Breece D’J Pancake’s story collection was first published in 1983. His death by suicide happened in 1979 after he experienced a spate of grievous losses in his life.

Much has been written about Breece D’J Pancake—the middle initials in his unusual name, his feeling like an outsider in university, for example. Some readers don’t consider his life and work without also considering his death.

But in life, he experienced a little bit of success, living to see his stories published in such reputable publications as The Atlantic Monthly. 

His stories were set in West Virginia and feature some focus on the natural world with hard-working characters in some sort of dire straits. Their lives are laid bare for readers bit by slow and thoughtful bit.

There’s a timelessness in Pancake’s stories. They are distilled, austere, compressed—and yet we find such a richness and complexity in them, in the interiority of the main characters, the conflicts they encounter, the losses they endure.

In this episode, Peter Orner and Yvette Benavides discuss “First Day of Winter” by Breece D’J Pancake. And stay tuned for a bonus episode as Orner and Benavides discuss another story by Breece D’J Pancake, “Time and Again.”

Breece D’J Pancake’s stories can be found in a number of collections, including The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake. 

The essay “Winter in September” can be found in the memoir in essays Am I Alone Here: Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live by Peter Orner.

We think you’ll find this article about Breece D’J Pancake by Jon Michaud interesting. Unearthing Breece D’J Pancake | The New Yorker

Read more about Peter Orner at Peter Orner

Read more about The Lonely Voice at tpr.org/thelonelyvoice

Send questions, comments or story recommendations for The Lonely Voice to [email protected]

New Year’s Eve. What is it about New Year’s Eve that makes it—for some of us—a little hard to take?

It’s a day weighed down by resolutions to make, promises to keep. It’s a day that carries the expectation of what the next year will bring to us.

And within that weight and pressure are the wishes for prosperous times ahead. Luck. Love. All good things.

If only it were that easy.

In Mavis Gallant’s story “New Year’s Eve” we see that the idea of this last day of the year plays a part in the lives of the characters in remarkable ways.

Mr. and Mrs. Plummer host a young woman named Amabel. Their daughter, Catherine, died years before and Amabel had once been her childhood friend.

Amabel is going through a divorce and wants to spend the holidays with the Plummers.

They go to the opera. They don’t know what it’s about, don’t know the players and don’t speak the language. That all seems emblematic of the ways in which they face their lives.

Mr. Plummer hasn’t necessarily been true to his wife. She has her own small secrets. They are finally at this stage in their marriage—well entrenched in routines. Amabel’s inviting herself is a nuisance—as is her insistence that the last day of the year and what occurs then is so supremely important.

“Whatever happens tonight happens every day for a year,” she says.

The Plummers have been through a lot over the years. The idea of a New Year’s Eve freighted with so much artificial importance will not be convincing for them as it is for the 22-year-old Amabel.

And yet … And yet … We see a glimmer of something. It happens in passing. It is something so quick and ineffable, almost imperceptible. It would be easy to miss it if we don’t pay attention. That’s kind of how it is with Mavis Gallant's stories.

In "New Year's Eve," we see the ways the characters enter and exit the rooms of memory, come to discover the ways doing so affects the present moments in that theater in Moscow on New Year’s Eve—and imagine (maybe still hope a little) about what the future can possibly bring.

If you’ve listened to this podcast before, you know that we love short stories and that we hold the stories of Gina Berriault in such high regard; they sort of set the standard.

“Stolen Pleasures” is a story about two sisters. Fleur is seven years older than Delia.

We meet them in childhood, but the story jumps to their adult lives and back again.

One sister survived being hit by a car. She has a lazy eye and grows up in a home without a piano— without many things that both sisters want.

The other sister survived scarlet fever and wants for more, too,

The sisters have a blind mother and a father who had been labeled the black sheep in his family.

These are some of the things we know about these characters—but we learn them incrementally, gradually. And it would seem there are many secrets about the “Stolen Pleasures” of each character about which we only know very little. We learn a little more as we continue to read the story.

As a story about siblings who know that they might not be able to ever have the things they want from this world, it would seem a very ordinary kind of story, but that is simply not so.

As Peter Orner surmises, Berriault has a talent 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 coveted goals that they can’t quite name but that they hunger for just the same.

As with all of Berriault’s stories, discussing “Stolen Pleasures” for Peter Orner and me is simply not an easy thing. Our emotions are high and settle in our throats about this story that is the furthest thing from maudlin or mawkish. Not a bit of that here.

In fact, in our discussion, I conclude that it is knowing that Berriault may only want to depict truth and honesty in these stories—in a world where there is so little truth and honesty—that makes me admire it so much. Emotions are high in this one.

As Peter Orner says, Berriault can take “sensational” situations and make them “subtle.” It is in that subtlety that the poignancy can speak to us.

We like to say we geek out over stories on The Lonely Voice. Indeed.

First published in 1913, “The Judgment” is a story by Franz Kafka. Among critics, it’s considered something of a breakthrough story—and one Kafka himself was proud of, having written it in the span of one day.

