This is The Writer's Voice, new fiction from The New Yorker.

I'm Dipper Treesman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Karen Russell read her story, The Ghost Birds,

from the October 11, 2021 issue of the magazine.

Russell is the author of five books of fiction, including the Story Collection Orange World,

which was published in 2019, and the novel Swamplandia, which was a finalist

for the Pulitzer Prize in 2012.

Russell was made in MacArthur Fellow in 2013.

Now here's Karen Russell.

The Ghost Birds.

I led the way through the woods because I didn't want my daughter to have her first encounter

with the ghost flock alone.

We were trespassing, but it seemed highly unlikely we'd be caught.

The school had been abandoned since the previous century when Ash from the Great Western Fires

made most of the region unlivable.

My daughter had never set foot inside an old-fashioned brick-and-mortar school,

and seemed more intrigued by the idea of seeing a chalkboard than by the birds.

The school was on the outskirts of a red zone in our family's ancestral breeding grounds,

or again on the older maps, the ones from my boyhood,

an evocative name, a name I loved and mispronounced with reverence at age 11.

I grew up in a town called Eugene in the shadow of mountains that were unreachable by my third birthday,

Oregon.

...