September 2025
Ten stories picked by Kathryn Silver-Hajo
Kathryn Silver-Hajo’s work appears in Atticus Review, Centaur Lit, CRAFT, Emerge Literary, Ghost Parachute, Gone Lawn, Milk Candy Review, New Flash Fiction Review, Pithead Chapel, Ruby Literary, The McNeese Review, The Phare, and other lovely journals. Her stories were selected for the 2023, 2024, and 2025 Wigleaf Top 50 Longlists and nominated for Best of the Net, Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and Best American Food Writing. Kathryn’s award-winning books include flash collection, Wolfsong, and YA novel, Roots of The Banyan Tree.
Website: www.kathrynsilverhajo.com
Facebook: @kathryn.silverhajo
X: @KSilverHajo
Bluesky: @kathrynsilverhajo.bsky.social
Instagram: @kathrynsilverhajo
You can order Kathryn’s flash collection, Wolfsong, from ELJ Editions: https://elj-editions.com/wolfsong/ and her YA novel, Roots of the Banyan Tree, from FlowerSong Press: https://www.flowersongpress.com/books/p/roots-of-the-banyan-tree-by-kathryn-silver-hajo-1
If you aren’t familiar with her work, here’s one of her pieces to start things off:
She’d Always Been Sure He’d Outlive Her (Kathryn Silver-Hajo | New Flash Fiction Review)
Why I like it (MK): There’s so much skill to telling a big story in a tiny space, and here in just a few dozen words, we have a sort of magic trick - it doesn’t feel like it should be possible to fit this narrative in this space with so much emotional clout. I love the way the title hangs over the piece that follows; I love the creative specificity of “planting purple-plum kisses”; and I love the effect of that tree-branch aside right at the end (“a heartbeat and a nail trim”) to stretch the moment of pause.
Egg Five Ways (Emily Rimkena | Identity Theory)
Why I like it: The story is as simple, perfect, and layered as an egg itself. Each of the five sections mirrors a phase of the narrator’s life with her partner with observations like, The perfect fried egg is steamed, you tell me the morning after we meet and, I make you scrambled eggs with cheddar cheese, but you tip your head away. We’re carried through an entire marriage in a few paragraphs. The final section circles back to the earlier part of the relationship, with, It all starts here, you told me once, tossing an egg into the air between us, before landing on the deeply moving ending that burrows into your heart and refuses to be forgotten.
21 Allen Drive (Diane Gottlieb | Smokelong Quarterly)
Why I like it: I find myself returning again and again to this brilliant story in which a series of deceptively simple, lyrical descriptions and details invite the reader into the peaceful, rural setting and even into the kitchen of the titular house. We have a strong sense of the place, people, and animals who reside at 21 Allen Drive. The repetition of the words, “The way…” in multiple contexts effectively builds tension and keeps the reader engaged right up to the explosive ending. In under 200 words, Gottlieb tells a fulsome story that echoes long after the last line.
Settle and Slake (Mikki Aronoff | Craft Literary)
Why I like it: The playfulness! The original and inventive language! The use of the 1st person plural to draw an intimate portrait with universal resonance. Aronoff’s protagonists take us on a wild ride through daily life in the nursing home where they live, die, play, connect, cope, and make the most of their experience. “Settle and Slake” is filled with poignant, witty observations that had me laughing throughout, with lines like, We cock our heads, all the better to hear, cock finger-pistols at foreheads as we watch the news, cackle at the design of cocks, gobble chicken fingers—plucked if we’re lucky. A delight from start to finish.
PROMPT: Write a story using the 1st person plural to describe an experience that is both particular to your characters and which most readers will be able to relate to on some level. Bonus points for making it funny.
Sweater Weather (Mario Aliberto III | Smokelong Quarterly)
Why I like it: “Sweater Weather” takes a moment in time—a father enlisting his young son to help prepare for the coming hurricane—and explodes it into a minefield of complex emotions. The close third-person narration and conversational tone offer the reader a front-row seat into the father’s thoughts that reveal his internal struggle to the reader, while limiting what he says aloud to cursing the Florida heat where they’re sweating their balls off, compared to the cool autumn up north where he’s from. We feel for both father and a son in this richly layered story whose harshness paradoxically hints at the possibility of tenderness.
Why I Still Wash Used Saran Wraps and Dry Them on the Dish Rack (Christine Chen | Forge Literary)
Why I like it: I’m a big fan of Christine Chen’s Ah Ma and Ah Ba stories, and here, the repetition of Because of… creates a rhythm that draws us deep into the narrator’s world where poverty drives her mother to find inventive ways to survive. She brings home leftover food from her cafeteria job, washes used paper towels and dries them on the clothesline, repurposes plastic containers into rice bowls and vases for growing herbs. We feel we know the tough, hard-working Ah Ma, who will do anything to give her children a better life than she’s had, and nowhere do we feel this more than at the moving conclusion.
