Join us for a reading from The Other Shore, a short story collection set in the Pacific Northwest from 2023 Ursula Le Guin Prize-winner Rebecca Campbell and Hamilton’s Stelliform Press. In 10 tales, Campbell channels ancient forest spirits, the lost ghosts of unknown fates, biological and technological transformations, and challenges the ways colonization and extraction have shaped not only landscapes, but how we imagine the future.
Campbell won the Sunburst award for short fiction in 2020 for “The Fourth Trimester is the Strangest,” the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award in 2021 for “An Important Failure,” and the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction in 2023 for her novella-in-stories Arboreality. This $25,000 prize recognizes fiction that focuses on stewardship and hope and the jury said Campbell's work was a "profoundly ethical" exploration of a community surviving climate change on Vancouver Island, including urban gardening, local ecology, and crafting musical instruments. The work has been described as a "eulogy for the world as we know it," asking profound questions about what can and must be saved. It was chosen from a shortlist of nine, as the only Canadian entry. NeWest Press published her first novel, The Paradise Engine, in 2013. She lives in Windsor, ON.
The Other Shore explores "how humanity has arrived at this precarious point in history—and where it can go from here—from several surprising angles" (Publisher's Weekly starred review). The fairy story "Lares Familiares 1981” is about the decline of the Canadian logging industry as experienced by the dysfunctional Thorne family. "The Bletted Woman" follows a widow with early-onset dementia who agrees to join a study that allows just-barely-alive corpses to fuse with natural surroundings, giving humans the potential to communicate with the plant world. "Conclusion: An Incomplete Catalogue of Miraculous Births, or, Secrets of the Uterus Abscondita” explores birth through historical oddities like Mary Toft, birther of rabbits, and historical monstrosities like the atom bomb.
"The Other Shore blends rich gothic lyricism with keen ecological awareness. These brilliant stories unsettle, dissolve, and refashion what we thought we knew of the world in the Anthropocene and our place within it. Layered and metatextual, they reveal both deep skill and profound environmental consciousness. ” — Jenna Butler, author of Revery: A Year of Bees
Our student readers include:
Gwendolyn Sanchez-Westaway is a fourth-year VIU Creative Writing student and a member of the fiction and subscriptions team for Portal 2026. She has had her own fiction published in The Navigator.
Cass Rundle is a third-year Creative Writing and Media Studies student at VIU. His short fiction “Nothing to Be Done” and script “The Art of Disappearance” appeared in the 2025 issue of Portal. His short story “Like a Moth to a Lamp” appeared in the first issue of The Raspberry, and his play “One Stop Horror Shop” was selected for the 2025 Satyr Players One-Act Festival. He’s also the Social Media Coordinator for the Creative Writing Club at VIU.
Flynn Connolly Sifton is a third-year English and Creative Writing student and serves as a fiction editor and a Portfolio Coordinator for the 2026 issue of Portal. His work has appeared in GOOEY and his story “He Sings to Us” appeared in Portal 2025. “It Leaves an Impression” won the 2024 Portent Prize and was published in that issue of Portal. He is the recipient of a Pat Bevan Scholarship for Fiction.
