Afterword: 6 Short Story Collections for Short Story Month

Mom Camp by Véronique Darwin
(Assembly Press)

This debut collection of intertwined stories is organized into six parts around competing identities: mother, sister, friend, server, lover, and artist—the last, a novella. The writing is hypnotic and full of sardonic humour—I was charmed and captivated from the first page. Some stories feature a recurring unnamed character on retreat. Another series follows a sister in a mysterious hotel, which serves up pieces of her past to figure out. The book grapples with the nature of selfhood under pressure, and the gorgeous cover illustration of a woman turning, hair obscuring her face, perfectly evokes this fluidity. A few pages into the title story, we read: “Amélie’s team of rehabilitation doctors told her she needed to learn mindfulness, but perhaps Mom Camp, with its tense games and existential debate, could help her learn how to don and doff her roles as surgeon and mother—how to become a craftswoman of her own life.” No pressure! Sign me up now for Véronique Darwin’s next book.

We Are Busy Being Alive by Rishi Midha
(Anvil Press, 2026)

Rishi Midha’s debut consists of sixteen stories that plumb the alienation and anxiety of everyday life, especially performative online lives. Characters grapple with the demands (and elusive rewards) of corporate jobs; the quest for romance when one seems fundamentally unsuited to it; and the superficial self-improvements that adults attempt to stave off a bigger reckoning. The title story, which was selected for Best Canadian Stories by Zsuzsi Gartner, contains a universe within one household, moving between the thoughts of 14-year-old Tommi, “alone with her principles,” her young brother Jason, and her parents, self-absorbed and oblivious to the environmental impact of their actions, whether it’s killing turtles with a Range Rover and not noticing; being stuck in I-95 traffic, cocooned by air conditioning and music on blast while disdaining the commuter train; or keeping their mansion chilled to “a crisp sixty-four degrees,” windows open, in a Florida heat wave. Gartner calls this climate-crisis story “a cheeky yet tender take on Tolstoy’s truism that every unhappy family is unhappy in its unique way.” 

Earthen by Katherine Koller
(Great Plains Publications, 2026)

The twenty stories in this aptly named book vary in length, setting, and style but are united in a devotion to nature and to the potential for human goodness. Decisive acts of kindness sustain characters or bind them in loving relationships—often women and their friends or children but sometimes a young person who is a stranger. In the opening story, “You Can Have More,” a widow who discovers a hungry boy stealing from her garden takes to feeding him, gaining his trust. Three stories follow Nell, an older woman deciding how to spend her remaining years after she discovers her dead husband’s betrayals. “The Maiden of the Plains” evokes fairy tales; “The Pyramidion” has a mythic quality; and “The Plug” is futuristic. Koller’s tender descriptions of trees, forests and animals highlight the need for care of the natural world.

Breathing is How Some People Stay Alive
by Alison Gadsby
(Guernica Editions, 2026)

This debut takes my breath away. Characters driven to torment themselves and others. Gut-kick dialogue, funny and heartbreaking and real. Fierce love mixes with histories of damage, ongoing damage. Several of the nineteen stories have speculative elements, such as humanoids that (who?) continually seek more—power, intimacy, agency—as their wily owners struggle to defeat them. Gadsby’s use of the price tag for these robotic characters as a plot point is a brilliant choice, sending up the ways that so many parental investments function as signals of social status. Buying a friend/child/servant that can be upgraded and reprogrammed is just one more example, in this imagined world. In “The Beginning of Sadness,” Fern has the power to fold time, recycling it to prevent an imminent tragedy, but she must make a choice about whether to continue or return to Ordinary Time. Multiple characters appear in more than one story, creating echoes among the linked narratives. The stories are linked thematically, as well—swimming and all it represents, but also abuse, addiction, misogyny, crime, and religion. The reader has a sense of looping, approaching each narrative from a new and illuminating angle.    

There’s Always More to Say by Natalie Southworth (Linda Leith Publishing, 2026)

Natalie Southworth’s debut collection reveals the particular fractures of family life in nine stories, three of them linked. These stories centre the experiences of young women and girls—daughters, sisters, friends—as they grapple with the weaknesses of parents who are pressured by job loss, mental illness, divorce, or the lack of a higher purpose, while propelling themselves toward their own beckoning futures. The protagonists apply a critical gaze, precise and unsparing in their assessments of the dynamics. Yet their responses also contain compassion and acts of loyalty, along with a palpable sense of heartbreak ahead. Southworth has an assured writing style, with deceptively quiet, clean sentences, closely observed details, and dialogue that captures each character’s unique voice.

Suddenly Light by Nina Dunic
(Invisible Publishing, 2025)

I read this compelling collection slowly, savoring stories of deep interiority and underlining precisely right sentences throughout the book. Many of Dunic’s characters hold themselves apart, unwilling or unable to join in the ceaseless flow of activity around them. The purchase of a contested overpriced painting marks the moment a couple’s marriage begins to unravel. At a dinner party, a woman realizes that she and her husband have a fundamentally different orientation to life: “He wasn’t going to wander or forget himself or suffer without knowing why, wasn’t going to ask why, probably ever.” Voyeurism features in several stories, always with an empathetic attempt to construct or inhabit the observed person’s life. In “Bodies,” a young man sees his mother in a new light after her uncharitable reaction to the death of a neighbourhood man, whom she dismisses as an addict and therefore unworthy of consideration. Suddenly Light, which was longlisted for the 2026 Carol Shields Prize, reveals the depth of human connections, real and imagined.