Maile Meloy reads Laurie Colwin's "Mr. Parker" and discusses it with The New Yorker's fiction editor, Deborah Treisman. "Mr. Parker" was published in the April 14, 1973, issue of The New Yorker and can be found in "Passion and Affect." Maile Meloy's novels include "Liars and Saints" and "A Family Daughter."
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 Mister Parker by Laurie Colwyn.
He was very thin, as if the friction of living had burned every unnecessary particle off him.
But he was calm and cheery in the way you expect plump people to be.
The story was chosen by Miley Malloy, whose stories have been appeared in the magazine for twelve years now.
Her novels include Liars and Saints and a family daughter.
She joins us from a studio in California.
Hi Miley.
Hi.
So I think you were about one year old when Mister Parker came out in 1973.
So I'm sure you didn't read this story then.
How did you first find it?
I read Laurie Colwyn stories when I.
Was first writing stories, trying to write stories.
And I hadn't realized that this story was as old as I was or that passion and affect the collection it was in was her first collection.
She was my parents age, but she felt more like a contemporary, maybe because I was reading stories she'd written in her twenties.
And it was a world that was recognizable to me, although it wasn't my own.
And I think she made writing stories seem possible.