6-minute Stories

 – I have always told myself I’m not a runner.

Race day in November dawned bright and crisp.

After a career spent finding the voices of senior business executives, Alison Rice Bruster is writing a new chapter. She holds a BA in English Literature from Queens University of Charlotte. Her work has been published in three previous Personal Story Publishing Project collections, and she won recognition in the Charlotte Writers Club Nonfiction Contest. She is a member of Charlotte Lit, the Charlotte Writers Club, the North Carolina Writers Network, and the South Carolina Writers Association. She lives in Fort Mill, S.C., and travels widely, often bringing home stories worth telling.

Diana Neunkirchner is a retired teacher living in Rougemont, North Carolina. An avid reader and writer, she is a member of the Durham Writers Group, the Writers’ Inspirational Network, and the Writers’ Critique Group. When she’s not writing short stories, personal essays, or memoir, she is hiking along the Eno River or playing the flute at Your Saving Grace, the family farm.

Not all the lessons learned in school came from our teachers. This is a story of “unarmed power. “

As a music professor and academic administrator, Joel Stegall authored more than 35 journal articles, book chapters, and other such long-forgotten documents. Since retiring to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, he has completed a family history dating from the early Colonial Era. Delighted to discover in his bloodline ingenuity, inventiveness, devotion to duty, self-sacrifice and uncommon love, he was at the same time distressed to find insanity, murder, suicide and cattle rustling.

Award-winning writer Steve Cushman reflects on an early experience in parenting his autistic son.

Steve Cushman earned an MFA from UNC-Greensboro and has published three novels, including the Novello-Award winning Portisville. Steve’s first collection of poems, How Birds Fly, is the winner of the 2018 Lena Shull prize. Steve lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with his family and can be found online at www.stevecushman.net.

– longing for family

Separated as children, a relentless desire to find one another spawned a frustrating search.

Patricia E. Watts lives in Mountville, South Carolina where the love of local and family history has given her a passion to write stories to pass down to her children. She has found through stories of tragedies, tears, and triumphs and even mysteries that she has a rich heritage worth telling.  Her story “A Real Small Town” appeared in the 2020 Personal Story Publishing Project, That Southern Thing.

your wingman with angels

An engineering prodigy arrives in the South, fascinated with an ancient relic and searching for the aerodynamic laws of angel wings, all the while nurturing his grove of Carolina dogwoods. It’s a good life.

Mary Alice Dixon lives and writes in Charlotte, North Carolina. She is a former attorney who often served as court-appointed counsel in juvenile court. She has also been a professor of architectural history, teaching in Charlotte, Minneapolis, and China. She belongs to Charlotte Writers’ Club and Charlotte Lit. Her recent writing is in, or forthcoming from, Living Springs  and Main Street Rag. She volunteers with hospice and delights in reading poetry to the dying, grateful for the lesson this teaches about what really matters.  

—a brush with my bugaboo.

A brother’s seeming “betrayal” awakens a loyal kid sister as his fiercest champion and ally.

Janice Luckey, who lives in Davidson, North Carolina, is a member of the Write On! writing group sponsored by her local library as well as the online writing group Impromptu. Writing became a rhythm of her life when she scribbled a romance novel in a 3-ring binder in junior high school. This sparked a life-long love of all things writerly—writing, reading, journaling and hoarding office supplies. Janice was a contributor to the 2020 and 2021 Personal Story Publishing Projects. You can see more of her stories at LKNConnect.com. When Janice isn’t writing she can be found encouraging her four granddaughters’ creativity or roaming libraries, bookstores, and Staples.

 — You durn fool

Waves of hot lava washed down my throat, past my lungs, and hit my stomach like an acid avalanche.

By day, Nick Sipe works as a mild-mannered IT manager for a Fortune 150 company. By night, he mostly recovers from the workday, but occasionally finds time to write. He enjoys writing Twilight Zone-style short stories, mostly horror and light sci-fi. Nick is currently shopping his debut novel, “Midnight Springs,” to literary agents. “Midnight Springs” is the first in a planned horror-Western series that sends classic monsters (think Frankenstein, Van Helsing, the Wolfman) to the Wild West to tangle with their American counterparts (think witches, the Headless Horseman, the Wendigo). Nick live in Gastonia, North Carolina. He is a member of Charlotte Writers Club.

Each of us would have a dress made specially. My ears perked up.

I imagined, over and over, the blue of my dress, deep and velvety, the color of evening, just as the stars begin to come out.

For fifty years, Becky Gibson has written mostly poetry, publishing it in journals, anthologies, three chapbooks, and five full-length collections. She turned to creative nonfiction only recently, seeking to expand narrative beyond the constraints of a poem. Her essays appear in Snowy Egret, Canary, Cold Mountain Review, and two PSPP anthologies, Twists and Turns and Sooner or Later. Becky taught English at Guilford College until 2008, when she retired to write full-time. She lives with her husband in Chapel Hill.

Fascinated with every big and little thing, Jamie Cheshire has long been an avid student of design and structure. Having worked together with giants, he has had the extreme good fortune to practice his craft for most of the last four decades and has seen his work appear nationally and in several countries on three continents. He lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, with his beloved feral, hippie-chick wife, their three dogs and two cats. Deeply committed to the ordinary, he is constantly searching for a way to describe it.