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 the lesson by Jessaman West.

Hey Curly, he called softly.

How you feel this morning?

Feel like a prize, baby beef?

Feel like the best stare in California?

The story was chosen by Sherman Alexi, whose stories have been appearing in the New Yorker for more than a decade.

He's published almost 20 books of fiction and poetry.

His new story collection, Blast for Me, New and Selected Stories, is just out this month from Grove Press.

He joins me from KUOW in Seattle.

Hi, Sherman.

Hi, Debra.

Now, Jessaman West was a quaker who lived in Indiana and California.

She published 10 stories in the New Yorker between 1948 and 1970, as well as a handful of poems.

She wrote almost 20 books in several screenplays, but I knew very little about her before I started preparing for this podcast.

How did you first find her work?

I looked up to New Yorker.

I put New Yorker rural writer of short stories.

You hadn't read her before that.

No, I hadn't.

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