Ellen Slezak

Ellen Slezak grew up in the Detroit area, the middle child in a family of five daughters. She has strong Polish ancestry and many of her protagonists are also of Polish decent. She utilizes her knowledge of Polish culture to add authenticity to her character's cultural backgrounds. Slezak also includes places familiar to anyone who is familiar with Detroit and it's suburbs. This adds an element of reality to her fiction.

In her self reflective essay, Kissing Wayne Newton, Slezak discusses the closeness of her family. Interestingly, she comments of her mother, "She’s the one who taught me never to leave the house without a book..." Slezak views her mother as a positive influence and looked up to her as a girl. However, one of the major themes in Slezak's work is the absence of a mother figure for her characters.

Slezak appears to be preoccupied with the concept of an absent or silent mother since in her short story collection, Last Year 's Jesus, in seven out of ten texts, a child, most often a daughter, has to come to terms with a mother absent either physically due to death or abandonment or absent emotionally because of total involvement with another child who is sick or dying.

Absent mothers seem to be a major concern of Slezak.

Also mentioned in Kissing Wayne Newton is Slezak's identity as a Catholic.

When I was a kid I had deeply ambivalent feelings about the Catholic Holy Week... I haven’t called myself a Catholic in more than thirty years, but my tall sister remains devout. I’d often challenged her about her Catholic faith, asking how she could identify as a member of a church that had doctrines against gay people, birth control, abortion, and women priests, when she herself supported gay rights, had used birth control, was pro-choice, and believed that a woman could turn water and wine into body and blood as well as any man.

Despite these views on the religion she was raised in, the Catholic faith appears in many of Slezak's works. Many of her protagonists are Catholic or were raised in the Catholic religion. One review of her book states, Sadness and how the different characters deal with it form the basis for most of the plots in Last Year's Jesus. Many also deal in some way with the characters' religion, specifically Roman Catholicism." Despite her break with the Catholicism, it still greatly influences her writing.

Other than her collection of short stories, Last Year's Jesus, Slezak has also published a novel, All These Girls, as well as reviews in many publications.

If you want to check out Ellen Slezak's essay Kissing Wayne Newton, click here.

Slezak, Ellen. "Kissing Wayne Newton." AGNI Online. Boston University, 2008. Web. 31 Jan 2012. http://www.bu.edu/agni/essays/online/2009/slezak.html.

Kozaczka, Grazyna. "The Silent One." Polish American Historical Association. 66.1 (2009): n. page. Web. 31 Jan. 2012. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20533158%20..