The Spirit of Wagner Award

Carrying the Flame

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BACK TO WORDS ROOM

Short Stories

This table is a doorway into other worlds

Welcome to Georgia Shreve’s short story salon — a collection of crystalline worlds, quiet ruptures, and perfectly timed turns.

Each object points to a different story… and every story is a fully built world.

Over the course of more than 25 original short stories, Georgia has written about couples in quiet unraveling, daughters caught between legacy and loss, people on vacation and on the verge. Her fiction is compact but expansive — every sentence purposeful, every world immersive. Her characters feel so real you almost expect them to speak back.

She doesn’t just write about places. She places you in them.

In “Grace,” a camera lost on a Bahamian island reveals far more than missed photos — it unspools an entire marriage.
In other stories, a folded map signals a journey that never started. Or a pair of sunglasses hides something even the wearer can’t name. Georgia’s stories are never just stories — they’re scenes in motion, worlds you’ve just entered, moods you didn’t know you recognized until you were in them.

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Original Stories

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Short Stories

by Georgia

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Short Stories
The Countess of M—
In nineteenth-century France, a sheltered aristocratic daughter enters a secret romance with a fallen nobleman, discovering both the thrill of being chosen and the cost of defying the social order around her.
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Short Stories
The Enigma Variations
In “The Enigma Variations,” a daughter chronicles her composer mother’s brilliance and unraveling as harassment, domestic pressure, and illness sever her from the piano that defines her life. Expansive, intimate, and devastating, the story is both elegy and indictment, revealing how a creative life can be erased long before death.
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Short Stories
Her Apartment
In “Her Apartment,” Shreve follows a widow whose pursuit of perfect interiors becomes a closed aesthetic system, turning taste into isolation. Sharp, satirical, and psychologically exact, the story maps the moment when sanctuary becomes prison.
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Short Stories
Grace
In “Grace,” Shreve turns an anniversary getaway into a psychologically exact portrait of marriage under pressure, where social polish, contempt, and long-buried secrets collide. Elegant and devastating, the story culminates in a hard-won moment of disclosure that recasts grace not as comfort, but as the brief interval in which truth is finally seen.
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Short Stories
Last Acts
In “Last Acts,” Shreve follows an acclaimed singer home to care for her dying mother, transforming grief from abstract tragedy into the lived texture of hospitals, memory, and duty. Unsentimental yet deeply affecting, the story culminates in a final redefinition of voice, not as performance, but as witness.
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Plays
The Odds
A darkly funny three-scene play about two sisters who grow up treating family dysfunction like a math problem. Ten years later, memory returns with teeth, and “the odds” becomes the name for what was hidden in plain sight.
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Poetry
Mother in the Snow
In “Mother in the Snow,” Georgia Shreve turns a winter stumble into a piercing portrait of maternal endurance under watchful eyes. Dark humor and raw imagery reveal a woman improvising her way forward while trying to hold dignity, and herself, together.
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Poetry
No Pity for Pigeons
In “No Pity for Pigeons,” Georgia Shreve transforms a quiet park encounter into a piercing social portrait of class, displacement, and human vulnerability. What begins with birds and cake ends with a deeper grief: not for pigeons, but for people quietly pushed to the margins of the worlds they once called ordinary.
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Poetry
You, we, I
In “You, We, I,” Shreve turns pronouns into emotional architecture, mapping how intimacy moves between fusion and fracture. With spare, incantatory lines, the poem captures two people reaching for truth through glare, innocence, and uncertainty, before landing on a haunting final shift from “we” back to “I.”
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Poetry
New Life
In “New Life,” Shreve imagines reinvention as metalwork: each day newly minted, each love a chance to re-stamp the self. Through images of repaired bridges, open doors, and an untouched bed, the poem captures the vulnerable mechanics of beginning again without denying what came before.
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Poetry
Is There a Poem in the House?
In “Is There a Poem in the House?”, Shreve turns inspiration into a haunting presence that seeps through walls, books, and breath before vanishing again. By merging domestic imagery with artistic dread, the poem captures the fragile cycle of creative arrival and loss with wit, unease, and precision.
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Poetry
Intimate Transmissions
In “Intimate Transmissions,” Shreve reimagines longing as signal and occupation, where desire arrives as pulse, implant, and interference rather than romance at a distance. Erotic, unsettling, and darkly funny, the poem traces how intimacy can slip from invitation into control while still feeling impossible to refuse.
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Operas and Musicals
Enron
In “Enron,” Georgia Shreve turns corporate collapse into biting music-theater satire, following Carol Sidney as loyalty, ambition, and conscience collide. With sharp tonal shifts and escalating moral pressure, the work reveals how institutional fraud is sustained not by one villain, but by a culture of performance, fear, and strategic silence.
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