- Although some of this collection’s stories are set in places Peter Orner has called up in previous works—Fall River, Massachusetts, and the suburbs of Chicago—others range from North Carolina, Nebraska, and Wyoming, to Mexico City, the Czech Republic, Moscow, and elsewhere. Did you find yourself relating more to the characters in the familiar places, or did you find that elements in the more far-flung places were still universal?
- Some of the women in these stories stay fixed in place, constricted by the social mores of their era, while their men are fantasists, dreamers, hamstrung by their disappointments. How does this difference create conflict within the couples? Have times changed sufficiently to address this disparity in expectations, or do couples still face such challenges today?
- “Herb and Rosalie Swanson at the Cocoanut Grove” speaks directly to the power of stories in people’s lives. One reviewer wrote, “We’ve experienced the story as memory, as history, as projection, as defense, as regret.” Is there a story about your own life that you tell often? How has it changed over the years? How close to the truth do you think your version comes?
- In Orner’s stories daily life often brims with interest and mystery. “Every day,” he has said, “I watch people—on the bus, on the street, at the post office. The need to see the world through other people fuels my work.” Is your curiosity about the lives of strangers as strong? Do you think social media has enhanced or diminished your ability to observe others?
- In the foreword to a recent reissue of Orner’s first collection, Esther Stories, Marilynne Robinson writes that he focuses on events that “send their repercussions across time so that they become events again and again.” In other words, recalling the past can be dramatic, as is living in the present. Do you agree, or do you think that remembrance is a passive experience?
- The human condition involves enormous personal losses—of family, love, and aspirations—all of which are frequently addressed in this collection. “How is it possible that we aren’t in a permanent state of mourning?” (here) asks Walt Kaplan in the title story. Did you find this aspect of Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge dispiriting, or did you find the author’s preoccupation with past and future loss to be a way of honoring his characters’ life stories?
- Ann Beattie wrote of “At the Fairmont” that “Peter Orner’s story is one of regret tinged with exhilaration.” In what ways do humor, absurdity, and mischievousness leaven even serious moral transgressions in some of Orner’s stories? And in your own life?