Texas Public Radio had the rare and wonderful opportunity to host acclaimed author Peter Orner at a special event last January. After over five years of collaborating on "The Lonely Voice," we were all in the same room — in person — while discussing his latest novel, "The Gossip Columnist's Daughter." We also recorded a couple of episodes of "The Lonely Voice."

We always go back to short stories. We had to. How often does one get to sit in the same room with Peter Orner and talk about stories? For this special time together, there was one author we had to make time for — Gina Berriault.

If you’ve listened to this podcast before, you know that we love short stories and that the stories of Gina Berriault are some of our favorites. They sort of set the standard.

We’ve covered a few of her stories over the years, including “Stolen Pleasures,” a story about two sisters — Fleur and Delia.

This time we are talking about “The Tea Ceremony,” and it features the sisters in their childhood. Front and center is Delia. She’s a noticer. She's bright and observant — even if she is rather shy and doesn't have any friends.

But right under everyone else's nose is the fact that the teacher, Miss Ferguson, considers Jolie Lotta something like her pet, a favorite student. Delia easily surmises that what’s behind this is Jolie’s beauty. And her mother, Adrianna is beautiful, too.

A tea ceremony occurs in the story — a ritual-filled spectacle that is so sublime that Delia feels like she would like to capture its beauty by drawing it. But she can’t muster a way.

And then she considers her own family situation, her "rain-stained bungalow," her blind mother and the disarray and disorder that can’t be helped along in her family.

Years later, she is still thinking about the ceremony and what the idea of beauty can really mean to her.

There is a lot going on here with the idea of beauty — not just for some aesthetic quality or as something life-saving, a transformative force that allows us to transcend a "world awry" or a life full of compromise. She can escape the confines of her past and the expectations of that life and make her own way, shape her own identity — through her appreciation of beautiful things. It is a means of future for herself—one she feels she can choose for herself.

The Tea Ceremony is a story collection that was compiled by Berriault's daughter and her partner, Leonard Gardner, following her death in 1999, and is celebrated for its spare, elegant prose.

As we’ve said before on this podcast, and as Peter Orner surmises, Berriault has a knack for taking ordinary characters and situations and imbuing them with a fullness and a dignity — that maybe all the rest of us want and deserve, too. There is something powerfully emotional in that.

This is the way that Berriault manages her characters, these outsiders, suffering the losses of goals that they can’t quite name but that they hunger for just the same. That’s how Delia feels about beauty — about harnessing it in some way, if only for a little while.

We believe this is precisely what Berriault does with her story writing. She captures the beauty inherent in people's lives. An ordinary world is never just that. Or it is — and there is beauty there, too.

How fortunate we all feel to have been in the same room with Peter Orner. And then to have the opportunity to discuss a story by Gina Berriault? Well—how lucky can we lonely voices be?

Alex Gordon, a Chicago-based editor and journalist, joins the program.

He is the perfect guest host to join The Lonely Voice for an episode about Train Dreams by Denis Johnson.

This is a podcast where we celebrate the short story. That means we explore the worlds that authors build in just a few pages. We’ve taken that idea to heart so much, we’ve even veered before into one episode about poetry.

Every once in a while, a piece of fiction comes along that is too complex for a single story, yet too distilled to be an expansive novel. It lives in that haunting middle ground genre of the novella.

A book that many critics call the "perfect novella" is our focus today. We’re talking about Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams. Originally published in The Paris Review and later a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, this slim volume manages to pack an entire American century into just about 116 pages. It’s a story that doesn’t just sit on your shelf; You don’t forget about it after you close the book. It lingers in your mind like a dream.

Doesn’t it stand to reason that someone would eventually adapt a movie from the novella?

Train Dreams is the story of Robert Grainier, a laborer in the American West during the early 20th century. We follow him through the logging camps and the construction of the Great Northern Railway. But this isn’t just a historical chronicle. It’s a meditative, even disorienting journey through grief, isolation, and the terrifying beauty of a wilderness that is slowly being erased by progress.

We’ll be discussing Denis Johnson’s impressionistic storytelling, how we drift through time and memory. He shows us a man who survives unspeakable tragedy only to become a ghost in his own life — or to quietly and temperately resist that fate.

