Thoughts on Mavis Gallant's "Voices Lost in Snow"

A colleague of mine turned me on to the New Yorker Fiction Podcast, and I am shocked that I did not already know about it. If you have not heard of it, every month a well-known author reads a short story written by another author, and then the reader and a member of the New Yorker staff (in this podcast, it is New Yorker Fiction Editor Deborah Treisman) briefly discuss the story. Since the series has been running for a number of years, there are many podcasts out there, but I chose to start with Margaret Atwood's reading of Mavis Gallant's "Voices Lost in Snow" posted April 1, 2013. After listening to this podcast, I most definitely will have to pick up Mavis Gallant's short-story collection, Varieties of Exile (which I hope contains the full collection of Linnet Muir stories).

I do not spend nearly as much time reading short stories as I do novels, and I consider this a personal shortcoming. Partly, I love to get really engrossed in the story and travel through it with a characters, w…