Whole Stories Shortly Podcast

When Alex discovered that he was in stage four with an aggressive form of stomach cancer. He had a better idea than many of us might about what that meant. Alex was 48 and he worked at Delaware Hospice. He had been a friend and companion to many families on their journeys with terminal illness, as a palliative care chaplain and bereavement counselor. Whole Stories Shortly is a reader-supported pub...

I don’t love ‘Hallmark’ holidays at the best of times—the sappy sentiments of picture-perfect relationships are a turn-off, but Father’s Day leaves me feeling especially unsettled and adrift. My heart lacks the experience it needs to connect with this day and make it meaningful. My father arrived in Scotland in the early 1950s as a foreign student from Kenya. He had one pair of long pants and a bo...

An appreciation of the short story and one of its most beloved and lauded practitioners. This story is part of the memorial for Alice Munro created by Quiet Reading with Tara Penry When I heard that Alice Munro had died, I drove down to the library to beat the rush. There were five volumes of her work on the shelf below Morrison, Toni , and a hand span away from Murdoch, Iris . I was greedy and gr...

We met on an island of cream-white sand and swam in the warm swells of the Indian Ocean. Our connection belonged to some long-ago time and arrived in a moment too fast for words. After a ricochet of love and sex; in a seedy, green Nairobi hotel room, on a camping safari across the wild Masai Mara, and on a hotel rooftop lost in ancient Islamic alleyways, we separated. This story was first publishe...