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Introducing Broken Ground
What are Uncertain Stories?
They’re stories that take the world as it really is, more-or-less here, more-or-less now, and then they put a crack in that reality, just to see what light gets in.
They’re stories written to grab you and pull you in. Because while we’re increasingly encouraged — compelled, you might say — to waste our time on social media and doomscrolling and likes and one-more-episode streaming until it’s suddenly two a.m. and that’s another day gone, people sometimes forget that short stories exist, sometimes forget what they’re worth as an art form and as entertainment.
But you won’t forget these stories.
They come at you with their what if and why and how and why not, and in half an hour or less they’ve shown you a new world — or a new reflection of the one you thought you knew.
You could read a very short story like Shadow by Tamsin Hopkins, or Flo Ward’s The End of the World, in the time it takes to get a password reminder for your Tesco Clubcard account; you could spend thirty minutes scrolling through deeply unreliable gossip about an actor you’ve never actually seen in a film, or you could read Owen’s Wynd, Eva Carson’s salute to M R James, and find yourself feeling inspired to pick up some classic ghost stories, not to mention tracking down more of Eva Carson’s own work (for which, watch this space).
You could spend the next half-hour adding shows to a streaming watchlist — shows which, in the end, will turn out to be okay, not bad, some good bits, the title sequence is quite slick, but the show itself is sort of a bit forgettable — or you could read The Builder, after which you might well feel the need to treat yourself to a copy of David Frankel’s collection of short stories, Forgetting is How We Survive.
In arguably less time than it takes to scroll through the extended introduction to an online recipe for fruit crumble, thumbing your way past sterile reminiscences of long-gone grandmothers, vaguely sinister targeted advertisements, and artfully composed overhead photographs of ingredients in little glass bowls, you could join the protagonist of Mark Taylor’s All Seasons Sweet, searching for the ghost of a peach and the real meaning of our relationship with food.
You might think that swiping your way through potential matches in a dating app is a better idea than reading What Remains of Us by Jack Edwards, but that’s precisely and only because you haven’t read it yet. And what could you possibly find on your socials that would fill a coffee break better than sitting down with Nathaniel Spain’s What My Father Left Behind?
It’s true of all of these stories: they’re deliberate, and thoughtful, and engaging, and they’re the product of human craft and human intelligence. Sometimes they’re scary and sometimes they’re funny and sometimes they’re thought-provoking, and they’re all worth your time.
It was inevitable, really, that when we sat down to put together our first anthology, we would find ourselves gathering a selection of stories with more than a hint of finality to them. This book starts with an ending, looks back several times over its shoulder (sometimes at the past, other times at something creeping along in the shadows), and ends in stasis. But really, it’s all just a beginning. You can find out more about Uncertain Stories, who we are and what we’re doing, here on our website.
Just don’t spend too long here: you’ve got stories to read.
