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

I'm Debra 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 voices lost in snow by Mavis Galant.

Two persons descend the street, stepping carefully.

The child, reminded every day to keep her hands still, just deculates wildly.

There is the flash of a red mitten.

The story was chosen by Margaret Atwood, whose work was first published in the magazine in 1970.

She's the author of more than 40 books, and her latest novel, Mad Atom, is coming out this fall.

Margaret Atwood joins us from a studio in Toronto.

Hi Margaret.

Hello Debra.

Mavis Galant is a compatriot of yours, so she hasn't lived in Canada for 60 years or more.

Was was her work an influence on you and you were becoming a writer?

I would say in my early years as a writer, I stumbled across her, in fact, in The New Yorker,

and I wondered who is this person.

And I remember the story very clearly.

It's the one about the convent school in which the little girls have to wear rubber aprons in the bathtub.

Do you remember that?

That's one of the Canada ones here.

Yeah, it is.

So I thought this person must be Canadian.

...