On Presenting These Stories

This collection gathers twenty-three stories written by Sue Ann Montgomery between 2002 and the present — Halloween letters posted to her family each October, autobiographical fictions, and children's tales written for her grandchildren.

It is presented in the spirit of an archival edition: typos are silently corrected, but the author's voice — the em-dashes, the trailing ellipses, the one-word paragraphs, the rhythms that are unmistakably hers — is left exactly as she set it down. Where the original manuscript leaves a passage incomplete, that gap is preserved as written, marked with a small editorial note. The work is shown as it stood when she put down her pen.

The Dream Index at the back catalogs the recurring motifs, characters, and worlds that thread through these stories — the locket, the prairie, the horses, the moon, the women of the Anderson and Rittenoure line, the town of Piddleton — so that the collection can be read not as twenty-three separate pieces but as a single continuous mythology.

— Sam, editor