by Writing Workshops Staff
7 hours ago
“To me, short stories are the perfect bite of food. They are the heart of the watermelon.”
Darcy Alvey, GreatShortStories.com
The note is tucked inside a Paul Revere hat. It is nine in the morning on the Fourth of July, seventy-some guests are due in two hours, and Yolanda, the narrator of Darcy Alvey’s “Parade Day,” has just learned what her husband has been up to. She tosses the crumpled paper onto the bed, underhand, like a grenade. Then she goes downstairs and starts the guacamole.
That is the engine of the story: a marriage cracking open in real time while the woman at the center of it holds the day together by force of will. The Saturday Evening Post published it on October 23. It is Darcy’s second story in the magazine, after “Holding Room” in July 2025, and we are glad to have been a small part of the year between the two.
Darcy came to fiction by way of the newsroom. She earned a journalism degree from San Diego State and worked her way up to editor-in-chief of Life After 50, a Los Angeles monthly with a readership of half a million. Then she walked away from it to write short stories full time. The decision made sense to her the way it makes sense to anyone who has fallen hard for the form. “A cross between poetry and the novel,” she calls it on her site, “a gift wrapped in red ribbon.” Her stories have since appeared in 34th Parallel, After Dinner Conversation, Westwind, and Red Rock Review. She was shortlisted for The Masters Review’s Best Emerging Writers and was a finalist for the 2025 Tobias Wolff Award in Fiction.
This September she joined us in Oregon for Writing Workshops Portland, where she spent four days in the fiction cohort led by Antonio Ruiz-Camacho, author of the linked collection Barefoot Dogs. Every writer at the retreat brings two manuscripts, one for the group workshop and one for a private conference with the instructor. For Darcy, the conference was the hinge. “My one-on-one with Antonio Ruiz-Camacho cleared up a major stopping block in my novel,” she told us. The workshop sessions did something just as useful: “The workshop pinpointed some overlooked areas in my writing, which I am working to improve.”
Antonio has a habit of asking writers to read like mechanics, to look under the hood of a story and figure out how its machine runs. That approach suits a writer like Darcy, who is building a collection and a novel at the same time and needs each piece to work on its own and in company. She did not come home with a formula. “His insights into writing sent me in a new direction,” she said. “What more could I ask for?”
The direction is visible in “Parade Day.” It refuses the easy version of its own premise. The affair is discovered on page one; what follows is not a confrontation but a party, with its casseroles, its sparklers, its homemade Independence Day procession down the driveway, and a narrator who keeps measuring her hurt in the vocabulary of illness.
Darcy’s advice for writers and her secret weapon for the hard days: “Regular writing hours every day.” And for anyone weighing a workshop, she offered the shortest endorsement we have ever received, and maybe the best: “I found it beneficial to my writing, and it was fun.” What she enjoyed most, she said, was “the camaraderie of the group setting.”
Her collection is called Women Bumping into Things. The novel Antonio helped unstick is Pork and Beans, now deep in its second draft. “The story includes many of the insights I have learned through the years,” she said, “insights I am eager to share.” In the meantime, she keeps GreatShortStories.com, where she posts the stories by other writers that have, in her words, knocked her socks off. It is, she says, a love fest. Go read “Parade Day.” Then go read the rest.
Darcy brought a stuck novel and a finished story to a room of ten writers and one good reader. If you have a manuscript that needs the same kind of attention, our online classes run year-round in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and our retreats take applications each season.
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