By Morgan O’Grady

Mark Brazitais called me on a rainy-day Saturday and admitted me into graduate school. Immediately, I jumped around on my bed while the calm voice on the other end of the phone explained what my admittance meant. I commenced official professor research, known to some as professor stalking, and discovered that Mark has many achievements: a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Best American Short Stories Award, the Iowa Short Fiction Award, and he is published in, among many other places, Ploughshares, The Sun, Poetry International, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. To top this off, he has four other published works: a novel, Steal My Heart; two collections of stories, the Iowa Short Fiction Award winner The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala and An American Affair: Stories; and the ABZ Poetry Prize award-winning book, The Other Language: Poems. Currently, Mark has two prize-winning new books coming out: a collection of short stories, The Incurables, and a forthcoming novel, Julia & Rodrigo.

I’m sure Mark Brazaitis did not jump up and down on his bed in February when he found out that his collection of stories, The Incurables, won the The Richard Sullivan Prize for Short Fiction. That’s okay; I have it covered.

His collection is being compared to Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, and it is just as haunting. Mark said he was not intentionally setting out to write an updated version of Anderson’s collection, but it’s not hard to see the similarities. All of the stories take place in Sherman, Ohio. When I googled Sherman, Ohio, a military training ground came up as well as a Wikipedia page about John Sherman, aka the “The Ohio Icicle.” By placing his stories in Sherman, Mark says it allowed him to “populate it” and not worry about a town with established memories.

Mark says he kept his collection “without judgement” as it moves through the themes of mental illness and family struggles. The Incurables is culturally signficant to the millions in America suffering from mental illness, and for those that don’t, it may feel cathartic to live vicariously through lives that, quoting Mark, “[go] off the rail.” Even if Mark is not a former porn star or a sheriff like some of his characters, he is able to connect emotionally and, as he says, “understand them and feel what they feel.” The Times Literary Supplement reviewed the book and said, “The Incurables deserves a lasting place among regional story cycles; it brings small-town Ohio palpably alive and combines a comic relish for the bizarre with a tenderness towards human frailty.” Recently, New Pages added to the praise, calling The Incurables “[masterful],” “hilarious,” and “haunting.”

More good news arrived later in the year when Mark’s novel Julia & Rodrigo won the 8th Annual Gival Press Novel Award. His novel will be published by Gival Press in 2013. Julia & Rodrigo focuses on a relationship between two Guatemalan teenagers in love and their struggles to overcome societal and cultural norms. He first wrote a synopsis of the novel during graduate school at Bowling Green University. A modern day “Romeo & Juliet,” Mark did think about the archetypal idea, but he did not focus on it because historically this is one of the ways, as he says, “romance works.”

The novel explores Guatemalan society’s cultural awareness of race, ethnicity, and class. Mark explained to me the division between Catholics and Evangelicalism and Protestants, Ladinos and indigenous, and landowners and farm workers; Julia and Rodrigo are in opposite categories on all accounts. And this all happens during the Guatemalan Civil War. The small town setting allows all of these dichotomies to clash beautifully because there is no way to avoid contact. Thaddeus Rutowski, the final judge of the contest, said “this finely crafted novel goes a long way toward answering the question of whether human free will can overcome fate, or God’s will.”

Mark is currently working on stories set in a skating rink. A mysterious place, and sort of scary, hopefully we will see a collection of these stories soon. In the mean time, go ahead a pick up a copy of The Incurables and pre-order your copy of Julia & Rodrigo.