2026 Next Generation Short Story Award - a win
🏆 Kahlil's Wall won "Inspirational" Category
Hey guys,
Most of you know that I publish a short story near the opening of each month and you’ll get one for June!
Right now, a bit of a brag. Kahlil’s Wall is a fictional short story about peace during war. In 2006, a queer military intelligence officer builds a wall in Tikrit Iraq while exploring beloved poetry.
The story won in the Inspirational Category which makes me proud because (1) the core elements of the story draw on Robert Frost’s poem Mending a Wall (2) the only religious references are Islamic in that I wrote within the context of living, working, and collaborating with Iraqis.
After these guys publish the story, the story will also be here on substack with the audio available wherever you listen to podcasts.
I get notes from you guys out there once in a while.
One of you suggested I apply for a fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center. I did and I am now in Residence there during their “Vermont Week”, a week reserved for Vermont artists. What amazing group.
One of you asked how to follow along with short stories better. Substack can be odd and Google does a poor job of showing our content during searches. He also related to me the real names of baddies in my last novel “Stolen Mountain”. That’s super cool. My message back was: try searching for “Aiken Trowbridge Dispatch” at your favorite podcast site. When a “stacker(?)” publishes a series of audio works on Substack, Substack automatically publishes them on the most common podcast sites.
I love reading aloud to you, my readers, but I never know who’s listening.
Since this entry is more like a newsletter than my normal efforts, here’s the recent activity.
Captain Henry: 2½ Insurrections, 2 Wars, 1¼ Centuries and a Story of Love - is now speeding towards production. Covers approved and marketing efforts to the behind the scenes stuff started. Working on getting book reviews.
I’ll be at the New England Independent Booksellers Association in September, just about the time of the “pub date” for that novel.
I finished a novella this spring. We may see that next spring if my publisher/publishing team determine it is ok enough.
I promise to get around to more bookstores this year. I fell through a roof the weeks before the last novel dropped. I couldn’t drive for six months. I did so very little to support the last novel, “Stolen Mountain”. Several of the VT bookstores recognized it as a Vermont story by a Vermont author and propped it up nicely and sold a few copies.
In Closing, I’ll share a market blurb by my friends at Catalyst Press. They were doing 2 minute pitches to national book sales people. I would not have written “decorated” and I had to read the closing twice. First time through I thought I might have been a “civil war veteran.” I re-read it. I am not that old.
“Our next title is CAPTAIN HENRY by I.M. Aiken — adult literary fiction in the anti-war realist tradition. The most politically charged title in our catalog. Pitch it honestly to the right accounts.
Here’s the author. I.M. Aiken served in Iraq as a civilian member of the U.S. military campaign and earned multiple military awards for that service. She is also short-listed for the 2026 Next Gen Short Story Awards for “Kahlil’s [kah-LEEL] Wall.” This is not her first novel. This is not a tourist’s view of war — this is a decorated participant writing literary fiction.
And this is not just a novel. It’s built on two real archives: her ancestor’s Reconstruction-era papers and her own Iraq journals. Pitch it as a novel and a semi-fictionalized memoir.
Here are the comps that do all the work. CATCH-22. M*A*S*H [Mash — like the TV show, but the novel by Richard Hooker]. Joseph Heller and Richard Hooker. Anti-war literary fiction written by people who lived inside the war and saw all aspects of its crazy reality. CAPTAIN HENRY belongs to that tradition. Less absurdist and more realist, but a direct descendant non-the-less.
What it is NOT: I talked to the author. It is not Jack Carr. Reps need to be clear about that — opposite end of military fiction. Not heroic thriller. Anti-war, literary, realist, queer.
Two timelines. 1870: eighteen-year-old Henry McDonald enlists in the U.S. military and is sent into Reconstruction Georgia, hunting Ku Kluxers through a landscape of lynching and guerrilla violence. He earns the nickname “Private Trouble.” 2006: Lieutenant Sam Musgrave is on her second tour in Baghdad — queer, competent, losing faith in her government — while her partner Brighid Doran traces an archival thread back to Private Trouble himself.
The book is dedicated to Capitol Police officers from January 6, 2021. References to a possible war with Iran read as prescient. None of this is incidental — it is the book’s argument.
Here is one way to pitch it: a Catch-22 for our forever wars, by a decorated civilian war veteran. That’s CAPTAIN HENRY.
