Ipellie, Lindberg, and Saona

Short Stories in October, November and December

Whether in a dedicated collection or a magazine, short stories captureand create a variety of reading moods.

This quarter, I returned to one favourite writer and also explored two new-to-me story writers.

Despite my newfound dabbling habit with stories this year, wandering aimlessly between collections, I finished another two by Canadian writers discussed elsewhere: Timothy Findley’s Stones (1988) and Budge Wilson’s The Leaving (1990), and wrote about a few more from the latest Margaret Atwood collection, Old Babes in the Woods (2023) as well.

The stories in Tracey Lindberg’s The Cree Word for Love: sâkihitowin (2025) are paired with artwork by George Littlechild and I hope it’s not the only collaboration between this Rocky Mountain Cree writer and Plains Cree artist. The stories are deftly told and the art is vivid: each medium’s power adds to the other’s. My favourite in this moment would be “The Woman Who Loved a Crow” which I kinda loved just for the title actually; but, then, there was this bit: “F*ck off to those who call those gatherings ‘murders’, Crow has always said. It’s  sooooo Poeish, speciesist, and racist to associate them with death. Their gatherings—their very social structure—are based on love, empathy, and societal/reciprocal care. Calling their parties ‘murders’ is the offensive equivalent of the two-leggeds calling their murders ‘parties’. Crow and its family called its aggregation a ‘convention.’ There are four pieces in four sections—Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter—best thought of as thematic groupings than calendar terms. There is a lot of satisfying detail, but in the end, I’ll remember the feeling of all this. (I also loved her debut, a novel: Birdie.)

Table of Contents: Sixteen pieces, from “They Chose Them” to “The Little People Are Queer”.

Alootook Ipellie describes some of his drawings as “true in the sense that they happened in my dreams and nightmares”, some “inspired by people and events surrounding my daily life”, and some “inspired by my ancestors’ extraordinary gift for inventing myths, stories, and legends.” So, altogether, Arctic Dreams and Nightmares (2025) is a “smorgasbord of stories and events, modern or traditional, true or imagined.” First assembled and published by Theytus in 1993, Inhabit Media has recently republished in a slightly oversized and striking edition. Even though he’s best known for his work in magazines, these drawings seem to correspond perfectly with these stories. And the details—whether a pattern on a pair of pants or on a man’s claw—keep your eye on the illustrations every bit as much as the text. And I was thrilled to find one of the stories is titled “|Love Triangle”, just when I was beginning to despair of finding a match for that line in the challenge. (Inhabit, Indie Press)

Table of Contents: Twenty pieces, from “Self Portrait: Reverse Ten Commandments” to “The Exorcism”

Margarita Saona’s The Ghost of You (Trans. Luciana Erregue-Sacchi, 2022) is such a spell-binding volume of stories that I kept it in the stack long after I had finished reading. Then I selected a few stories to reread, the kind that reminded me of Eduardo Galeano’s, the kind in several parts that share a title (Saona’s are displayed sequentially, Galeano’s are dispersed). Some of them are just a few sentences long, like the thoughts that circle in your mind when you wake up at 3am: the sort of idea that is both sad and satisfying, sometimes ironic. (In one, a woman finds a key, but then cannot find a door.) Others are fable-like, perhaps populated by a devil who is drinking a double cappuccino. Her parenthetical observations are sometimes wise, sometimes funny—sometimes both. An aquarium might spark old memories, a person’s name might evoke a certain smell, one story’s title might be longer than some of the stories are themselves. We know what it’s like to be in a skyscraper, to touch a button in an elevator—but the way that Saona considers ordinary events makes you peer more closely, and it feels like she’s paying attention the whole time you are looking. (Laberinto, Indie Press)

Table of Contents: Fifty-three pieces, from “What I Do” to “Escapism”

Next year, I’m going to experiment, try organising my short story reading differently. I’ve been reading 20 to 25 collections annually for several years now, nearly always single-author collections. In 2026, I’ll aim to read more standalone stories and edited anthologies (with many different authors included). What do you think? 

And you: any short stories lately?