Queer View Mirror 2: Lesbian and Gay Short Short Fiction

Claire Wilkshire is a PhD candidate in English at the University of
British Columbia.

The first Queer View Mirror appeared in 1995. A large collection of
short short stories by gay and lesbian writers, its strengths lay in the
quality, quantity, and variety of the fictions it included. Follow-ups
are never easy, and Queer View Mirror 2 demonstrates the point. It is as
if most of the good writing were used up in the first anthology and the
editors decided to publish what was left.

There are a few fine stories, but too many of them sound like the first
story you ever wrote, when you were 18 and believed it must be good
because you had spent several hours working on it. Too many stories open
with inauspicious sentences like “Glen should have seen it coming”
or “So anyway, it was ugly.” And too many end with statements that
are feeble, predictable, or trite: “We knew, when we started, the road
would be long”; “I get in my car and cry.”

QVM would make an excellent annual or biennial publication, or possibly
a journal, but it needs to be shorter and more selective.