Alex Gordon enlightens us on some of the back-story of Denis Johnson’s research for the book. And we’ll see how those elements and scenes figure in the film.

Clint Bentley directed the movie and co-wrote the screenplay with Greg Kwedar. Joel Edgerton plays Robert Grainier.

We’re not film experts, but we love movies —especially those inspired by short works of fiction —or that lend themselves to a podcast like ours where we just want to talk about stories. You know us —that’s what we’re all about.

Whether you have read the book ten times or have seen the movie three or four times — or are hearing about them for the first time today, grab a coffee and settle in. Let’s head into the Idaho Panhandle.

Denis Johnson is the author of Train Dreams.

GUEST: Alex Gordon is a Chicago-based editor and journalist, who most recently has detoured into the realm of marketing and media services.

On this episode Peter Orner and Yvette Benavides discuss the story “Gómez Palacio” by Roberto Bolaño.

This is a story selected by Peter Orner for this episode. It’s a curious choice — but not altogether surprising as it seems to be a favorite story for the legions of aficionados of Bolaño’s stories.

For many of us, the favorite Bolaño story is any one that we happen to be reading.

In “Gómez Palacio” an unnamed protagonist is far from home in the country of Mexico — specifically the town of Gómez Palacio where he is staying briefly to conduct workshops with a handful of students — none of whom he is terribly impressed with.

A friend named Montero is mentioned — but we don’t know a lot about him, except that he works for the arts council that helped the main character find this gig. And we can also assume that he is someone who sort of understands the protagonist’s temperament.

A character we do see is the director of the arts council. She is described candidly as "plump" and in other ways that are not so flattering — if only a little tactless.

But this is the way the protagonist surmises everyone — including his young charges.

The director picks up the writer every single morning in a boat of a sky-blue car.

They sit together and have coffee, and she tells him that her husband does not seem to understand the life of the writer.

His perspective is how sad everything seems. He thinks that he is “confusing sense with sensitivity.”

The writer has trouble sleeping. He has nightmares.

He includes odd details about being very thirsty –and the ways that keeps him awake. His solution is to drink water, but then having to get up to go to the bathroom becomes a problem, too. Everything is kind of awful for him.

But think about this: How is it that if things were so awful when he was 23 — all these small moments of things he considers with disdain — why have they become such deep memories, recalled with yes, a tactlessness — but wrapped around a wistfulness, too, and a beauty that he finally gives over in a very particular way to Gómez Palacio.

On this episode, Peter Orner joined us in person in the TPR studios in San Antonio.

On this episode Yvette Benavides and Peter Orner discuss stories by the Russian writer, Varlam Shalamov.

He was a journalist and a writer. In 1936, he was arrested for counterrevolutionary activities and sent to the Soviet Gulag. After surviving 15 years in prison campus, he was released and would go on to write short fictional stories that reflect the years he spent in the Gulag.

The New York Review of Books (NYRB) published Kolyma Stories, in 2018. The translation is by Donald Rayfield. This volume, along with a second titled Sketches of the Criminal World with a translation by Alissa Valles, make up the first complete English translation of Shalamov’s stories— the only ones based on the authorized Russian text.

As remarkable as this access to these stories 90 years after Shalamov was first arrested, is how they can still matter so much.

In 1951, when he started writing, Shalamov was focused on a particular place and time — not as a journalist, but as a story writer.

He brings such humanity to the telling, a poetry to the descriptions of the place, the hunger of the people, the uncertainty and the fragility of life that ruled the day.

For us in 2026 there are still challenging themes to understand — about persecution and inhumanity.

But there is far more than that, and we find that we are moved by glimmers of resonance and of hope and light in the most abject and distant of places.

Peter Orner and Yvette Benavides discuss “Berries” by Varlam Shalamov. They also reference the stories “At Night” and “RUR.” All of the stories can be found in the collection, Kolyma Stories — translated by Donald Rayfield and published by New York Review of Books.

This is a special 50th episode of the podcast. To celebrate, we have one of our favorites — Mavis Gallant — and not just one, but four stories.

