Little Bird Stories, Volume 10

By Invisible Publishing

Invisible Publishing and Sarah Selecky Writing school have joined forces to produce print editions of the wildly popular Little Bird Stories anthologies. The Little Bird Writing Contest is an international contest for innovative, emerging short fiction writers. The contest opens each spring when the birds come back and showcases the excellent stories that come from Sarah Selecky Writing School.

Proceeds from anthology sales go towards the Pelee Island Bird Observatory and the Prince Edward Point Bird Observatory to help protect the real little birds out there.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Invisible Publishing
• Release date: Jan 24, 2021
• ISBN: 9781988784557

Book preview

Little Bird Stories

Volume Ten

Selected by Sheena Kamal

invisible-ebook

Invisible Publishing

Halifax & Picton

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Table of Contents

Copyright Information

About the Contest

Preface

Words Fail

What Fits In the Palm of Your Hand

Little Birds

Author Biographies

Landmarks

Cover

Introduction copyright © Sarah Selecky, 2021

Preface copyright © Sheena Kamal, 2021

Individual contributions copyright © the authors

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any method, without the prior written consent of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a license from Access Copyright.

These are works of fiction. Names, characters, business, events and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada

Cover design by Megan Fildes

Invisible Publishing

Halifax and Picton

invisiblepublishing.com

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada.

About the Contest

We almost missed our own 10th anniversary this year.

We run this contest annually in the early spring. Just before our 2020 contest was announced, the world shut down.

You remember what that time was like. We were all in shock. I called Leigh Nash of Invisible Publishing and told her that we were pausing the Little Bird contest.

We numbly traded these words: Let’s wait and see what will happen.

Writers, more than most people, are familiar with this phrase. Not knowing is at the heart of reading and writing. This is what we do, as storytellers.

We don’t really know what our story is, until we write it. We write to see where it will go, to see what it wants to teach us.

Writers try to tantalize readers with uncertainty. In our craft, this is called dramatic tension, and we put a lot of effort into it. We want to make our readers turn pages, to find out what happens.

But none of us want a story to break out in our real life.

Let’s wait and see what will happen.

Much has been written on how this year has brought us very close to three laws of human existence: change is constant, we’re all interconnected, life is out of our control.

For anyone who reads this collection, these concepts become embodied experiences. These three stories