Original Article here: Glendale News Press
New Short Fiction Series' Has Glendale Ties in Final Season
By Tristan Longwell | Sept 11, 2026
Los Angeles' longest running spoken word series, Sally Shore's "New Short Fiction Series," is in its final season after 30 years.
Over the years, Shore, the host and creator, has featured works from close to 500 writers primarily from the West Coast, including some with connections to the city of Glendale.
"I feel that it's been a platform for very early career writers to take off and move forward," Shore said. "I know that sometimes writers convene in workshops or in readings, but this was more. There was a very strong social element to this."
An excerpt from Glendale Community College English instructor Rhona Blaker's memoir "A Dance Called America" was performed by the "New Short Fiction Series" on Aug. 26. The book depicts her mother's struggle with dementia and its impact on her family, as well as the difficulties in navigating the medical system.
"I get very nervous if I have to read my own work in front of other people, but to have actors do it and do it with so much expression and dynamism was a really unique experience," Blaker said. "One of the actors was reading a piece that has a lot of my mother's voice in it, and it was really interesting to hear that voice articulated by someone else, and not just me doing everything. I really heard it in a different way."
Launched by Shore in 1997, the series provides writers with an opportunity to see their work through a fresh perspective.
"It's spoken word. It's not a reading, and having an actor perform your work allows the writer to see the work through a lens that they may not have originally heard it because ... it morphs a little bit, and there's subtleties that actors bring to the performance that allow the writer to see their own work in an evolutionary way," Shore said.
Prior to COVID, the live literary performances had various residencies, including at the Beverly Hills Public Library, the Lankershim Arts Center, the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, and the Federal Bar in North Hollywood. The "New Short Fiction Series" had its last in-person performance in March 2020.
Since 2021, the series has been broadcast on Crowdcast, a streaming platform. The transition, although challenging, became an opportunity for the series' evolution — Shore said people from all over the world attend the streamed performances.
Prior to the switch to streaming, the series focused on West Coast writers, mostly because it didn’t have a big enough budget to cover guests’ travel expenses.
"When I started this and over the years, I noticed that sometimes West Coast short story writers are sort of the redheaded stepchild of the literary world. Now the literary world is very New York-focused, and they're very East Coast-focused," Shore said. "Los Angeles, Southern California particularly, but also the West Coast, has a very, very rich and talented writing community, which sometimes the folks on the East Coast forget that we're here, but the talent pool is rather immense."
In search for work to include in the series' final season, Shore contacted Lou Mathews, a Los Angeles-based writer, author, novelist, playwright and UCLA Extension instructor, who recommended three students, including Blaker.
"Lou contacted me and said, 'I think you should send her some work,' and I did, and then she chose it, so that was very exciting," Blaker said.
Mathews has also participated in Shore's spoken word performances, and so have some of his other students.
The 79-year-old Mathews grew up in south Glendale and attended Glendale Community College (GCC), where he was the editor of their student paper, the El Vaquero. He went on to work at all of the local libraries and do a stint as a sports reporter for the Glendale News-Press in the late 1960s.
"I worked at every branch in the city ... and that was my introduction to literature, and ... it's why I started writing fiction, probably," Mathews said. "Glendale Community College was where I was forged."
Mathews remains connected to where it all started. In 2024, he participated in two "Author Talk" events hosted by GCC's library for his novel "L.A. Breakdown" which the community college had selected as its "book of the year."
