by Dennis Dalman
When published author Cynthia Frank-Stupnik of Sartell “talks turkey” about the hard work of writing and getting published, she wears two hats for her audiences.
First she dons a cap, something one could see on a breezy, relaxing day on a golf course. That hat, she notes, represents the notion many people have of the writing-editing-publishing process – lots of inspiration spewing from a pen or computer keys onto pages as a masterpiece breezily emerges.
Then Frank-Stupnik dons a no-nonsense, functional, protective construction hard hat. That hat, she says, symbolizes the hard long battle, full of bumps and bruises, that go into the often frustrating processes of writing, editing and publishing.
To paraphrase great inventor Thomas Alva Edison, genius (and writing) is 1 percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration. It’s an adage Frank-Stupnik understands.
“It’s work,” Frank-Stupnik said. “It’s hard work. The cutting, the changing, the things you do to make it better, but you just know when it’s finally right.”
After having written essays, a memoir, a novel, a book of poetry and several historical works, she is well aware of how much work it takes – work that includes endless interruptions from daily life, the necessity of having to re-think and re-write, getting “stuck” sometimes by writer’s block, finding a publisher and then having to amend or re-write yet again to bring the project into line with what the publisher requires.
Frank-Stupnik just completed teaching a two-part course on writing and publishing for members of the Sartell Senior Connection. She often shares her experiences with such groups, as well as book clubs and others interested in the art of writing and the publishing trade.
A long-time English teacher in South Dakota, Frank-Stupnik’s life has been surrounded happily and defined by language, by the shaping of words to bring meaning to life experiences – her own and others. When she was in third grade, she made up her mind: she would become a teacher and writer.
Her first book, published in 1996, took years of research. It’s called Steppes to Neu Odessa: Germans from Russia Who Settled in Odessa Township, Dakota Territory, 1872-1876. The book is a biographical dictionary of the first settlement of German-Russians in the area where she lived and taught in South Dakota.
“I did research for eight years,” she said. “I made phone calls, read newspapers, visited libraries, met with people who gave oral histories. I put many miles on my car in those years.”
Later, a new world of genealogical research opened for Frank-Stupnik via the Internet. Suddenly, she had ready access, via her fingertips, to massive amounts of information concerning the German-Russian immigrants who came from the Odessa area in Russia to South Dakota, including Frank-Stupnik’s own relatives, and her father himself, a German-Russian. By then her book had already been published, but with all the new information, she updated and expanded the book, and it was published again – in 2002.
Last year, Frank-Stupnik published a novel entitled Scruples and Drams, which is about young Jennie Phillips, who is an apprentice in her father’s drug store in the late 19th Century in Clearwater, Minn. While on a walking trip to deliver a prescription in the country, she is startled when she encounters what some believe to be the ghost of a murdered Irish girl roaming in a tamarack swamp. She soon becomes obsessed with the case of the murdered girl and, little by little, discovers to her sadness that even rape and murder can occur in what she thought of as her idyllic village. Frank-Stupnik did an enormous amount of historical research for her historical novel, and many incidents and developments in the book are based on the realities of the late 19th Century in Clearwater, a city that Frank-Stupnik has always loved since childhood and which informs so much of her work.
One example of the constant surprises that occur in the writing process is when Frank-Stupnik realized, while writing Scruples and Grams, that something seemed to be lacking in the scene where Jennie is walking through the woods. She thought and thought, and then it dawned on her: animals! She then added some sights and sounds of animals, and the scene was fleshed out nicely.
Another Clearwater-based book is Postcards from the Old Man and Other Correspondence from Clearwater, published in 2004. It’s a memoir of Frank-Stupnik’s leaving her home town for the larger world.
Life of words
Born in the St. Cloud Hospital, Cynthia Frank grew up in Clearwater, one of three children. Her father, who worked at the Granite City Ironworks in St. Cloud, was originally from Yankton, S.D., a place Cynthia would later get to know so well. Her mother was from Haven Township near the St. Cloud Airport.
Frank graduated from St. Cloud Tech in 1968, worked as a bookkeeper in the Twin Cities for a time, then returned to Clearwater and became a secretary-receptionist at the nuclear power plant in nearby Monticello.
“That was a wonderful job,” she recalled.
One day, Frank and three girlfriends decided to take a breezy car trip out to Rapids City, S.D.
“We just wanted to do something different and crazy,” she recalled.
A cousin of hers, a captain in the Air Force, set up Frank for a blind date with a soldier, but before the date could happen, the guy was shipped out for duty in Vietnam. So her cousin rousted up another date, a friend named Frank Stupnik. It didn’t take them long to fall in love. They were married in 1971.
At first the Stupniks lived in a house they built just two miles from St. Stephen, a rather appropriate place as Frank is a second-generation Slovenian, like so many others in St. Stephen. They’d moved into that house from St. Cloud when Frank was attending college. Later, they moved to South Dakota when Frank landed a manufacturing-engineering job there, and that is where Frank-Stupnik began years of teaching as well as her creative-writing work. They lived for 30 years in Watertown.
Frank-Stupnik earned a bachelor’s degree in English from South Dakota State University, Brookings, and later a master’s in English, also from SDSU. One of her first historical-research works was Harvesting Their Stories: South Dakota’s Writers’ Perspectives on Pioneer Woman, 1870-1900. A recurrent theme of her work is how women of that day and age had to struggle and adapt to such often grueling lives, deprivations and lack of opportunities.
In South Dakota, Frank-Stupnik was constantly involved in her work with words, including as president for eight years of the South Dakota Poets’ Society. She was just as busy helping raise their two sons: Todd and Matthew, who are both highly successful, both with master’s degrees, and both who live in the Twin Cities. The Stupniks are the grandparents of three girls, with another grandchild on the way.
In 2013, the Franks moved to north Sartell, not too far from St. Stephen, from the house they’d built and left 30 years ago when they moved to South Dakota.
Frank-Stupnik’s latest project, just completed, is a picture book of postcards and captions entitled Around Clearwater. Arcadia Publishing contracted with Frank-Stupnik to do the book for part of Arcadia’s extensive series of “Around . . . “ picture books.
Soon she plans to start another historical novel, also about a woman in Clearwater, a remarkable woman who lived to be 103.
For now, however, she’s taking a brief break. The work on the Clearwater picture book was exceedingly difficult because of so many busy things going on in her life during the making of the book. Her hard hat firmly ensconced on her head, she toiled away at it, and it was a huge relief, finally, to finish it.
There are 203 postcard photos in the 128-page book, and the captions for the photos are anywhere from 50 to 150 words or so. She also wrote a historical introduction for each of the eight chapters. Like all of her other works, this book also required lots of fine-tuning touch-ups after she finished the first draft.
Arcadia Publishing will release Around Clearwater in July 2016.
Many of the postcard photos for the book came from Frank-Stupnik’s sister, Becky Frank, who lives in St. Joseph and is known as the “collector in the family” and who owns a dazzling collection of artifacts, photos and ephemera, some of which she purchases on Ebay.
Some of Frank-Stupnik’s books are available on amazon.com.
To find out more about her work, go to cynthiafrankstupnik.com.