A fine story by Callan Wink in current New Yorker

Callan Wink - a Montana resident and ski instructor whom, I think, is one of the few writers introduced recently to a wider readership by none other than the New Yorker - has a really fine story, A Refugee Crisis, in the current issue. As the narrator of the story says to a fellow ski enthusiast much his senior, he's writing a story about a writer who has trouble writing. Noting the uninterest on the part of his friend, the narrator adds: It's better than it sounds, I think. He's right - it's much better than it sounds, a story with many dimensions. The narrator - who seems much like the author - reflects on his early and unexpected success and the difficulty he's having writing in the wake of same; he wryly notes that in his first book he had about 100 different lyrical descriptions of mountains, and now all he can say is: mountain. And of course it may be the just-=plain-mountain is better (though by the end of the story, when he's eschewed literary affectation, noting that sometimes when a writer doesn't know how to end a paragraph the best thing is to stop right there, he slips a few really fine descriptive phrases right by us. But the story, as the title suggests, has much wider implications and greater ambition: The narrative involves the sudden re-appearance of a former girlfriend who's been living in Serbia and advocating on behalf of the refugees, and has become pregnant by one of the refugees, a much younger man. She's back in Montana to end the pregnancy. The narrator and she, named only M, get into some spats, in particular as she encourages him to write about the refugee crisis and he brushes that off; she can't understand how a writer could avoid writing about what she considers the key issue of our time. But he does keep a few notes on a possible story about a young American woman obsessed with the refugee crisis, from a wealthy family, perhaps involved in this issue because it's a trendy gap-year project. M finds his notes for a story - obviously, the story we're now reading - and leaves him a blistering response. At the end, he notes to M that he has written about the refugee crisis after all, but it's not the story she'd expected - nor had we. So it's almost as if the narrator - or Wink himself - is a refugee, struggling w/ his fate and with his calling, almost but not quite - because he's obviously privileged and wealthy in comparison to those whom M serves. She's right in upbraiding him - but wrong and doctrinaire in her assumption that a writer owes it to himself to take on social and political issues. Wink prevails in the end, but at a cost.