degree from Syracuse University and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and American Literature from the University of Missouri. She will be the artist in residence at The Studios at Key West, Florida from June to July 2018. She recently was the artist in residence at the Dickinson House, Olsene, Belgium in June 2017 as a Henry James Grant recipient; and in Ragdale, Lake Forest, Illinois in Jan. 2017. She recently won the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library in Delaware’s Maker-Creator Fellowship to support two novellas that she is currently writing.
