Same Walk, Different Shoes: Volume II
A Substack Community Writing Project
“Same Walk, Different Shoes” is a community writing project I dreamed up in the fall of 2023 to bring together a collective of writers who all happen to be on the Substack platform. The first collection of stories was published in December of 2023. This is not a competition and there are no barriers to entry— all writers are welcome regardless of experience in writing fiction. The project is aimed at cultivating empathy, a quality I believe is essential for everyone, but especially for writers of fiction. The premise for the project is simple:
Every writer contributes an anonymous prompt from a transformative experience in their life.
In turn, they receive a prompt from another participating writer to develop into a story.
The writer then writes a fictional short story based on this virtual stranger’s transformational life experience.
For this second round of the experiment, I encouraged writers to contribute a prompt based on something they had to leave behind.
You can read more about my thoughts on the subject of empathy in the post where I originally announced the project and made a call for other writers to join me.
All the stories in the index below were written during the month of June 2024 and published as a collection on July 5, 2024. 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 twenty-one 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
“Imposter” by
“Soloist” by
“Moss Skyscrapers” by
“Your Birthday is Never Your Deathday” by
“If I Could Talk I’d Tell You” by
“To Sleep Perchance to Dream” by
“Untangled” by
“Drift and settle” by
“The Life I Thought I Wanted” by
“Estrangement” by
“The Yellow House” by
“Extraction” by
“Life Could Be a Nightmare” by
“Amputated” by
“Blank Slate” by
“The Storyteller” by
“Black Bay” by
“Gap” by
Let me be the first. 👏
My head swims with my first readings, picking titles from here and there - all so, so well done! This is a joy.
To the authors of Julie Gabrielli’s prompt and mine: Be sure to read both our stories. There is surprising kinship in your two prompts that may give comfort in reality beyond what we imagine in fiction. I wonder how many such kinships there are here. Must read more to find out. Thank you, Ben!