John Jodzio’s “If You Lived Here” proves Minnesotans can write

Minneapolis’ own John Jodzio has been making waves with his short fiction, nestling his way into literary magazines like Opium and The Florida Review , winning the Loft-McKnight Fellowship and earning the praise of everyone from Chuck Klosterman to local rapper Dessa . Jodzio’s next logical step was to publish a compilation of his short stories, and to do so he looked to local upstart Replacement Press . His submission ultimately bested 150 others to become the company’s first book release. The collection, “If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home ,” features 21 stories, some old and some new, that blend together the surreal and the mundane for results that are oftentimes as funny as they are tragic.
Jodzio tackles the biggies in this collection — issues of unrequited love and familial estrangement — but he freshens up what could be stale material with unlikely happenstance and bizarre characters. There’s a fine line being straddled, one that allows absurdity without destroying realism. This makes otherwise insane situations, like an amateur vet chaining his suicidal daughter to his car without repercussion, seem somehow plausible.
“You can’t go off on this flight of fancy without having your feet on the ground a little bit,” Jodzio said. “I think my stories would be totally unbelievable if I didn’t make sure that the reality of the story was really solid.”
To further cement the believability of his tales, Jodzio makes his unusual characters strangely sympathetic. It would be easy to condemn the protagonist of “Flight Path,” a cutter in a psych ward who sneaks into the room of a married, comatose man every night, but Jodzio masterfully employs a female, first person perspective and makes the protagonist likeable, despite her questionable actions.
“With these crazy things that are occurring, you want to make sure that the person has a soul and that you’re not just using them as a prop to set up some sort of situation,” Jodzio said. “So, you need to make sure that whatever they’re feeling is coming out in the story, too.”
Downtrodden characters and woe seem to pervade the collection, but Jodzio performs another trick by making the stories comedic. It’s sad that a poor clown is racked by the dognapping of his beloved Choco, but at the same time it’s too ridiculous to not be funny.
“I think what really distinguished his submission beyond many of the others was the humor with which he approached his subjects,” said Andrew De Young , Replacement Press’ managing editor. “He’s dealing with subject matter that in other hands might be pretty serious, earnest, maybe even a little bit depressing, but he approaches it with a little bit of a wink, a little bit of irony.”
“If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home” runs the board from outrageous to poignant, but it succeeds as a whole because Jodzio never loses sight of his characters. They’re failures, they’re contradictions and they’re entirely human.