indiereadergirl0329

I first encountered the short story collection A Simplified Map of the Real World (2013) by Stevan Allred when I got an email from the editor.  She is Laura Stanfill, whom I’ve met through blogging and whom I would call friend.  When she got to the story that names the collection, she immediately thought of me, and with the author’s permission, emailed a copy of it to me.  It was a story about Cal, a young Mormon boy who has a good relationship with his uncle Lenny.  But Cal can see that his family shuns Lenny, and that they often act afraid of him being alone with children.  It becomes clear, as the story progresses, that Lenny is gay and that his relatives assume that being gay means being a pedophile, an assumption that is absolutely false.  I was grateful to Laura for sending me this story, for she…