The Lonely Voice

“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. 

Leonard Michaels wrote that “The ability to tell a story, like the ability to carry a tune, is nearly universal and as mysteriously natural as language.” Importantly, he added, “Though I’ve met few people who can’t tell stories, it has always seemed to me they really can but refuse to care enough, or fear generosity, or self-revelation or misinterpretation…or intimacy.”

When you think about The Nachman Stories by Leonard Michaels, it’s easy to see that he didn’t fear generosity or self-revelation or intimacy. Not a bit.

These stories are about one Rapahel Nachman–an austere unassuming mathematician. A sensible, simple guy–quite different from the panoply of characters in Michaels’ earlier story collections. And anyone familiar with his work will find the tone to be different, the mediated prose to be notable. Nachman is aware of his flaws and frailties, but he’s okay with that. We find in the stories, moments when he is in awe of his surroundings–of places and other people.

He is someone who likes what he likes. An inciting incident moves him to try something out of character. It changes him–some misdeed or unkindness–but he remains essentially Nachman.

Elsewhere Leonard Michaels described that a central problem in storytelling is “how to make transitions into transformations. He said that transitions are about “logic, sincerity, boredom,” but that transformations “belong to art.” He said that the most impressive stories include transformations where nothing changes.

Here again, with Leonard Michaels’ story, we see how true this idea is, how it emerges so plainly in a story like “Cryptology” where Nachman is out of his element, in a new town and then thrust into a very unusual and unlikely situation. There are many shifts in the story–explosive ones and unexpected ones that seem impossible to come back from. But Nachman returns to himself in ways that are unexpected. If, as Leonard Michaels said, the most impressive stories include transformations where nothing changes, “Cryptology” is truly sublime.

Leonard Michaels is the author of “Cryptology” and “Murderers.”

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Yvette Benavides and Peter Orner discuss “Lonesome Road,” a story by Gina Berriault.

If Berriault’s stories are not so well known to most, this one might never have registered–if not for the unapologetic ardor that her fans–Peter Orner and Yvette Benavides among them– feel for her.

The “Lonesome Road” of the title remains a little enigmatic once you read the story–because that is the nature of things when a relationship ends and happenstance–or something like it–brings you face to face with a person you used to know–used to love.

Things change. Relationships end. We move on–and when we move on, we travel along a road made lonesome by the realization that we are utterly alone in trying to figure out what it was all about, what it meant–what it can still mean a dozen years later.

Gina Berriault is the author of “Lonesome Road.” It can be found in the collection Women in their Beds published by Counterpoint–with an introduction by Peter Orner.

Peter Orner is the author of seven books, including the story collection Maggie Brown and Others. His essay collection Still No Word from You: Notes in the Margin was a finalist for the 2023 Pen America PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. He holds the professorship in English and Creative Writing and is the director of creative writing at Dartmouth college.

Do you have a question or comment or story suggestion? Send me an email at [email protected].

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Grace Paley's "Goodbye and Good Luck" is a story that has been very often anthologized.

On this episode, Peter Orner and Yvette Benavides shine a light on the story's ubiquity and popularity and discuss the beloved author.

If you talk about Paley, you have to talk about voice. But you also talk about compassion.

Paley's characters face conflict and tragedy and deep sorrow and loneliness on any given day. But with that tragedy we see the absurdity of life, and a good measure of humor comes through in Grace Paley's unforgettable story.

Plus! Peter Orner and Yvette Benavides talk about Grace Paley's luminous story "Living."

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The Lonely Voice is hosted by acclaimed author Peter Orner and TPR contributor Yvette Benavides. The podcast is inspired by their shared passion for the short story. On each episode they discuss a story, raise interesting questions, share details about the author’s life and more. Listeners will feel like they are eavesdropping on a couple of people who really love stories.