The “judgment” of the title is a pronouncement made by the father of the main character, Georg Bendemann.

It’s likely that “The Judgment” is one of the most analyzed of Kafa’s stories. It’s often described as being chaotic and full of paradoxes.

The story is divided into two main sections. The first one makes the reader privy to Georg’s thoughts as he writes a letter to an unnamed friend. It is a friend who lives in Russia and is not faring well there.

Georg feels guilty about telling this friend how well his own life is going—that he continues to work for his father, that he is engaged to a lovely young woman.

In the second part of the story, Georg checks on his father. Since the death of Georg’s mother, his father has slowed down. Georg’s relationship with his father is fraught. His father is sharp in his tone and critical of Georg.

When Georg tells his father about his friend and how he has not been sure about how to tell him all about how great his own life is going, the father’s reaction is quite strange.

When Georg promises to take better care of him, his father reacts harshly, even forming a stark judgment against his son.

What will happen after this rough pronouncement? What will happen next between the father and son? What will Georg do next?

The story is one that is full of the mysteries that can imbue the most ordinary situations—and the most dramatic and unthinkable ones.

Alice Munro passed away on May 13. She was 92. The beloved Canadian author dedicated her long career to creating stories that were both psychologically complex and accessible. She never failed to both mystify and dazzle legions of readers all over the world.

The Swedish Academy that awarded her the Nobel in 2013 referred to her as “a master of contemporary short story.

We’ve been reluctant to join the chorus of tributes that have come forth this week, feeling both bemused and bereft.

But there is plenty to say. Perhaps in time we will share those thoughts. For now, for this week, we’ve instead immersed ourselves in reading Alice Munro’s stories. We’ve been celebrating her life for a very long time.

One reason we created The Lonely Voice podcast is to celebrate the work of writers like Alice Munro—the ones who celebrate stories, the ones who want to write stories first (and not as a warm-up for the novel—dear no—never that.) It’s the story.

In one interview cited in the biography by Robert Thacker, Alice Munro was quoted as saying, “Oh, writing makes my life possible, it always has.”

And that dear life made many other things possible for us—and the many ways we can enter the stories of Alice Munro, these women and girls, these fathers and brothers, the lovers and friends—in situations created to depict the richness of experience every human being understands in small and large ways—but can really come to know by reading the stories of Alice Munro.

In this episode, Peter Orner and Yvette Benavides discuss the story “Illinois.” It is a story from the book The View from Castle Rock, a collection of stories that are more personal than any that Alice Munro ever wrote before. In this one, while one family journeys from a homestead in Illinois to the Canadian border, a baby is lost—but then magically reappears.

The narrative voice in “Death in the Woods” by Sherwood Anderson is an important element of this classic story. From it, we receive the strange, sad story of a woman he describes as rather typical and common—the type of person who is “nothing special” and whom we all know in our own lives.

And yet, the story itself is told in such a close way, brimming with details that go beyond some kind of mere distant familiarity we have with someone random.

The woman had lived in extremely difficult and bleak circumstances for her entire life. We learn this from what the narrator shares. And yet, we wonder how he could possibly know the intimate details of her life—or even of the way she dies.

That becomes one of the most important things to talk about—and admire—in this story.

The story has been so often anthologized. Perhaps we receive the story in brand new ways with each new reading. And this is how it is with a story such as this one. That is, that it is one—as the narrator reminds us—that must be told slowly and with care—over time.

We receive a story in brand new ways with each rereading. Maybe we need to read this one again when we are older and when we can examine the motives of the two young brothers in the story and the ways they retell the story at the exact same time that we are receiving the story from the narrator (one of the brothers) when he is older, and some time and distance have passed.

As we read the final of the story’s five sections, we come to realize that the story is about storytelling. It parses the idea of narrative, breaks it apart, puts it back together. It’s fragmented, but it is a composite whole.

It’s reconstructed—and rooted in imagining what could have happened. So some of this comes from the narrator’s imagining. And yet, as he tells us, he is trying to tell us a “real” story—one about the woman, one about himself as a storyteller—one for us all.

“The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street” is one of Mavis Gallant’s most beloved stories.

Protagonist Peter Frazier is a Canadian married to a British wife, Sheilah.

On a languorous Sunday morning in Toronto, they lounge in Peter’s sister’s kitchen where they’ve lived for 17 weeks with their two children.

They’ve traveled in Europe and lived in Paris and Geneva. They’ve also lived in Ceylon.

During part of that time away, Peter held some low-level jobs, including as a filing clerk in an office in Geneva.

Just a few mere lines into the story, Peter thinks about Agnes Brusen. We later learn she was a co-worker in that office in Geneva. She was a “mole-faced, round-shouldered” young woman, inexperienced at life and from a large family where she was the oldest of many children.

Agnes has a misstep: she gets drunk at a party. Peter’s wife and the party hostess urge Peter to see the girl home.

