72. Less is More: Celebrating Short Stories

Good short stories can share expansive truths with the smallest details. Each of these authors has built a reputation for articulating our depths with exquisitely crafted, luminescent prose. Together, they discuss why short stories are, in many ways, a true artistic form, and how a narrower word count leads to more expansive characters. Multi-award-winning, bestselling Billy-Ray Belcourt shares a masterful yet playful collection about Indigenous love and loneliness in Coexistence. Jen Currin’s Disembark features queer characters navigating new worlds, new circumstances, and new methods of relating to the people around them. And Amanda Peters’ Waiting for the Long Night Moon describes the Indigenous experience from an astonishingly wide spectrum in time and place. Moderated by Tara McGuire.

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Event Participants:

Billy-Ray Belcourt

BILLY-RAY BELCOURT (he/him) is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He won the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize for his collection, This Wound Is a World. His memoir, A History of My Brief Body, won the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize. Belcourt is Assistant Professor of Indigenous Creative Writing at UBC.

Jen Currin

JEN CURRIN is the author of seven books, including Hider/Seeker: Stories, which won a Canadian Independent Book Award and was named a 2018 Globe and Mail Best Book, and The Inquisition Yours, which won the 2011 Audre Lorde Award and was a Lambda finalist. Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, on the traditional territories of the Multnomah, Chinook, Clackamas, and other tribes, Currin studied with Martín Espada and John Ashbery before moving to Canada in 2002. They live in New Westminster, BC, on unceded Qayqayt, Kwantlen, Kwikwetlem, and Musqueam territories and teach creative writing and English at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

Tara McGuire

TARA MCGUIRE is a former broadcaster whose essays and poetry have appeared in several magazines. She is a graduate of The Writer’s Studio at SFU and holds an MFA from the UBC School of Creative Writing. Her first book, Holden, After and Before, was published in 2022.

Amanda Peters

AMANDA PETERS is a writer of Mi'kmaq and settler ancestry. Her debut novel, The Berry Pickers, was a critically acclaimed bestseller in Canada. Her work has appeared in the Antigonish Review, Grain, the Alaska Quarterly Review, the Dalhousie Review and Filling Station. She is the winner of the 2021 Indigenous Voices Award for unpublished prose and a participant in the 2021 Writers’ Trust Rising Stars Program. Peters has a certificate in creative writing from the University of Toronto, and she is a graduate of the master of fine arts program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Amanda Peters lives and writes in the Annapolis Valley, Nova Scotia, with her fur babies, Holly and Pook.