Summer Stories 2025: Winds Of Change

Now in its 12th year, The Spokesman-Review's Summer Stories series highlights the Winds of Change. The Winds will feature works by acclaimed regional writers Shawn Vestal, Carla Crujido, Sharma Shields, Kate Lebo, Sam Ligon and Jess Walter. This year's series, which runs through the first weekend in September, will feature four first-time Summer Series participants: the YA author Jennifer Longo, of "What I Carry," Spokane's poet laureate Mery Smith and Eastern Washington University master's of fine arts creative writing students Daniel Reiss and Miranda Manzano.

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Latest Stories

‘Next of Kin’

By Shawn Vestal

Sheriff hands me the fax, watches over the top of his glasses as I read. Bad news from a neighboring county. He says, “You’re gonna need to go see the widower.”

“But–” I say.

“Not what I want, either. But this wind.”

I can hear it out …
‘The Luckiest Wind (1978)’

By Carla Crujido

Ford reaches down and turns the radio up. It’s a song about dust, about wind. His mom’s favorite. She liked to remind him that the luckiest wind delivered him to her.

Twenty-nine years ago tonight, a November gale blew through Spokane.
‘Movement’

By Sharma Shields

It’s a beautiful morning in early summer, breezy and not too warm yet, the sky a smooth blue stone behind the narrow spears of the pines, the garden with its fresh green growth damp with dew and already warming in the early sun. Sofia stands in her …
‘Tuesday, cursed’

By Jennifer Longo

Tuesday, June 10, 1692, was a windy day. Cold salt air bent slender seagrass and flapped dark linen skirts and coats of a group of Salem Village Puritans gathered on a grassy knoll overlooking the sea. Sunshine sparkled on the dark Atlantic waters and the assembled crowd …
Snow Bowl

By Daniel Reiss

This was West Central in the early aughts. Long after Union Pacific abandoned the railyard overlooking the river. A neighborhood of middle-class people born and raised by the tracks, people who never dreamed of leaving.
Stop, Go

By Miranda Manzano

I’m having a midlife crisis and you know what that means. It means I’m giving and receiving hickeys. It means I’m painting my toenails green and using darker shades of blush in all my hollows until I look like a relief sculpture. Until I’m collar bones and …
A Mystery or a Problem or a Garden

By Kate Lebo

The neighbors want to put a gazebo at the back of their yard, near our garage. “Sounds fun,” I say. “For who?” says Jordan, whose job it will be to build the thing.

When my husband and I bought our house an almost-decade ago, the first change …