This is The Writer's Voice, new fiction from The New Yorker.

I'm Debra Triesman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this special episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Cape Folk read her story out there,

which ran in the magazine two years ago in the March 23, 2020 issue.

Folk's recording session at the time was cancelled due to the pandemic lockdown,

and we're thrilled to have her back to do the taping now.

Folk was a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University.

Her first book, The Story Collection Out There, will be published next month.

Now here's Cape Folk.

Out there.

I was putting myself out there.

On my return to San Francisco from a bleak Thanksgiving with my surviving relatives in Illinois,

I downloaded Tinder, Bumble, and a few other apps I'd seen Instagram ads for.

I resolved to pass judgment on several hundred men per day and to make an effort to message the few I matched with.

I'd never liked the idea of finding a romantic partner on an app, the way you'd ordered pizza or an Uber.

To further complicate matters, it was estimated that 50% of men on dating apps in the city were now blots.

But what choice did I have?

Apps seemed to be the way everyone found each other these days.

After my last breakup, I spent a while letting something happen, which meant doing nothing.

Years passed and nothing did happen, and I realized that without my intervention,

my hand pushing the warm back of fate, it was possible nothing ever would.

In the end, it seemed to come down to never dating again or taking the chance of being blotted,

...