Introduction

This process was initially really jarring for me. Choosing your favorite, or most beloved, or absolute best short stories – I couldn’t even think of one! It’s like when you walk into a record store and you suddenly can’t name a band to save your life. I felt floored by this process for the first hour, but slowly, as I recontextualized and reimagined, things fell into place. These, rather than being the Top Brass of short stories, are the stories I relied upon to help convince me I wanted to continue writing. Without these stories, I would not likely be writing today, because they offered me an intangible level of mentorship and guidance that I was having trouble accessing in any other way.