Excited to have a ‘Distinguished Story’ in The Best American Short Stories anthology for 2025. What’s this mean? The story is not published in the anthology. There are 20 excellent stories, curated from amongst all North American published short stories in 2024, that are. My story, ‘The Reach’, is one of 126 total stories that were pre-selected for the anthology by editors and readers. Then the guest editor, Celeste Ng, picked the final 20 for publication.

Some of you may have read ‘The Reach’. It’s a simple story about a friendship between a young man and an older woman, and how they relate to each other. Then something happens, and about a thousand years pass as he goes on a trip, and she goes on a different one. Talk about shifting the timeline. This story won Boulevard’s Short Fiction Contest for Emerging Writers and the Lascaux Prize in Short Fiction. If you’d like to have a read, you can find the story here, it’s available online for free. You can also read more about the story here.

‘The Reach’ is not science fiction, though there are speculative elements. True literary writers might look down on this story a bit; at least, my fragile writing self feels that might happen (at least from some quarters). I’m a borderline literary writer. I’m a borderline speculative writer. I’m constantly writing about our planet and the environment but I’m a borderline writer on the topic. And that’s all I have to say about that.

Being picked as one of 126 stories published in North America… I’m not prepared for that. There are stories from The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, One Story, Zoetrope, Ploughshares, Granta and the Harvard Review in this thing. Some of the past editors of The Best American Short Stories: Lauren Groff, Jesmyn Ward, Anthony Doerr, Salman Rushdie, Michael Chabon, Amy Tan, Alice Adams, Margaret Atwood, Raymond Carver, John Updike, and Joyce Carol Oates.

This is big league, in my view, and I think I got very lucky here. I’m okay with that. Feels a bit nuts, but I’m okay with that too. In terms of the ideas swimming in my head, the styles and voices that I want to pursue, I’m only getting started.

Will be sitting down to read the anthology stories. So far, the only thing I’ve read is the introduction by Celeste Ng. The selection of stories for the anthology, as you might suspect, is subjective, but there’s a set of traits that Celeste was looking for that I find instructive and relevant to all of us writers. Celeste looked for four main things:

1. Stories that grabbed her, whether that be because of premise, plot, character, humour, charm, a twist, etc. In any case, she looked for stories that would not get out of her head. Seems like any story element could capture her attention but something truly had to. 
2. Stories that are complete, while emphasizing that ambiguity is okay and stories don’t necessarily have to end conclusively. In her words, “…enough of the picture had to emerge at the end to give a clear sense of the whole. There might still be gaps, but I needed to know enough so that I could imagine what might fill them…” I really like the way she describes that.
3. Language that startled or surprised her and was of the highest caliber. She was looking for writers “in control of their language”. To me, that sounds like the application of voice, and more than that, a confident voice in telling the story.
4. A sense of ‘heft’. The way she describes it, it’s about knowing that the story is somehow incredibly important to the writer – it’s not just an experiment, or an attempt to sound literary, but an ingrained exploration of intent… “the author wrote the story because they had to”. Do we always write stories because we have to? Do I? No, but I’m taking this advice head-on, as it’s very valuable, and it poses the fundamental question of why we write in the first place, or what it means to compose narratives. If it’s in us, it’s in us. If it’s in us, it will sound that way as it’s released to the world. 

I wanted to analyze ‘The Reach’ through the lens of these four traits.

I think the ‘grabbing’ part of this story is likely the premise. It plays with time and space in a very specific way, but I also think it’s rooted in two characters, with several peripheral characters in there as well. To me, the premise doesn’t work without those characters.

I believe it’s a complete story, and while it ends, the story never really does. There’s a continuation of the narrative beyond the written words, intentionally so, on a trip that a reader can fill in as they see fit. 

Language of the highest caliber… I don’t know. I’m a simple writer, sparse, maybe even threadbare, with the occasional excursion into my internalized pomposity. I have stories where the language is a prime feature, but this story is not one of them. The language serves the premise, which serves the characters. So, I don’t think I nail this criteria.

And finally, heft. I absolutely had to write this story. It’s about our world and how we treat it. It’s about wanting to do better, about looking for more. This is probably the criteria that resonates the most with me.

So that’s it. I really have to thank Boulevard for putting me up for this, and for the editors of The Best American Short Stories for putting me forward. It’s a huge honour. There’s a note in the Foreword from Nicole A. Lamy, the series editor of the anthology, that reads as follows: “…lead me to writers whose work I have loved for decades and to fall for writers whose work I have never read.” She seems like the prime reader that assimilated the stories sent to her by literary magazines. I can imagine her plowing through short story after short story. And then she came across mine, a writer whose work I’m sure she’s never read… It’s an honour to be read. To have people pick up and peruse your words, and to think about them. And that’s it. That’s the thing. It’s so simple, it hardly needs any words to explain it.