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 Test and Defines Us.

I'm Meg Walitzer, Brave the Elements and Stay with me.

You're listening to selected shorts. 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 of 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, K-U-F-M.

In the first, a comic duel between a woman and her garden,

in the second a border crossing reveals outer and inner landscapes, 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

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