What occurs then is as mysterious and intimate as almost anything else we would find in a love story. It’s odd and unlikely. But it’s honest. It is perhaps the most honest exchange Peter has had with another person.

But so much time has passed by the time we see Peter and Sheilah passing the time on that early Sunday morning.

What’s on Peter’s mind in quiet moments there? Agnes.

But why? There was nothing between them. There were no kisses or words of love. They didn’t sleep together.

What did happen is that in that moment of drunkenness, Agnes tells Peter a simple story from her childhood. It is a story of longing for something ineffable that she cannot easily name. And perhaps Peter felt this yearning, too, even if he didn’t recognize it as such. And all that remains instead is remembering Agnes.

Mavis Gallant is the author of “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street.”

Jorge Luis Borges is one of the most anthologized authors in the world. In his writing, he was often concerned with the ways Argentine writers related to the world. In one famous lecture, “The Argentine Writer and Tradition,” he is known to have famously discounted the idea that Argentine literature should be confined to “Argentine traits and Argentine local color.” He believed that the writer is always in conversation with all spaces, always.

He was, of course, a giant in Latin American letters and wrote numerous books of poetry, fiction, and essays. He was also a prodigious translator of authors such as Kipling, Woolf, Faulkner, and Poe.

His story “Funes, the Memorious” was first published in La Nación in June of 1942. In 1944 it appeared in the anthology Ficciones. The first English translation of the story appeared in 1954 in Avon Modern Writing #2.

Since then, the story remains popular and beloved. It’s the story of Ireneo Funes who falls off his horse, suffers a grievous head injury, and somehow acquires a dubious gift of remembering everything—absolutely everything.

The fall also causes Funes to be paralyzed and bed ridden. From that vantage point, however, he still seems to be exposed to the world—universes—within his own mind. His memories bloom kaleidoscopically with layers and permutations of associations. These come unbidden and he can do nothing to stop, not just the memory of it, but a super-sensory recollection of everything—not just a day—but the weather, the cloud formations on that day, the temperature, and everything that occurred every single second of that day. It’s uncanny and strange. However, while everyone around him merely accepts Funes and his oddness and his memories, the narrator of the story meets Funes only three brief times—and each meeting is confounding—but also compelling, unforgettable.

On this episode of The Lonely Voice podcast, hosts Yvette Benavides and Peter Orner welcome guest Ricardo Siri—who is known professionally as Liniers.

The Argentine cartoonist whose work has been featured on the cover of The New Yorker has had a daily cartoon strip, Macanudo, featured in the Argentine newspaper La Nación for over 20 years and in U.S. newspapers since 2018.

Fantagraphics publishes Liners’ comic strip in new English-language collections.

While his legions of fans might know that Liniers has also collaborated musically—with Gustavo Santaolalla, Jorge Drexler, and Kevin Johansen, among others (and his tributes to the late Gabo Ferro in 2020 are unforgettable) he’s also quite the reader of literary fiction—and Jorge Luis Borges is an author who captured his imagination from a very young age.

This is a special episode of The Lonely Voice as Liniers joins Peter Orner and Yvette Benavides in an unabashed celebration of Borges’ “Funes, the Memorious.” And as a special added bonus, listen as they segue into a discussion of “The South,” another of Liniers’ favorite stories by the masterful story writer, Jorge Luis Borges.

More about Ricardo Siri (Liniers):

Born in Buenos Aires in 1973, Ricardo Siri became a daily cartoonist at the age of 28 almost by accident, when other Argentine newspaper cartoonists had decamped to Spain at the nadir of a recession. He saw his role on the last page of La Nación as offering a respite from dour news, but the strip’s whimsy and humanity quickly led Macanudo to expand to papers across Latin America, and eventually beyond to Europe and North America. Three of Liniers' children's books have been published in the US, with Good Night, Planet, winning the comics industry Eisner Award for Best Publication for Early Readers in 2018. He currently lives in Vermont.

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 juxtaposed with ugliness.

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.

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.

“Strays” and “Step” are two stories by Lucia Berlin. You can find them in the collection A Manual for Cleaning Women. 

On this episode of The Lonely Voice, Peter Orner and Yvette Benavides discuss “Steady Hands at Seattle General” by Denis Johnson.

When you read a story like this one, it's easy to see why there are still legions of fans who love the work of the late Denis Johnson.

There is an ineffable quality in his stories that’s hard to pin down.

Another thing about “Steady Hands at Seattle General,” is all the ways that it defies convention and containment.

We listen in on a conversation between two people who are in rehab together. It’s a conversation, something like an interview. But this isn’t surface-level, small-talk stuff.

There’s a lot to glean from the exchange that shows Johnson’s sleight of hand and the way he can offer something so profound in a deceptively simple story.

Is this story just about two guys conversing in private or is the reader really the whole point—the reader and all that we are given and can begin to understand about two people in a context we might not otherwise consider?

Denis Johnson is the author of “Steady Hands at Seattle General.” It can be found in the collection Jesus’ Son.