Who Is Milena?

 

Who Is Milena?

In the late 1980s, Milena Miklavčič (born 1952) began working at Radio Sora. By her own account, this was one of the most creatively vibrant periods of her life. Even then, she was fascinated by how people in Slovenia had lived in earlier times, from the late nineteenth century to the present day, with a particular focus on Slovenian sexual customs—subjects that were, and remain, taboo in public debate. Her first stories appeared on the popular radio programme Interesting People Live Among Us. After little more than a year, they grew into a serial entitled Destinies in the newspaper Gorenjski glas, where it continues to appear today. Some experts told her not to delve into sexual detail, yet it was always precisely the forbidden that fascinated her.

‘The silence surrounding sex was, and still is, a form of omertà,’ Milena Miklavčič says. That she managed to break it was, in its way, something of a miracle. Even today, there is little or no discussion of sex within families. As a result, young people sadly know next to nothing about the intimate lives of their parents and ancestors.

When she began working in radio, she started out with children’s stories for Zakajček’s Corner. The first of these were later collected in the 1991 book The Alphabet from Zakajček Street. Turn Left at the Oak was named the best self-published book in Slovenia in 2007. Her favourite children’s adventure novel, Dot on B., appeared in 2008. Further titles followed: Šnitka (2009), Marička and the Teddy Bear (2010), Who Destroyed the Swallow’s Nest?, Gal and the Hungry Pears (2011), The Little-Great Gardener (2012), Julia from Zakajček Street, Ajda and the Witch’s Troubles in Fairyland (2018), Cooking Mischief (2021), and others.

Destinies was published in 2004, followed six years later by Women. The books went through several reprints, the latest an expanded edition published in 2023. Readers also responded very warmly to her crime novel Where Is the Child?

A year later came another crime novel, Soft as a Razor, based on several stories from the fifth volume of Fire, Arse and Snakes Are Not for Playing With, subtitled Lučka’s Stories and Other Tales.

The first book in the Fire, Arse and Snakes Are Not for Playing With collection was followed by a second in 2017, subtitled Grandmothers, Daughters, Granddaughters. Men’s Stories followed in 2019. The fourth volume, Look, My People Are Coming!, took shape when COVID-19 broke out. The fifth, subtitled Lučka’s Stories and Other Tales, takes us into the world of a fortune-teller who spent more than forty years recording the stories of the people whose futures she foretold.

The collection’s roughly 1,700 pages contain several thousand stories written by life itself. The books belong to the category known as citizen science, or citizen-led research, and are unique both in Slovenia and internationally. Milena, who calls herself ‘the last storyteller’, is chiefly interested in the lives of women within the family: their relationships with their husbands, children, mothers-in-law and themselves. The stories of those she has spoken to take us into a world we generally keep hidden from others, a world full of intimacy, suffering, deprivation and sexual violence. Yet it is also a world of beautiful, sunlit moments that warm us and make us smile.

And one more thing: for almost ten years, Milena hosted public conversations with Slovenian cultural figures at the Ivan Tavčar Library in Škofja Loka, and later in Žiri. For several years, she organised the Lacemaking Literary Competition as part of the Slovenian Lacemaking Days. A similar competition in Trebnje gave rise to the book Stories about Good People. She continues to answer all manner of questions about life in her Milena Advises column for the newspaper Nedelo, while her columns also appear in Reporter, Domovina and Siol. She also writes the blog Jutri 2052.

The first volume of Fire, Arse and Snakes Are Not for Playing With also caught the attention of film director Urška Djukić, who made the animated documentary Granny’s Sexual Life. Among its many prestigious honours, the film won the European Film Award for Best Short Film in Reykjavík. In the 2021/22 season, director Mirjana Medojević brought The Apparitions of the Dragonfly, based on stories from Fire, Arse and Snakes Are Not for Playing With, to the stage at SNG Maribor.

Sociologist Dr Zdravko Mlinar wrote of the first volume:

‘At the same time, viewed from the perspective of sociology as a discipline, this first volume presents both a challenge and an opportunity to draw attention to certain substantive, methodological and epistemological questions concerning, more broadly, the involvement of laypeople in what is known as participatory research, an approach currently coming to the fore internationally. Beneath the book’s accessible form lies important material that even professional researchers into this area of human experience cannot afford to overlook. Although Slovenian research, too, shows that the social organisation of sexuality has undergone major changes over a relatively short period, none of these studies demonstrates the scale and depth of those changes as convincingly as the testimonies of older women presented in Milena Miklavčič’s book. These accounts are a valuable source of information because they show that behind such broad labels lie the lives of individuals who grappled in different ways with the constraints imposed upon them by a restrictive sexual culture and often harsh living conditions. Because the testimonies collected by Milena Miklavčič are not confined to sexuality alone, they reveal both how sexuality is connected to other aspects of everyday life and how it remains distinct from them. For sociology, the findings of lay observation can be an important source of information and inspiration. From a methodological perspective, they can also provide sociology with compelling examples—as Milena Miklavčič’s first volume demonstrates.’