13 Ways is an on ongoing creative project that was launched in 2011, by td Whittle and Sandra Peterson Ramirez. The central theme of the series is a simple one: the stories have been inspired by the photos which accompany them, and they provide an imagined context for – or a particular interpretation of – those photos. Some of the tales are brief vignettes, while others are more fully-developed narratives. The literary styles and subjects vary enormously from story to story, invoking realism, suspense, fantasy, and modern Gothic.

 

Here’s how to access the 13 Ways stories:

  • To read the stories that are available here on our site, click on the first link under Categories on our sidebar. 
  • To read our first published collection, featuring sixteen tales from our 13 Ways series, click on the cover image of our book, which is at the top of our sidebar. As of August 2013, the book is available in Kindle format from Amazon. (If you do not own a Kindle, you can download the application for free here, to read on your iPad, laptop, PC, etc.).
  • There is a paperback version of the book, too, available for purchase through Amazon CreateSpace.

For readers who prefer to access the stories via our website, the series will remain here and we will continue to add to it. However, please be aware that there are some stories in the book that are not on the site, and vice versa.

With the title of our series, 13 Ways, we pay homage to the Wallace Stevens poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird:

I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

(Stanza VIII)

A note on grammar and style: We have used different spellings, vocabulary, verb conjugation, punctuation, and idioms in our stories, depending upon where they are set. One of us lives in Australia, and the other in the U.S. The stories take place in both countries, as well as in the far countries of imagination, which may borrow language from anywhere. Australia largely takes its cues from the UK on grammar and spelling; but it has developed, too, its own terminology and colloquialisms over the decades, which are quite distinctive.