This is the New Yorker Fiction Podcast from the New Yorker magazine.

I'm Deborah Treesman, 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 a story by Udora Welty called Where Is The Voice Coming From.

I says, Rolla, there was one way left for me to be ahead of you and stay ahead of you,

and I just taken it. Now I'm alive and you ain't.

Where Is The Voice Coming From was chosen by Joyce Carol Oats,

whose book reviews, Fiction and Poetry have been appearing in the magazine since 1994.

Joyce Carol Oats is the author of many novels and short story collections.

Her latest novel is called My Sister My Love, the intimate story of Skylar Rampike, and it's published by Echo Press.

She joins me from a studio in Princeton, New Jersey.

Hi, Joyce.

Hi.

So is Udora Welty someone who's meant a lot to you as a fellow writer?

Absolutely. I began reading Udora Welty when I was in high school,

and I was just mesmerized by her ability to write so beautifully, so lyrically,

at the same time as in this story so powerfully.

And what was it that most struck you?

Was it the subject matter or the style?

I've read a number of Udora Welty's stories in which he uses voices.

It's a way of writing that I like very much myself.

The voice in this story is her most extreme, masculine, percussive, mean, vicious, thug voice.

...