Chapter 1: What themes do the stories explore about nature?
You know that phrase, a force of nature? On the next Selected Shorts, we've got four strong stories to blow you away. From our gardens to our weather, the great outdoors tests and defines us. I'm Meg Wolitzer. Brave the elements and stay with me. You're listening to Selected Shorts, where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time.
Sometimes the setting of a story can matter as much as the characters, creating challenges for them, helping to define them, and giving the reader a visceral context for the narrative. On this program, we share four stories in which nature has an impact. I am not someone who spends a lot of time in nature, and as a result, I don't have too many nature metaphors to rely on when I write fiction.
Instead, my fiction tends to include nature's indoor parallel, by which I mean families in their native habitat gathering around the dinner table or sitting on the grassy plains of the shag carpeting in the den. But I do appreciate writers who make the actual natural world vivid and original, using it in ways that amplify the emotional tension in a scene.
Landscape can sometimes be the most memorable character of all. Several of the stories on this program were part of a show we presented with Cash Arts and Utah Public Radio, KUSU-FM. In the first, a comic duel between a woman and her garden. In the second, a border crossing reveals outer and inner landscapes.
Chapter 2: What role does humor play in the storytelling of nature?
In the third, mastering one of the elements. And in the fourth, the upside of bad weather. Humorist Jenny Allen, the author of the collection Would Everybody Please Stop? Reflections on Life and Other Bad Ideas, has mastered the art of disappointment. You name it. Boyfriends, tie-dye, slumber. She's tried it, it hasn't worked, and she wants to share her pain. This time, it's her garden.
How doth it grow? Well, let's just say, time to go to the supermarket. Reading this essay about Allen's not-so-green thumb is Kirsten Vangsness, best known as computer whiz Penelope Garcia on Criminal Minds. She is also an accomplished playwright, performance artist, and podcast producer. Here she is with Jenny Allen's Garden Growing Pains.
Garden Growing Pains Garden Growing Pains Now that it's harvest season, I'm curious.
Chapter 3: How do the authors use nature to reflect human experiences?
How did your garden grow this summer? Wasn't it thrilling in those early days to watch your vegetable patch begin to come alive? To step into your garden in the dewy dawn and see what magic had transpired during the night. How each brave green shoot had grown a little taller.
And then, after only a few weeks, to spot adorable tomatoes and green peppers no bigger than you might find in a dollhouse kitchen. to peek under a fuzzy leaf and encounter a shy cucumber the size of a pea, to gasp at the appearance of bugle-shaped squash blossoms, the cheerful orange of school buses, where there were no blossoms, none, the day before. But then, something happened.
The cucumbers grew bigger slowly and steadily, but when they finished growing, many were only the size and shape of golf balls. You rushed to the garden each morning to see if the golf balls had elongated at all, had taken on anything that resembled a cucumber shape. No, still golf balls. Others of your cucumbers started out shaped like tiny crescent moons and stayed that way.
At full maturity, they resembled cashews. Was there some warning on the plastic label that came with the seedlings, which you stupidly threw out, that you missed? Some mentioned mini cucumbers? Ditto the squash. The squash vines grew as thick as hot dogs. The squash leaves as broad as butterplates. And yet the squash, a pallid yellow, grew no bigger than a light bulb. Also, your yield was three.
Maybe these vegetables underwent a kind of spontaneous genetic mutation in your garden, and you invented a whole new strains of wee food. Maybe you could sell them to some researcher at MIT to study. Maybe the nut-sized cucumbers could be marketed as a cocktail snack. Cashew Cukes? Face it. Your garden is filled with the vegetable equivalent of failure to thrive infants. It hurts to look at them.
But you cared for them. You fortified the dirt with huge sacks of very expensive, loamy soil from Maine, so heavy that you pulled a muscle lugging them from your car. You lovingly watered every day, and yet, here they are, puny and stunted. Those vegetables that are not puny are non-existent. Like good for you to have tried your luck with artichokes, very adventurous.
And whoa, those leaves are two feet long and spiky, just like the pictures online. You've been Googling photos of artichokes to see where the artichokes are supposed to be. On top of a stalk in the middle of all the spiky leaves. But you put your face right down in there and there's no stalk. So the artichokes were a bust. Why are you so negative? Your tomato harvest was a success.
Copious plum tomatoes, sweet cherry tomatoes, dust-colored heirloom ones. The green peppers turned out good, too, a little on the small side, but close to regular size. You had so many that you kept foisting them onto your friends, who, it turned out, also had a bumper crop of green peppers in their gardens.
They probably gave your green peppers away to other friends until finally all the peppers rotted and got thrown away. And remember earlier in the summer when your lettuce came up? That was fun, right? The lettuce was delicious. After you ate it all, you could have planted more. Would it have grown and had a whole second crop? Maybe even a third. Why didn't you do that? Oh, that's right.
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Chapter 4: How does Jenny Allen humorously depict gardening struggles?
And even if you planted Swiss chard and it grew to normal size and you cooked it to death so it tasted less awful, you'd still have to clean it with a million paper towels and there'd still be that grain of dirt in it waiting to ambush your molars. No. Better to put the garden to bed for the winter. Possibly forever.
