This is The New Yorker Fiction Podcast from The New Yorker Magazine.

I'm Deborah 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 Stuart Dybeck's story, Paper Lantern.

The desire to touch her is growing unbearable, and yet I don't want to stop.

I don't want the drive to end.

I'm waiting for it, she says.

The story was chosen by ZZ Packer, the author of the story collection Drinking Coffee Elsewhere.

She's currently working on her first novel, an excerpt from which appeared in the magazine's 20 under 40 issue last summer.

Hi ZZ.

Hi Deborah.

Stuart Dybeck has been publishing short fiction and poetry for more than 30 years.

He did an MFA at the Iowa Writer's Workshop and he taught there. Was he teaching there when you were a student?

Yes, he was a visiting professor during my last year there.

And I just recall that no one was able to break down a story the way Stuart Dybeck was able to.

And he just had all these incredible insights in terms of how stories operated and he thought of them almost as sort of organic living beings.

So he's been a major, I don't know if I'd say influence on my work, but someone I always at least hope to be influenced by.

And paper lantern, the story you chose today, what is it about this one that's special for you?

I love how the story is these sort of nesting dolls or this kind of way in which you think it's about one thing and then it turns out,

oh, then you're thinking it's about something else and then you're thinking about something else and something else.

And there are these frames that keep getting progressively smaller when you look at the story, the heart of the story.

But in terms of image and memory and sort of awareness about the world, it's kind of expanding ever progressively outward.

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