Texas Public Radio had the rare and wonderful opportunity to host acclaimed author Peter Orner at a special event last January. After over five years of collaborating on "The Lonely Voice," we were all in the same room — in person — while discussing his latest novel, "The Gossip Columnist's Daughter." We also recorded a couple of episodes of "The Lonely Voice."
We always go back to short stories. We had to. How often does one get to sit in the same room with Peter Orner and talk about stories? For this special time together, there was one author we had to make time for — Gina Berriault.
If you’ve listened to this podcast before, you know that we love short stories and that the stories of Gina Berriault are some of our favorites. They sort of set the standard.
We’ve covered a few of her stories over the years, including “Stolen Pleasures,” a story about two sisters — Fleur and Delia.
This time we are talking about “The Tea Ceremony,” and it features the sisters in their childhood. Front and center is Delia. She’s a noticer. She's bright and observant — even if she is rather shy and doesn't have any friends.
But right under everyone else's nose is the fact that the teacher, Miss Ferguson, considers Jolie Lotta something like her pet, a favorite student. Delia easily surmises that what’s behind this is Jolie’s beauty. And her mother, Adrianna is beautiful, too.
A tea ceremony occurs in the story — a ritual-filled spectacle that is so sublime that Delia feels like she would like to capture its beauty by drawing it. But she can’t muster a way.
And then she considers her own family situation, her "rain-stained bungalow," her blind mother and the disarray and disorder that can’t be helped along in her family.
Years later, she is still thinking about the ceremony and what the idea of beauty can really mean to her.
There is a lot going on here with the idea of beauty — not just for some aesthetic quality or as something life-saving, a transformative force that allows us to transcend a "world awry" or a life full of compromise. She can escape the confines of her past and the expectations of that life and make her own way, shape her own identity — through her appreciation of beautiful things. It is a means of future for herself—one she feels she can choose for herself.
The Tea Ceremony is a story collection that was compiled by Berriault's daughter and her partner, Leonard Gardner, following her death in 1999, and is celebrated for its spare, elegant prose.
As we’ve said before on this podcast, and as Peter Orner surmises, Berriault has a knack for taking ordinary characters and situations and imbuing them with a fullness and a dignity — that maybe all the rest of us want and deserve, too. There is something powerfully emotional in that.
This is the way that Berriault manages her characters, these outsiders, suffering the losses of goals that they can’t quite name but that they hunger for just the same. That’s how Delia feels about beauty — about harnessing it in some way, if only for a little while.
We believe this is precisely what Berriault does with her story writing. She captures the beauty inherent in people's lives. An ordinary world is never just that. Or it is — and there is beauty there, too.
How fortunate we all feel to have been in the same room with Peter Orner. And then to have the opportunity to discuss a story by Gina Berriault? Well—how lucky can we lonely voices be?