Kirsten Vangsness performed Garden Growing Pains by Jenny Allen at the Ellen Eccles Theater in Logan, Utah. I'm Meg Wolitzer. I really enjoyed Allen's trope here. It's bad enough that everything is freakish or non-existent. Most gardens deliver those disappointments. Alan behaves as if her produce is a family of underachieving children.
I am not a gardener myself, but I think I know what kind I would be. When people give me flowers, they don't last long. I cut the stems on a diagonal, and I add the little packet of whatever they give you. Is it salt? So if you're ever going to give me something, I am really a fan of good olive oil. I'm also a fan of Jenny Allen. And we know one place to look for her if we need her.
Outdoors in her garden, doing her best. Our second work, Borders, is by prolific Indigenous writer Thomas King, whose titles include Indians on Vacation and Sufferance. This work was first published in 1993 in King's collection One Good Story, That One, and then adapted into a critically acclaimed graphic novel.
Borders presents the idea of nature in a very different context and on a very different scale from Jenny Allen's playful essay. In this powerful piece that joins family dynamics with identity politics, the vast Canadian landscape is both a goal and a witness to conflict.
Reader Kimberly Guerrero is making her Selected Shorts broadcast debut with this piece, which was also presented as part of our Logan, Utah live show with Cash Arts and Utah Public Radio. She was also the host and reminded her audience of her work in shows such as Seinfeld, Reservation Dogs, and the animated series Spirit Rangers.
When I was 12, maybe 13, my mother announced that we were going to Salt Lake City to visit my sister who left the reserve, moved across the line and found a job. Letitia had not left home with my mother's blessing, but over time my mother had come to be proud of the fact that Letitia had done all of this on her own. She did real good, my mother would say.
Then there were the fine points to Letitia's going. She had not, as my mother liked to tell Mrs. Minifingers, gone floating after some man like a balloon on a string. She hadn't snuck out of the house either and gone to Vancouver or Edmonton or Toronto to chase rainbows down alleys, and she hadn't been pregnant. She did real good. I was seven or eight when Letitia left home. She was 17.
Our father was from Rocky Boy on the American side. Dad's American, Letitia told my mother, so I can come and go as I please. Send us a postcard. Letitia packed her things and we headed for the border. Just outside of Milk River, Letitia told us to watch for the water tower. Over the next rise, it's the first thing you'll see. We got a water tower on the reserve, my mother said.
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Chapter 5: What cultural insights does Thomas King's 'Borders' provide?
but she's also able to advance her agenda in subtler ways. In The Storm, the upheaval in nature finds its analog in the emotions and acts of the characters. Reader Jane Curtin is known for work in iconic television shows like Saturday Night Live and Kate and Allie, and has had a rich theatrical career as well. But for us, she's an icon unto herself, veteran of many selected shorts readings.
And here she is in one of her best, Kate Chopin's The Storm.
The leaves were so still that even Bebe thought it was going to rain. Bobineau, who was accustomed to converse on terms of perfect equality with his little son, called the child's attention to certain somber clouds that were rolling with sinister intention from the west, accompanied by a sullen, threatening roar.
They were at Friedheimer's store and decided to remain there till the storm had passed. They sat within the door on two empty kegs. B.B. was four years old and looked very wise. "'Mama'll be frayed, yes,' he suggested with blinking eyes." She'll shut the house. Maybe she got Sylvie helping her this evening, Bobineau responded reassuringly. No, she ain't got Sylvie.
Sylvie was helping her yesterday, piped Bebe. Bobineau arose and, going across to the counter, purchased a can of shrimps, of which Calixto was very fond. Then he returned to his perch on the keg and sat stolidly holding the can of shrimps while the storm burst. It shook the wooden store and seemed to be ripping great furrows in the distant field.
Beebe laid his little hand on his father's knee and was not afraid. Calixta at home felt no uneasiness for their safety. She sat at a side window sewing furiously on a sewing machine. She was greatly occupied and did not notice the approaching storm. But she felt very warm and often stopped to mop her face on which the perspiration gathered in beads. She unfastened her white sack at the throat.
It began to grow dark, and suddenly realizing the situation, she got up hurriedly and went about closing windows and doors. Out on the small front gallery, she had hung Bobineau's Sunday clothes to air, and she hastened out to gather them before the rain fell. As she stepped outside, Alcide Laballiere rode in at the gate. She had not seen him very often since her marriage, and never alone.
She stood there with Bobineau's coat in her hands, and the big raindrops began to fall. Alcy rode his horse under the shelter of a side projection where the chickens had huddled, and there were plows and a harrow piled up in the corner. "'May I come and wait on your gallery till the storm is over, Calixta?' he asked. "'Come long in, Monsieur Alcy.'
His voice and her own startled her as if from a trance, and she seized Bobineau's vest." Alcide, mounting to the porch, grabbed the trousers and snatched Bebe's braided jacket that was about to be carried away by a sudden gust of wind. He expressed an intention to remain outside, but it was soon apparent that he might as well have been out in the open.
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