Rick Bass reads "Ice," by Thomas McGuane.
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 Thomas McWane's story ice.
I meant to learn courage out on the ice, to avoid the specter of cowardice by skating all the way either to Canada or if the icebreaker had been through to the Livingston ship channel.
The story was chosen by Rick Bass, whose story elk appeared in the magazine in 1997.
Bass fourth novel, all the Land to hold us, was published in August by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
He joins me from a studio in Missoula, Mt.
Hi, Rick.
Hey, how are you?
Good.
So you and Tom McGuin are friends, right?
How did you first meet?
Was it through your writing, or are.
You neighbors in Montana?
When we met, he was down in.
Mississippi, where he has family.
I was living in Mississippi at the time and frequenting a shared bookstore, Lemuria, that we were devoted to and just mutual friends.
Ended up having the same publisher for.
My nonfiction that he had, so just, you know, small circles.