2022-04-02
1 小时 10 分钟This is the New Yorker fiction podcast from the New Yorker magazine.
I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at the New Yorker.
Each month we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss.
This month we're going to hear where I'm calling from by Raymond Carver, which was published in the New Yorker in March of 1982.
We've only been in here a couple of days.
We're not out of the woods yet.
JP has these shakes and every so often a nerve.
Maybe it isn't a nerve, but it's something begins to jerk in my shoulder.
The story was chosen by Sherman Alexei, who's the author of 19 books of fiction and poetry, including new and selected stories and the novel Flight.
Hi, Sherman.
Hi, Deborah.
How are you?
It's nice to see someone in person for once.
So Raymond Carver grew up in Washington state, not so far from where you grew up.
Was that like a first point of affinity for you?
That was a big deal, yeah.
I first read him in college in my first fiction writing class, which would have been in 1988.
And you look at his bio, and he lived in Yakima, which is really 3 hours away from my reservation, and right near the Yakima indian reservation, where I had all sorts of friends, so he felt local.
And then in reading the stories, and it's about these broken people, alcoholics and people losing their jobs and domestic violence and depression.
And I so identified with the characters, I thought, wow, dad, whoa, cousin, whoa, sister.