Ken Tangvik is a white Dorchester native who spent most of his early years steeped in the quasi-apartheid culture of mid-twentieth century Boston. Clearly unwilling to swallow the dictates of racism or age, he has been married twice, first to a Puerto Rican and now to a Brazilian woman. The births of his children span more than two decades. His latest creative effort is "Don't Mess With Tanya: Stories Emerging From Boston's Barrios," a collection of short stories that confront the difficulties many inner city teens face.

In the cross-cultural, multi-generational world that Boston has become, he is a trailblazer, a man with his feet on multiple paths who has never been one to walk away from danger. He has spent the last 25 years heavily engaged in community life, particularly focused on stemming the violence that routinely plagued Jamaica Plain's youth in and around Hyde Square. Murder and mayhem were common. Drug dealers walked the streets near his home, boldly soliciting him for sales, even as a young father with babe in arms, making crack cocaine more accessible than food.

An active, founding member of Jamaica Plain's Hyde Square Task Force, now 57 and a professor of English literature at Roxbury Community College, he has written a slender volume of short stories that packs a powerful punch. From decades of street work, he has developed a small cadre of carefully crafted characters who don't fade from memory, characters who you already know, gleaned from real life, who struggle with racism, street violence and drugs, whose families are both there and not there, whose lives are just a few steps removed from being gunned down by their neighbors, caught in the downward spiral of criminality or simply drowned in addiction.

Although the context of place and time are Boston neighborhoods in the late 20th century, make no mistake, the truer context, the psychological context is the minefield of adolescence where the inseparable playmates of fun and drugs, sexuality and promiscuity, cultural pride and belligerence can each be mistaken for the other. These are not easy stories.  

Think of the dark vision of Robert Cormier or of Judy Blume, targeted to an older audience and accompanied by a razor and a line of cocaine. For their intended audience these stories are far more important than great literature, which can tend to be inaccessible or irrelevant. These stories are doorways into critical thinking and higher education in general, populated by a few special characters, of whose roundness and fullness we are given too brief a glimpse. For all that, perhaps he lets them off a little too lightly. We never get to see the full ravages of the bogey man. Their worst fears are not realized. Optimism somehow survives.

The lives that Tangvik has shown us are an amalgam of incidents on the streets and behind closed doors. They are tethered to the wisdom of a man who has walked those streets and lived in those apartments. There is Tanya, the black girl with a chip on her shoulder, smart as a whip and happy to crack it. Tito, the sincere and frightened Latino boy who's challenged by the territorial street gang on his route to and from school, and Matt, the bewildered white college boy who lives in the ghetto and lugs around addiction as if it were a giant toy. They are each precariously balanced on the tightrope between adolescence and adulthood with apparently no safety net, yet none of them plunges to his or her death. That might be the ultimate point of identification Tangvik gives his readers, after all they are also not dead. They are also survivors.

For young, urban readers who are just beginning to realize how deeply important literature and literacy can be in their lives, these are their true stories of danger, of anger and frustration, of sexuality, drugs, violence and hard choices. These are not stories of nuance, although nuance is there, nor are they the stuff of carefully observed habits and tics of personality. There is no pretension in these tales. These stories are tools for examination and introspection, a mirror for the angry black girl, the racist white boy and the struggling Latino, all of whom are threatened by the demands of survival and challenged by the mysterious route to prosperity.

Tangvik's art is in the deep concern he has for his characters and his audience and the subtle ways in which he challenges them to consider their predicament. We want to know more about them. We want them to know more about themselves. Tangvik has more, but we’ll have to wait for the novel.

Don't Mess with Tanya: Stories Emerging from Boston's Barrios

Aberdeen Bay 2011 www.aberdeenbay.com