This weekend I ordered two books that have one thing in common: they are anthologies of stories by authors who are in some way contributing to a team effort. The new one is Fourteen Days, which is set in a New York apartment building where the tenants gather on the rooftop to tell stories during the COVID-19 lockdown. NPR said in its review: "Fourteen Days is an ambitious project, and its proceeds benefit the Authors Guild Foundation, two-thirds of whose members suffered an income decline during the pandemic." Contributors include Margaret Atwood, Emma Donoghue, Diana Gabaldon, Celeste Ng, R. L. Stine, and Ishmael Reed. Good authors, good project, sold!
My other purchase is Liavek #3: Wizard's Row from 1987. Thanks to Jo Walton's review, I'm reading Pamela Dean's 1994 novel, The Dubious Hills, for the first time. When I poked around to find out more about Dean, I was intrigued to learn that she and several other authors in Minneapolis had invented a shared world in which to set fiction. Patricia Wrede, whose YA fiction I enjoy, said of it: "When we invented Liavek, we wanted it to be a place where we, our real selves, could live if we had to. So it has a number of things its authors felt they couldn't live without: coffee and chocolate, cheap and reliable birth control (Worrynot tea), good medical care (based on magic, but still effective), good food, all-night cafes, a high literacy rate. And, of course, magic." They published five anthologies. I'm catching up.
The idea of a collective short-story anthology seems to me a good real-life project for a writing group. If you belong to one, what about setting yourself the goal of, say, everybody writing a holiday story to put together at for December? You've got time. Or election-year stories (naahh). The old standby, regional tales.
For introverts who don't belong to a writing group, consider the inverse—single author, group tales. Imagine a group of fictional characters who are embarked on such an adventure. What goes right or wrong over their weekend, vacation, or enforced time together? You could rewrite a set of fairy tales, myths, or other historical episodes in their different voices with or without a framing device.