This is the writer's voice, new fiction from The New Yorker.

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

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Lauren Groff read her story,

Flower Hunters from the November 21st, 2016 issue of the magazine.

Groff is the author of the story collection, Delicate, Edible Birds, and three novels,

including Fates and Furies, which was published in 2015.

Now here's Lauren Groff.

Flower Hunters. It is Halloween, she'd almost forgotten. At the corner, a man is putting

sand and tea-light candles into white paper bags. He will later return with a lighter, filling the

dark neighborhood with a glowing grid for the trick-or-treaters.

She wonders if it's not hazardous to allow small, uncoordinated people with polyester hembs near so many flames.

All day today and yesterday, she has been reading the early naturalist William Bartram, who traveled through Florida in 1774.

Because of him, she forgot Halloween.

She's most definitely in love with that dead Quaker.

This is not to say that she is no longer in love with her husband.

She is, but after 16 years together, perhaps they have

blurred at the edges of each other's vision. She says to her dog, who is beside her at the window

watching the candleman, one day you'll wake up and realize your favorite person has turned

into a person-shaped cloud. The dog ignores her because the dog is wise. In any event, her husband

will inevitably win, since Bartram takes the form of dead trees and dreams, and her husband

takes the form of warm, pragmatic flesh. She picks up her cell. She wants to tell her best friend Meg about her sudden overwhelming

love for the ghost of a Quaker naturalist, but then she remembers that Meg doesn't want to be

...