Same Walk, Different Shoes: Volume I

A Substack Community Writing Project

Today, I’m interrupting your normal Catch & Release programming to bring you something very special.

“Same Walk, Different Shoes” is a community writing project I dreamed up to bring together a collective of wonderful writers who all happen to be on the Substack platform. The project is aimed at cultivating empathy, a quality I believe is essential for any good writer. The premise for this project was simple:

1. Every writer contributes an anonymous prompt from a transformative experience in their life.

2. In turn, they receive a prompt from another participating writer to develop into a story.

3. The writer then writes a fictional short story based on this virtual stranger’s transformational life experience.

You can read more about my thoughts on the subject of empathy in the post where I announced this project and made a call for other writers to join me.

All the stories in the index below were written during December 2023 and published as a collection on December 29th. There was no audition or application for writers to participate. This was an open project in hopes of attracting a wide and diverse collective of writers (and readers) interested in exploring the power of the short story to help us better understand each other and ourselves.

Within this collection of over forty stories, you will no doubt discover many writers you’ve never heard of. You will find a few stories that crack you open and make you feel something you’ve never felt before. And there will be at least a couple of masterpieces that you will want to share with everyone you know. Please do that. Sharing art that moves us is how all this works.

Please Note: The stories and perspectives expressed in this collection belong to the writers alone and are not endorsed by Ben Wakeman or Catch & Release.

The Collection

1. “Walking in Circles Toward Change” by

   Amanda Carranza

2. “A Box of Rain” by

   Adam Nathan

3. “Aiming For Perfection” by

   Mackenzie Rivers

4. “A Filter of Amber” by

   Holly Starley

5. “A Working Mother Visits The Breath Worker” by

   Lizzy Co

6. “Barefoot” by

   Hannah Holm

7. “Beast” by

   Hedley Jackson

8. “Because I Loved You” by

   Eleanor Anstruther

9. “Beneath and Beyond” by

   Kenneth Mills

10. “Black and White Thinking” by

    Eleanor Anstruther

11. “Blowing the Flame Out” by

    Amanda Saint

12. “Blue Ice” by

    Mya Dexter

13. “Breaking Out Into Me” by

    Mark Connolly

14. “Cold Coffee” by

    Linnhe Harrison

15. “Coming of Age” by

    The Radical Individualist

16. “cut of the jib” by

    Clancy Steadwell

17. “Going Back” by

    Bertus

18. “Gratitude Can Be Slippery” by

    Jean Rhude

19. “Her Thing” by

    Jon T

20. “Into Me I See” by

    Dr. Kathleen Waller

21. “I’ll Just Pretend I Know” by

    Victoria Kazarian

22. “Maria + Alice” by

    Mr. Troy Ford

23. “Moments for Esperance” by

    T Van Santana

24. “One of the Others” by

    Troy Putney

25. “Root Rot” by

    J.E. Petersen

26. “Ship Rats” by

    Petra Hernandez

27. “Sparrow” by

    Nathan Slake

28. “Sunrise” by

    Marika O’S

29. “The Color of This Place” by

    Sal Randolph

30. “The Heat of the Summer Sun” by

    Rhiannon D'Averc

31. “The Many” by

    Dr. Levent Mollamustafaoğlu

32. “The Point of No Return” by driftonthis

33. “The Shortest Day” by

    Graham Landi

34. “Things Change on Wednesdays” by

    The Repurposed Life

35. “Two Pigeons on a Windowsill Sleeping” by

    Rhiannon D'Averc

36. “Unraveling” by

    Jo Vraca

37. “Walk’out” by

    Julie Gabrielli

38. “What are the lost thing?” by

    Ragha Abhinaya M

39. “Wildman: Origins” by

    Meg Oolders

40. “Wilson” by

    Linnhe Harrison

41. “Wishes Are Horses” by

    Ben Wakeman

42. “Youth” by

    Anne Thomas