Short fiction
The short form is where I test the strange ideas — some grew into books, some are complete exactly as they are.
The Lending Library of Forgotten Names
In a town where you can borrow a name you've lost, a librarian keeps one book no one is allowed to check out.
Seventeen Ways to Fold the Ocean
An origami master's final student learns that some folds don't unfold — a story told in seventeen creases.
The Man Who Kept His Mondays
He saved every Monday he didn't use in a jar on the shelf. This is the story of the week he opened it.
What the Frost Wrote
Each winter, sentences appear on one particular window. This year, they're addressed to her.
The Cartographer of Small Hours (original)
The short story that grew into the forthcoming novel — where the whole thing began.
The Understudy's Weather
A stand-in actor discovers that whichever role she's covering, the local weather starts to match the script. A story about being second, and what second-ness quietly gives you.
Instructions for Leaving a House Gently
Told as a numbered list, a woman narrates the small rituals of closing up a childhood home for the last time. Six hundred words, and most readers say it's the one that stays with them longest.
Where the stories tend to appear
Most of these first found readers in small literary magazines and anthologies, the kind that pay in copies and attention rather than headlines — which suits the work. A story like Seventeen Ways to Fold the Ocean needs an editor willing to sit with an odd structure for a while, and the small presses are usually the ones willing to do that.
On endings
A short story lives or dies on its last paragraph in a way a novel doesn't — a novel can recover from a soft landing; a story mostly can't. I write toward the ending from the first line, even when I don't know what it is yet, the way you can feel a staircase curving toward a door you haven't seen. When a draft's ending feels tidy, that's usually the sign it's wrong; the true ending tends to leave one small thing unresolved on purpose, the way Instructions for Leaving a House Gently never says whether she goes back.
On the short form
A story is a held breath; a novel is a long walk. I love both, but the short story is where I go to be surprised. Several of the pieces here — The Cartographer of Small Hours chief among them — turned out to have more room in them than I expected and grew into books. Others, like The Man Who Kept His Mondays, are exactly as long as they'll ever be. More on how the two forms feed each other in on writing and, in more granular detail, in process.