Margaret Atwood reads "Voices Lost in Snow," by Mavis Gallant.
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 voices lost in snow by Mavis Gallant.
Two persons descend the street, stepping carefully, the child, reminded every day to keep her hand still, gesticulates wildly.
There is the flash of a red mitten.
The story was chosen by Margaret Atwood, whose work was first published, published in the magazine in 1970.
She's the author of more than 40 books, and her latest novel, Mad Adam, is coming out this fall.
Margaret Atwood joins us from a studio in Toronto.
Hi, Margaret.
Hello, Deborah.
Mavis Gallant is a compatriot of yours.
So she hasn't lived in Canada for 60 years or more.
Was her work an influence on you when you were becoming a writer?
I would say in my early years as a writer, I stumbled across her, in fact, in the New Yorker, and I wondered, who is this person?
And I remember the story very clearly.
It's the one about the convent school in which the little girls have to wear rubber aprons in the bathtub.
Do you remember that?
That's one of the Canada ones.
Yeah, it is.