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

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

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Zach Williams read his story Wood

Sorrow House from the March 21st, 2022 issue of the magazine.

Williams is a stegner fellow at Stanford University.

He's working on a collection of stories.

Now here's Zach Williams.

Wood Sorrow House.

One.

It was a modest summer rental.

The kind Rana recalled from girlhood trips to Maine or Vermont or the Finger Lakes.

Set in a small clearing on a thickly wooded mountainside.

Peacefully out of sight of roads or neighbors or anything else.

Jacob opened all the doors, came back downstairs and remarked a little sternly that the cottage needed updates.

The range wobbled, the mattress caved in the middle, the woolly plaid sofas were from another era.

Still, there was something idyllic about the place.

They unpacked into daisy paper drawers and put their toothbrushes behind the spotted mirror.

Max got his very own room.

When he woke crying in the night, Rana walked down the hall and took him from the crib.

A wooden antique with rattling bars.

On the shelves in the den, multidantlers served as bookends.

A high and lowest strip hung in a frame there.

...