The career path of adult fiction writers typically involves the publication of short stories in small literary magazines followed by a story collection or novel. Unfortunately, no such trajectory is available to children’s writers. In my few stints as author-with-the-answers, I’ve met several emerging writers who have very promising short stories, but I’ve had to break it to them that unless their story works as a picture book text, it had better morph into a short chapter book. Despite several valiant attempts, no story magazine for kids has ever made it in Canada, and the market for kids’ short-story collections seems almost nonexistent. Why?

We have a fine clutch of story collections for teenagers by such writers as Martha Brooks, Linda Holeman, Rick Book, and Wendy Lewis. But there’s a big gap for the middle grades. Publishers say there’s no market for children’s short stories, but how will children develop a taste for this genre when they don’t have any experience of it? In the library I give kids and teachers (who are keen for middle-grade stories) the Tim Wynne-Jones collections and then I’m pretty much stumped.

Into this gap Tundra Books has leapt with a series of thematically linked short-story anthologies for children. In such collections as What If?, selected by Monica Hughes, and Laughs, selected by Claire Mackay, both new and established writers are showcased in very attractive packages. (Full disclosure or minor horn-tooting; I have stories in both.) With the newest venture centred around the theme of secrets, Marthe Jocelyn has created a collection of highly readable stories for middle-grade readers.

Jocelyn begins her introduction with a statement and a question: “Everybody has a secret. You do, don’t you?” If you honestly engage with this question, it seems to me you can have one of two reactions. One is the sinking of the heart. The other is the squirm. These two reactions roughly correspond to the two types of stories in the book. The heart-sinking type centre around coping with what are essentially adult problems visited on the young – the drunk father, the crazy older sister, the parents’ disintegrating marriage. The squirming type centre around the guilty secrets of children’s own actions – shoplifting, the betrayal of friendship, the love object who turns out to have feet of clay.

The heart-sinkers tend to take a more traditional Somerset Maugham-ish approach to the short story, with a surprise and a punchline. In Julie Johnston’s “The Gift,” a suspenseful, atmospheric tale of family revelation, the narrator discovers that she’s the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter; she is “the one.” In Nancy Hartry’s “The Thunderbird Swing” we discover that the narrator has been the sole witness to a vicious crime. The squirm-producing stories tend to be more contemporary: deadpan in mood, open-ended in plot, snapshots of a particular slice of life. In Martha Slaughter’s “Road Trip,” a poignant story of the descent into old age, we see a teenage girl’s subtly changing attitude to her aged, grieving grandmother and her realization that we carry all our life with us, right to the end.

Some of the stories are funny and lighthearted in bits. Marthe Jocelyn’s story of a mother-and-daughter con artist duo has an energy that keeps us rooting for the crooks. If you took authors Teresa Toten and Loris Lesynski and gagged them and tied their hands behind their backs, they would still make you laugh. But there is a tendency for short fiction to be bleak. The old joke about Canadian short stories all being about blood in the snow holds true here. Johnston’s story actually has blood in the snow, and there is darkness at the heart of all of them. Elizabeth Winthrop’s oddly haunting “The Golden Darters” takes us inside the head of a girl dealing with a depressed, manipulative father. Gillian Chan’s “Dream Girls” deals with the universal childhood experience of the two-faced friend. These stories made me sad and uncomfortable, but they are going to cut right to the quick for the typical child reader.

Jocelyn has done a fine job of selection. She combines established short fiction writers such as Chan with writers doing a sidestep from other genres, such as Lesynski, Hartry, and Anne Laurel Carter, and newcomers such as Susan Adach and Anne Gray. A welcome gem is the inclusion of “Tales of a Gambling Grandma” by the late Dayal Kaur Khalsa. This story first appeared as the text of a picture book, and reading it as a short story sent me back to its original presentation. It works beautifully just as text and is one of the warmest, most delicately realized stories in the collection.

But the picture book is still better, not just because of the addition of pictures, but because of the built-in rhythm of the turning page. One of Grandma’s anecdotes involves a cross-country train trip to California. “And that train was so luxurious, she said, that she spent the whole trip soaking in a big white tub full of fresh orange juice.” In the short story this is a funny tall-tale touch, but in the picture book the story expands at this point into a wide, gorgeous double-page spread of Grandma luxuriating in a long white bathtub surrounded by crates of oranges. We are seduced into slowing down. This comparison makes a telling case study of the difference between short story and picture book text. Khalsa was such a genius that she almost makes it work both ways.

In the 1997 anthology Laughs, there is a story by Richard Scrimger. It was, I believe, his first appearance as a children’s writer. Who knows what other careers will be launched or redirected by Secrets? Thanks to Tundra for being the springboard.