Photo courtesy of Patrick Coryell.
Alina Stefanescu at her Forest Park home.
As a child, Alina Stefanescu said her mom always thought she was a powerful writer and would pay her and her sister money to memorize poems and recite them aloud. Her mother, a physician, had a big space in her heart for the arts, Stefanescu said.
It wasn’t until Stefanescu was a mother herself that she started focusing on writing more.
“I just really enjoyed being a mother,” Stefanescu said. “I also started looking at the world differently, whether it was a sense of wonder where they saw the world, or a sense of concern of all the things people don't want to talk about [with being a mother].”
“Every Mask I Tried On,” Stefanescu’s prize-winning collection of short stories published through Brighthorse Books, was released in bookstores throughout the U.S. on May 1.
Many of the stories — described as realistic fiction that also incorporates fabulism and magical realism — have been published in various literary journals, Stefanescu said, but were chosen to be part of the collection after she won the 2016 Brighthorse Books Prize.
Only one collection a year is chosen to be published, according to Brighthorse Books, and the author is also given prize money and 50 percent of the proceeds, which Stefanescu said is unusual and generous for a publishing company.
“That’s what they wanted to do for emerging writers, and it meant a lot for them to pick me,” she said.
Stefanescu, who has only lived in Forest Park for about 6 months, said she moved to Birmingham because she loved the city and the energy surrounding writers and poets. She plans to do readings of her books in local bookstores.
“Parts of it are really funny, [especially] if you like authors that make fun of all the funny things we do as mothers. There’s also love stories in this,” she said.
In the end, Stefanescu said it is a sweet book, though it can be dark. Many of the stories in the book are interwoven, she said, with some of the same characters coming back.
As an immigrant, Stefanescu said she plays with immigration as a constant theme because she felt like it was a subject she knows well.
Being born in Romania, where her parents chose to defect, she and her brother stayed for a while in the country with other family members before her parents brought her to America to apply for citizenship with them.
“Living between two places and not really belonging in either gives you insight to belonging in both. Sometimes you can see things that some people can’t,” she said. “It’s hard for me to not describe a land that isn’t haunted by its past, much like Romania.”
Another theme throughout the collection is mothers. Her mother, who the book is dedicated to, died before it was published. There’s a story in the book called “Mothers Who Died,” Stefanescu said, that encapsulates the impact her mother and her death had on her.
“She was my best friend, she was someone who knew the worst in me but refused to believe it. I think when someone is such a huge presence in your life, you feel naked in so many ways when they’re gone,” she said.
Stefanescu has three chapbooks published, as well as another book called, “Stories to Read Aloud to Your Fetus.”
Stefanescu is also the poetry editor of Pidgeonholes, the president of the Alabama State Poetry Society and a board member of the Alabama Writer’s Conclave.
For more information on her, go https://www.alinastefanescuwriter.com/.
Correction: The story now states that she has a sister, not brother.
