The Writers' Block
 |
A weekly podcast featuring writers of all stripes reading from their recent work.
|
 |
Julie Orringer reads her short story "Flores."
|
|
|
|
|
About "Flores"
"Two dirty children. That was what they looked like at first, standing at the margin of the woods."
Julie says, "Last summer I dreamed I was standing in the glass-walled hallway of my house, which looked out onto a thick forest, and I saw this baby sitting on the floor -- not a human child, but a child belonging to the species of tiny hominids that lived thousands of years ago on the Indonesian island of Flores. When I went to pick up the child, I saw its parents standing at the edge of the woods -- they'd left the child with me because they were being hunted by humans. I woke up and told my husband about the dream, and he suggested I turn it into a short story. I've never written a story from a dream before, but I gave it a shot. The story changed in the telling -- the protagonist isn't me, but a woman whose last child is going off to college, and the Flores people make their presence known more subtly at first -- but, like the dream, the story addresses the blurring of the boundaries between town and wilderness, between human will and biological impulse, between hunter and hunted."
Purchase Julie Orringer's short story collection, How to Breathe Underwater (at powells.com).
Julie Orringer is the Distinguished Visiting Writer at California College of the Arts. Her short story collection, How to Breathe Underwater, was a New
York Times Notable Book and the winner of the Northern California Book Award. Orringer is a graduate of Cornell University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and she was a Truman Capote Fellow in the Stegner Program at Stanford. Her stories have appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney's, Ploughshares, Zoetrope: All-Story, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Best New American Voices, and The Best American Non-Required Reading. She is working on a novel set in Budapest and Paris in the late 1930's.
Suggestions? Comments? Experiencing technical problems with The Writers' Block? Please email us at arts@kqed.org
|
|
|
|
highlights
the writers' block
about KQED
