[Stephens is a Canadian educator, critic, and editor for the journal Canadian Literature. In the following review of Ten Green Bottles, he lauds Thomas as an exemplary practitioner of the short story.]

The short story expresses a succinct and personal reaction to some specific aspect of life that has moved the writer at a particular moment; the short story exists as a separate point on the canvas that is the writer's experience, yet it exists as a point that is linked, irrevocably, to other points within that experience. The fortunate thing about the short story is that it can be considered as a small, isolated unit, or it can be compared with other stories. The short story writer needs only to consider the form and development of a particular moment, and is consequently freed from the responsibility of expressing that moment in relation to other moments; this a reader may do if he so wishes. Rarely, if ever, does a short story writer express the freedom that is essential to the form. Rarely does a collection of short stories express this freedom.

But Audrey Callahan Thomas has caught the essence of the freedom of the form in her first collection of short stories [Ten Green Bottles], and caught it with something that is peculiarly her own. The variety is impressive. There is a range of subject matter—from studies of social bores and their effect on people around them, to racial consciousness in a Negro Peace Corpsman's emotional changes, to thoughts on childbirth—that lifts this book above so many collections of short stories; the range in situation is reflected, too, in the geographical range presented by Mrs. Thomas. Her heightened awareness of some special moment that makes a short story, gives to Mrs. Thomas the predominant characteristic that in a good writer separates the short story from any other literary genre. The fluid moments which are examined in this book change and flow easily. The reader perceives the awareness behind the story, the fluidity which surrounds the particular moment. Mrs. Thomas leads on into a vast reservoir which is her interpretation of life. It is a clear, no-nonsense view; it makes sense. Her stories, alone, or in the collection, reach pinnacles that I would suggest few writers of the contemporary short story—in Canada, and elsewhere—have reached.

It is not the plots that are interesting alone, not the style, not the rhythms, but a combination of these things that make Mrs. Thomas an artist in the short story. It is, after all, her whole technique, or her technique of wholeness. It is the unique approach that she has to what happens, to the importance of the moment she is examining, to the function of language within her expression. She works in easy circles, moments of time that circulate about her past, future, and present, into a particular mosaic that lacks sequential structure. At times it is what is happening now that asserts the story; sometimes it is something that has happened, or something that will happen. But finally, it is the reaction within the now that validates the story. On one hand there is isolation within experience, and then Mrs. Thomas leads her story away from sequential occurrences and lets incident and time weave her story for her. For her characters, real life stops temporarily, and in its stopping is its essence. Character and plot define the moments—or the latter defines the former—and so it flows on.

There is no doubt that Mrs. Thomas's book is more than just a "tour de force" in technique. Everywhere in the collection are signs of a writer with a keen observation, or someone who has obviously reacted to life with an almost limitless sensibility. The language is beautiful and controlled; her choice of words is admirable without being pretentious. She is a born short story writer in an age where lucidity seems to be often lost in short stories. I recommend her book highly. Reading it is an experience not to be missed. It is, as Kjeld Deichman used to say about his feeling on opening his kiln after a firing of many pieces of pottery, "like Christmas morning; everything becomes a surprise."