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 Richard Ford read his story displaced

from the August 6th, 2018 issue of the magazine.

Ford is the author of five short story collections and seven novels, including Independence Day,

The Lay of the Land, and Canada.

He's working on a new collection titled The Irish in America.

Now here's Richard Ford.

Displaced. When your father dies and you are only 16, many things change.

School life changes.

You are now the boy whose father is missing.

People feel sorry for you, but they also devalue you, even resent you, for what you're not sure.

The air around you becomes different.

Once the air contained you fully, but now an opening's been cut, which feels frightening, yet not so frightening.

And there is your mother, and her loss to fail at least to step into, while you manage all your own sensations and others fear, opportunity.

And always there is the fact of your father whom you loved, but whose life has become only about its end.

Much of the rest quickly fading. So you are alone in a way that is many-sided. There is not a word for it.

Attempts to find the word leave you confused, though that confusion is not altogether unwanted

or unliked. Try to find the word.

It is not necessary to talk much about my parents.

My father was a country boy from near Galena, Kansas, large and handsome and good-natured.

My mother was a skeptical, ambitious town girl from Kankakee that met in the club car of a Rock Island passenger train between St. Louis

...