Short Story Bonanza!
In a bit of serendipity, two Creative Writing professors are publishing short story collections in the space of two months this year. In May, Regents Professor Julie Schumacher followed up the 2023 finale of her Dear Committee Members trilogy with Patient, Female (Milkweed). On June 30, Assistant Professor Aamina Ahmad publishes July Sun (Riverhead), her second book after her 2022 debut novel The Return of Faraz Ali. (And there's more: next fall, Associate Professor Megan Giddings publishes Black Arts, her first story collection after three novels!) It seemed like a ripe opportunity to learn more about short story writing from Ahmad and Schumacher.
How can you tell that a piece is a story and not a novel?
Schumacher: “I feel that ideas often arrive in my mind with shapes associated with them. I'm not a poet, but sometimes an idea will arrive, and I'll think, ‘That's probably a poem,’ and I don't do anything with it, because the poems I've written are no good. I suppose I think of stories as more situation-based, and novels as more plot-based. At least, I don't worry as much about plot when I write a short story.”
Ahmad: “I’d like to think the characters in a short story have enough to them that I could write about them in a longer work, but usually a piece will feel like a story when I know there is something very specific—a question, an event, a theme I want to think through, or when I can see a very clear moment I’d like to work toward. If it’s a longer work, I often feel I can’t see anything very clearly! The much longer process of writing a novel seems to be about trying to figure out what it is I’m trying to do, or to find.”
What suggestion do you most often offer students writing short stories?
Schumacher: “Details, details, details. You need vivid, original details so that readers can imagine themselves into the prose.”
Ahmad: “A story can be about many things, and many things can happen in the story, but usually there’s a single emotional throughline for the character that’s pulsing through it, energizing it. If you can find it and follow it to the end, you, and the reader, will end up understanding why this moment matters and why it was so important to tell this character’s story.”
As you gathered these stories, what did you notice about your writing?
Schumacher: “Seeing the stories together in a single manuscript gave me a birds-eye view into my own personal anxieties—does that count? I'd been writing the stories one at a time rather than as a collection, so I hadn't thought much about craft and thematic connections, but there they were, in plain view on the page! I knew that the common thread was the predominance of female characters, but I hadn't seen the focus on trepidation and anger and humor in their relationships until the book was done.”
Ahmad: “The stories represent my earliest writing in prose, and looking at them now, I can see the work I’m doing to learn how to tell a story, how to write character, how to balance interiority with action within the framework of the story. They were allowing me to practice these storytelling skills, to really hone in on a moment, and draw out a story and emotional journey as precisely as possible. All of which was good preparation for the novel I went on to write which was big and messy; knowing I could control my material, and really find and build a character, gave me the confidence to manage the more unknowable and chaotic process of writing a novel.”
What's the background behind the oldest story here, and the most recent?
Schumacher: “It's hard for me to sort that out. Some of the stories were written years ago; others were thought about years ago but written recently. Sometimes I have a remark or an incident or a detail in the back of my mind, and I turn it over and polish and consider it until, all at once, I understand what I might be able to make of it. 'How My Light Is Spent' existed in draft for about 10 years—I would take it out of the drawer, tinker with it, and put it back in the drawer again—and then for some reason I remembered Milton's poem about blindness, which gave me a title and a crucial scene.”
Ahmad: “The oldest story in the collection is called 'Remnants,' and it’s about an elderly servant who comes into conflict with another elderly woman who works for the servants in the household. It’s pretty much impossible to experience life in Pakistani society without confronting issues of caste and class, and in this story, I wanted to look at just how pervasive and pernicious it is, how everyday it is in the way it determines how people interact and move through the world. The last story in the collection is called 'A Small Kindness' and was largely my attempt to capture that strange period when you fall somewhere between child and adolescent, where the shape of the adult world makes itself visible but is still profoundly confusing, and maybe even a little bit frightening.”
More about the authors
Patient, Female has received multiple starred reviews: Booklist called it a “master class on short-story writing.” Schumacher, with her comic campus novel Dear Committee Members, was the first woman to win the Thurber Prize for American Humor; she followed it with two sequels, The Shakespeare Requirement and The English Experience.
Of July Sun, Kirkus Reviews noted: “Ahmad excels at swiftly drawing readers into her characters’ unique internal landscapes, so that each story feels more expansive than its page count.” Ahmad’s novel The Return of Faraz Ali garnered numerous honors, including the LA Times Book Prize's Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. This spring, Ahmad was named a 2026 University McKnight Land-Grant Professor.
