The New American West
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What does Meg Wolitzer say about the myths and realities of the American West?
There's no one way to look at the American West, a wild place of awesome natural beauty, a big open territory for pioneering individualists, or a colonized landscape. I'm Meg Wolitzer, and in this edition of Selected Shorts, fiction that explores an iconic area of the country and the space it occupies in our minds. Stay with us.
You're listening to Selected Shorts, where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time. For many of us, the idea of the American West holds a lot of power. There's just something about the rugged terrain and the rugged individualism born of that terrain, something about bravely confronting everything that nature might throw at you, something about the stubbornness to seek new worlds and the survival instincts to see it through. Though many of the standard tropes about men and women or heroes and villains perpetuated by classic Westerns have shifted over time, there's still some magnetism to the idea. Of course, there's another layer that romantic American ideas often fail to confront, and we'll touch on that.
This show is made up of two stories, each of which reflects a different element of what the West has become in the years since the first European settlers claimed the land for themselves. One story of a harrowing weather event cleaves a stalwart generation from its offspring. The other story examines the way in which humans have shaped the landscape and asks how long they can remain safe, physically and emotionally. The first piece we'll hear is by beloved, multiple-award-winning writer Louise Erdrich. Erdrich is a Minnesotan whose narratives often embrace a Western landscape and her heritage as part of the Turtle Mountain Ojibwe. She's published it all, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, even children's books.
Her titles include The Roundhouse, The Sentence, and Love Medicine. This piece doesn't explicitly deal with colonialism, as do a number of Erdrich's works, but it is about being haunted by troubled legacies. It's set in South Dakota and inspired by very real accounts of a famous blizzard in 1923. Right away, the story is framed as some barflies sitting around telling one another old ancestral chestnuts. And from there, Erdrich makes clear the difference between those who shaped the Old West and those living in their relatives' shadows. The weather in this story, its beauty and its violence, is strong and strange and memorable, and best experienced from the warm confines of a bar or from your home, and certainly well after the fact.
Performing it is Tate Donovan. His long TV and film career includes roles in well-regarded titles including Argo, as well as animated works such as Hercules. But once you hear his voice and do an image search, you're going to say, oh, that guy, he's in everything. And here's Tate Donovan reading The Hollow Children by Louise Erdrich.
At the Tabor Bar around beer number four, the men sometimes got into history farming, trading stories of their antecedents, exploits, and agonies. In the long ago, wheat prices had plunged, and most of the Bonanza farms had broken up. That was when their great-greats had bought the land. The men talked about old plagues, old equipment, old swaps of ownerships, crops, land, and dire weather. John Pavlecki's great-grandmother, at the age of nine, had survived the blizzard of 1923 by burrowing into a nearby haystack when the school bus didn't show up. Diz remembered his grandfather telling stories about an Uncle Ivek, who had also endured that blizzard, which was particularly lethal because it happened on a misty and mild April day.
Around eight that morning, the bus had been almost full of children and headed toward the school, when out of the northwest, a wind of 60 miles per hour had dropped the temperature instantly to minus 20 and filled the air with a blistering cold curtain of powder. Such a snow would blind your eyes and scour the features off your face. Ivek was a farmer, part-time school teacher, and one of the bus drivers.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What does Meg Wolitzer say about the myths and realities of the American West?
0:07–8:22
2
How does Tate Donovan’s reading of Louise Erdrich’s “The Hollow Children” set the tone for the episode?
8:22–16:24
3
What new novel does Louise Erdrich discuss in her interview and how does it relate to the West?
16:24–23:33
4
Why does host Meg Wolitzer introduce writer‑activist Rick Bass and his story “Fires”?
23:33–29:32
5
How does the “Fires” narrative illustrate the tension between humans and the western landscape?
29:32–37:42
6
What observations do the hosts share about how the West shapes identity and memory?
37:42–44:40
7
How does the Glenda‑and‑the‑hedgehog subplot explore community, danger, and survival in the valley?
44:40–50:51
8
What final reflections do Meg Wolitzer and the guests offer about storytelling and the modern West?
50:51–58:03