There’s a series of four Mavis Gallant stories that might be presented to us in various sequences and that feature the stories of three characters — "Edouard, Juliette, and Lena."

We hope that’s clear. Four stories. Three characters. Edouard narrates throughout.

It starts with “A Recollection” a rather vague title for a story that establishes a lot that’s going on during a contentious time in occupied France.

Edouard tells of his marriage of convenience with Magdalena. Whose convenience is it? She is over ten years older than he is. She is originally from Hungary and a Jewish convert to Catholicism. She avoids deportation thanks to her marriage to Edouard. But while he finds her cosmopolitan and curious in her choice to be ignorant about politics, they part ways.

Another woman in his life appears in “The Colonel’s Daughter” and in “Rue de Lille." Her name is Juliette.

Edouard has been on some adventures and Juliette — still a tender-aged teen — visits him in the hospital. She is a lonely girl — an only child whose father has been lost in the war and whose mother remains distant and aloof.

In Edouard she finds a cause. In her, he finds someone to take care of, a woman-child.

But it’s clear, his attempts to blunt the sharp edges of her loneliness, fall short. And as she grows older, it is as if he has stayed just exactly who he has always been. And through it all, she is the polar opposite of the Magdalena with her expensive, sophisticated attire and Chanel perfume.

Juliette would like to have children. There is even a name for an imagined child. But Magdalena will not give Edouard the divorce that would allow him to marry Juliette and have a child.

But that’s not quite the point, as we discuss in our conversation.

Everyone gets older in this series of stories. Things outside the characters change. Technologies take hold. Conventions change. Wars begin. Other wars begin. Disasters change the landscape.

But the tiny stories we carry around with us that come from exactly who we are at our core — are immutable — for better or for worse.

Mavis Gallant is the author of "A Recollection,” “The Colonel’s Daughter, “The Rue de Lille,” and “Lena.”

“Out with the Old" by Richard Yates is a New Year's Eve story.

It's set on December 31, 1950, in the tuberculosis ward of Mulloy’s Veterans Hospital in New York.

Tiny and Jones are patients in the ward — of building seven, to be specific. And it's worth noting. They are in a building that's set apart from the other veterans.

In the hospital where each day is like the next, they want to break up the monotony of things during the holiday season.

At the appointed time, Tiny (whose nickname is ironic) will come out in only a towel made to look like a diaper and parade around looking like Baby New Year.

But they need someone to look like Father Time.

One patient they settle on is McIntyre. And even though he’s only 41 years old, he looks the part — gaunt, grey-haired and haggard. The problem is — he won’t do it.

And then we learn about his recent visit home. The complicated reentry for him is compounded by the fact that he has been in the hospital a long time — years, in fact.

The alienation from the family, the isolation that the hospital engenders — along with the fact that he seems to know he is quite ill — combine to make him want to keep to himself.

He is also consumed with the idea of writing a letter to his daughter — the objective for which is not certain. And when the mystery of this particular activity grows, an unexpected shift occurs in the story.

New Year’s Eve can be a fraught time in the best of circumstances. For McIntyre — as aloof as he is in the hospital, as distant as he is from his family, and as squarely he is coming to terms with the facts of his life — it becomes an opportunity that no one really expected.

Richard Yates is the author of "Out with the Old." It can be found in the collection "Eleven Kinds of Loneliness."

We are excited and happy to be talking about a Grace Paley story again. And it’s one we bring to you to coincide with the holidays.

Shirley Abramowitz is the “voice” of the title. She is “the loudest voice” in the school. The sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Hilton, knows this about her, indeed summons her and gives her the role of a kind of narrator of the Christmas pageant.

Never mind that Shirley is Jewish—as are many of the other kids in the program. For her, as we see, it is quite enough to be included, to be counted, to be taken as someone with skills and talents — never a fool.

And that’s not even the biggest conflict here. Her mom isn’t too thrilled with the way the school makes all the kids participate in the holiday program — without considering their religious backgrounds and beliefs. It’s a tension that’s on a low simmer, but Shirley will have to figure out how to adjust and stay true to who she really is.

This story has been often anthologized, but we want to shine a light on its ubiquity — not just as a Christmas story but as a really great story — for any time of the year — any day at all.

