Vend diagram

It’s pronounced “Chiz-ny-EV-ski,” but let’s just call him Mike.

“In the first workshop I took, I made up a pseudonym because I thought that’s what you did,” Czyzniejewski explains. “The name was Scott Michaels, which sounds like a terrible porn name.” It lasted three days.

The way the Calumet City native’s name juxtaposes the odd with the commonplace infuses his life, as well. Though he’s a full-time writing instructor at Bowling Green State University, where he’s editor-in-chief of Mid-American Review, he has spent the past 20 summers working at something less literary but equally noble: vending beer with his family at Wrigley Field.

And being a Cubs diehard, Mike knows the significance of numbers. He amassed 192 rejections before landing his first publication, “Streetfishing,” a story about two buddies casting their lines in the middle of the street, hoping to catch anything but loneliness. A decade later, that story is one of nearly 20 previously published pieces in his debut collection, Elephants in Our Bedroom (Dzanc, $16.95). The title story, about a husband who isn’t surprised by his wife’s nonreaction to the 800-pound elephant in the bedroom, captures the tone of the entire collection. Many of the stories revolve around the domestic discord of young marriages, with spouses yearning for happier times and the narrator realizing something too late.

“That’s me—being the last one to know,” Mike says, quick to point out that the theme doesn’t relate to his relatively young marriage to poet Karen Craigo, who is his first and most critical reader and coeditor-in-chief of MAR. The experiences the narrators endure (every story but one is in first person), he admits, add up to thickly veiled autobiography.

The bizarre underscores the familiar line of marital: A husband is alienated by his wife’s new friend and possible lover, a wooden dummy named Victor. In “Valentine,” a husband pursues his wife’s ob-gyn, whom she schedules appointments with every Valentine’s Day. In “Hapax Legomenon,” go-kart crazies employed at a pirate-themed mini-golf park terrorize the manager, whose mother is as insane as his stalker ex-girlfriend, who, heartbroken, blew off half of her face with a shotgun.

Each story starts with some oddity couched in a common situation, like “I was showering in the men’s locker room at my gym when I found out peanuts weren’t nuts.” That line opens “Cwm,” which is indeed a word and representative of the strange factoids sprinkled throughout the collection. The ending of each story is definitive but ambiguous. Czyzniejewski leaves it up to the reader to come up with his or her own interpretation. Instead of an explanation for that metaphoric elephant, for instance, you’re left with a profound lingering that the story was about something more. “I think it’s a big step for a writer to realize what a story is about,” he says.

Czyzniejewski finds curiosities everywhere—during his writing time at 3am when he might be Web surfing for an idea, or on his 20-minute walk to school, where he once mistook a squirrel on its hind legs for a monkey. And his new role as a father has deepened his perspective on things.

“My kid inspires me because I want to succeed and be like, ‘Hey, your dad’s not a total bum.’?” No, junior, he’s a writer, teacher and beer vendor. Though vending life has been too complicated to suit his short-story style, Mike is busy with a novel on beermen at Wrigley that may be too weird to be commercial.

“Fuck it,” he says. “I’m not going to write a novel that I don’t like.”

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