short stories – 2nd Avenue

Selected short-story reading (vol. 5)

I’m just weeks away from the end my Post-Graduate Diploma in Creative Writing and feeling out of my depth reading stage plays and film scripts and TV treatments. This term is all dramaturgy and I’ve taken solace in short fiction.

As the photo of me reading as a child demonstrates, escaping into story is nothing new—and I’ve got three more absorbing reads to share.

Selected short-story reading (vol. 4)

For the first year ever, I religiously tracked the books I read in 2021. From technical tomes on poetry and required reading for my Post-Graduate Creative Writing course, to cookbooks and the trashiest of romance novels, everything went into Goodreads. (Yeah, I’m not thrilled about it being Bezos-owned and the interface is pretty bad, but it’s the devil I know.)

The book-centric site can’t, however, capture all the smaller bits; the short stories, poems, and personal essays that fill my laptop screen or are thumbed through on my phone. Since starting the Creative Writing course, I’ve maintained a series of Google Docs where I sock away the best of those smaller bits. It’s useful when reflecting on what I read and how it influences my own work (a requirement for the final term assessments)—and it’s a great source for recommendations!

Selected short-story reading (vol. 3)

I’m well into the first term of the final year of my Post-Graduate Diploma in Creative Writing from the University of York (not to be confused with York University in Toronto!) and this term’s focus is poetry. The last four weeks have confirmed that I enjoy reading poetry far more than writing it.

And, whether reading or writing, I prefer prose to verse.

To that end, here are three more short stories I recommend.

Selected short-story reading (vol. 1)

Woman reading a paperback book by a body of water

Since I wrote about boycotting written works by straight white men (or avoiding them as much as possible) I’ve made very deliberate choices about what to read for my Post-Graduate creative writing course. This term is all about short fiction and contains some unavoidable SWM-authored works (notably Raymond Carver thus far), but we’ve also had a lot of latitude in picking what we want to read, present, and pick apart.

Instead of keeping the women-authored pieces I’ve found within the bounds of the course, I’m sharing some of my favourite discoveries. These are quick to read, readily available, and a no-commitment-necessary kinda way of broadening reading horizons. Lots of people don’t love reading short stories… maybe these picks will help change that!