Or Else (Melissa Llanes Brownlee I Five South)
Why I like it: With the first six words of the story, we are slammed against the wall knowing something ominous is at the heart of the narrative. The second shock is learning that the main character is a young boy thrust into a drama that places a huge burden on his young shoulders. If he fails in his imposed mission, he could face severe physical and emotional consequences. Ultimately, he’s faced with an impossible dilemma that will force him to decide between obeying the demands of his family and following his heart. “Or Else” is a deeply thought-provoking, tender story that I’ve read again and again since it was published.
PROMPT: Write a story in which the narrator is carrying a painful burden that finds echoes in another layer of the story such that the two griefs converge by the end.
If You Weren’t Such a Good Boy You’d Remember (Sudha Balagopal I Adroit Journal)
Why I like it: I love being transported to another place, another world, another time, in a story. I love the rhythm and romance of trains, love word repetition when skilfully employed. The use of the word “our” to begin each of the seven paragraphs establishes the relationship between the narrator and the “good boy,” as well as their mothers, whose own friendship is a subtext woven throughout the story. That collective sense continues throughout the gently rocking train ride of this piece, where sexual attraction, friendship, duty, and rebellion clatter against each other and keep us hoping, wondering, and worrying all the way through.
Color Permanence (Meg Pokrass I Centaur Lit)
Why I like it: I was deeply drawn into the narrator’s emotional journey—her sadness, capacity for joy, her longing for what might have been possible. “Color Permanence” explores the complexities of grief, loss, and desire through the lens of eye color—the unchanging dog-brown of her husband’s eyes, the aquamarine she dreams her baby had, the ever-changing colors of her lover’s irises—now baby blue, now lurid emerald green. The aching heart of this deftly layered, mysterious story is encapsulated by this wonderful line: The entire week…felt like a foreign movie in which nothing happened, yet everything changed. And by the end, we feel somehow changed, as well.
PROMPT: Write a story in which a secondary character is someone important to the narrator but also a metaphor for an emotion or experience that has the capacity to shift and shape the main character’s perception of reality.
Stroked (Claudia Monpere I Ghost Parachute)
Why I like it: The tenderness of the relationship between the main character and her father is what resonated most for me in this story—the way she places his hand on her rippling belly, involves him in naming her unborn baby, her devotion to a parent who may never come back from a major stroke. By focusing tightly on the father-daughter dynamics we are intimately drawn into this multigenerational family portrait that highlights the way new life often seems to spring up just when another is on the wane. It’s as if—consciously or unconsciously—we reach for something life affirming in the face of loss and grief. Ending this piece with a lullaby felt just right.
Bullet List for My Aged Kidnapper (Patricia Bidar I Flash the Court)
Why I like it: Trauma has a way of rattling around inside our bodies and minds wreaking havoc, resistant to being pinned down. Here, the narrator addresses / confronts her abuser in a one-way conversation I took to be the words she wishes her kidnapper had to reckon with—that police and old lovers had to reckon with. Layered within the piece is how power dynamics stack the deck against women, especially working-class women who aren’t the “kind of victim they had to care about.” After the bullet list, the narrator shifts to the “we” POV, noting that she and her kidnapper are both old now, living similar lives. Life buzzes on but this thing between them will never be diminished, at least not for her. But perhaps by giving voice to it she can find a measure of peace, a reclaiming of self.
What did you think of these choices? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments - have you found a new favourite piece? Did you try out one of the prompts?
Next month’s selection will be chosen by Mileva Anastasiadou and will be appearing (fingers crossed) on the 21st October.
Story Shapes (workshop): Pyramids, Fishes, Spirals and Trees
7th October (19:00-20:30 BST) or 11th October (09:00-10:30 BST)
How do we find the right shape for our stories? What are the different images we might bear in mind to help with narrative and emotional build? How do we create a strong sense of structural balance? This 90-minute workshop considers different ways of thinking about a story in terms of shape. With the aim of giving writers plenty of new ideas and writing tools, we'll cover story vs plot, Freytag's pyramid, Vonnegut story graphs, tension and pacing, narrative time, and the golden ratio.
Other opportunities to work with Matt
STORY SHAPES (workshop): 7th October 2025, 19:00-20:30 BST (open for bookings)
STORY SHAPES (workshop): 1th October 2025, 09:00-10:30 BST (open for bookings)
EMOTIONAL DEPTHS (panel discussion): 3rd November 2025, 19:00-20:30 GMT (open for bookings)
LYRICAL WRITING: 10th-23rd November 2025 (open for bookings)
FUNNY BONES (workshop): : 2nd December 2025, 19:00-20:30 GMT (open for bookings)
FUNNY BONES (workshop): : 6th December 2025, 09:00-10:30 GMT (open for bookings)
Editing
NOVEL / NOVELLA EDITING: First steps review / structural review / line edit / submission review
EDITING FOR COLLECTIONS: Structural overview report / line edit
SHORT FICTION EDITING: Structural review / line edit / detailed edit
Another excellent selection. Thanks. 🙂