In 2007, the Flatiron Writers won a Regional Artist Project Grant from the state and local arts councils to publish a diverse collection of short stories. The result is Irons in the Fire.

n What I Did for Love, Genève Bacon follows the path of a young woman as she searches for love—from her first affair in college through a succession of men in the different stages of her life. She takes her identity from her various lovers, willing to be whatever they want her to be until, on a pyramid in the Yucatán jungle, she finds herself. (View a partial story, The Persian Lover )

The characters in Toby Heaton’s Coping With Purgatory—among them, an archaeologist, a baseball card collector, and an Appalachian farmer—have all suffered loss, pushing them into a limbo of unexplored emotional pain. In these stories, the protagonists forge their own unique accommodations to make their lives bearable. (View a partial story, Emmett’s Shoes )

Southern voices flow through Heather Newton’s Water Stories like the rivers, rains and baptismal waters that course through the South itself. A shifty log-home salesman, a grandmother mourning the loss of a baby, a boy running logs down the Cape Fear River after the Civil War, all look to the waters for cleansing, redemption or escape. (View a partial story, House of Twigs )

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