Because we are talking about Grace Paley, we’ll talk about voice. We’ll also read a paragraph or two — or three. With Paley, you read the words, and you read them aloud — and delight in them.

Yvette Benavides and Peter Orner discuss “Fun with a Stranger” by Richard Yates.

As with a previous episode, the focus again is a school story — with a teacher and her third grade class.

In the previous episode, William Maxwell’s “Love” helped us see the ways a protagonist learned a lesson about love through his fifth grade teacher, Miss Vera Brown. He learned about love — that it blooms in beautiful and unforgettable ways. Miss Brown was pretty, gentle, and compassionate. The protagonist feels a kind of love from her — and for her.

This time, we see another teacher, Miss Snell, who might seem the polar opposite of Miss Brown. As we discuss here, Miss Snell isn’t all that lovable. She’s an older woman who is described as having a homely smile and mannish features. She’s also tough on her students, even keeping to the regular school day schedule on the last day before the Christmas holiday.

But there are lessons to be learned in this story, too, about love — about compassion. Yates is known for presenting characters in all too real ways that we might interpret as cruel perhaps. Not all teachers are physically attractive. Not all of them are good at throwing little parties or choosing gifts for young children. Miss Snell is set in her ways. She is doing what she knows how to do — and is just who she is — despite what day in December it might be.

And she is as unforgettable as Miss Vera Brown in that other story. Miss Brown was isolated from her students at the end. She died alone. Miss Snell seems to go through her life alone. But her kind of loneliness is something quite else.

And it’s only a writer like Richard Yates who could compose the stories in Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and create the taxonomy of people bereft of love or of friendship — or even of a kind of kinship with the itinerant group of third graders who want to forget about their teacher over Christmas or after the third grade.

Miss Snell will make an indelible imprint and remain almost like a word in their vocabulary — part of the language they will always speak. “And that’s just the way it is with words,” as Miss Snell said.

Richard Yates is the author of "Fun with a Stranger." It can be found in the collection Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and in The Collected Stories of Richard Yates.

What do you expect from a short story with such a title as “Love”?

It’s not about familial or romantic love. It isn’t about a friendship either.

This is a story about a teacher. Sure, the narrator seems to have been infatuated with the teacher—a young woman named Miss Vera Brown—when he was in the fifth grade.

His nostalgic recollection of her classroom imbues here with a kind of saintliness. She was angelic in his telling.

And then something happens and the boy must learn a difficult lesson about what ends up happening when we have love, give love, are loved.

In this discussion, Peter Orner and Yvette Benavides also make mention of Charles Baxter and his ideas of what he calls “the half-known world.”

This is the way we come to know characters in stories. They are only half-known to us. And it's enough. It's necessary.

This is how we know our teachers, after all. They stand before us—fully who they are as teachers.

But who they are and what they do outside of the classroom is not known to us.

And the mysteries inherent in the relationship we have with our teachers take on even more significance in a story like this one by the great William Maxwell.

Find the story in "All the Days and Nights: The Collected Stories" by William Maxwell.

Reading the stories of Lucia Berlin can be an intense experience. The pacing of each moves with suddenness but then also lingers for brief moments of beauty and light juxtaposed with something unseemly and sad.

Characters want connection and love—and sometimes settle for something else that can lead to bad decisions—broken hearts, addiction.

Generally acknowledged are the autobiographical details in Berlin’s stories—the alcoholism and addiction, the humor and the heartbreak.

In the two stories we cover in this episode—"Panteón de Dolores" and "Emergency Room Notebook, 1977"—there’s family dysfunction and tragedy, too, set against the backdrop of another country and its culture and rituals or a hospital—another place with its protocols and routines. Except within all that can be expected in these settings there is something totally new to make us pay attention to situations and people to whom we might never have given a second thought.

Lydia Davis has long championed the work of Lucia Berlin, noting her awe of the natural world, the suddenness in the prose, her pacing, dialogue, characterization, a romanticism that is cut off by realism.

There are brutal elements in these stories to be sure. Berlin is unflinching. She is also compassionate, depicting again and again the beauty that can coexist with human frailty, the tenderness that twins with toughness, and the fullness of life that can be measured in sudden, small moments.