I'm Meg Walletter and on this selected shorts, how far will you go to support your loved ones?

Would you attend a thousand track meets?

Lie to them about how good they were in their school play, Cats?

Or consider haunting them at the supermarket?

This week, stories about parental figures doing the right thing

from some unusual perspectives.

You're listening to selected shorts, where our greatest actors

transport us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time.

There's a reason why families find their way into fiction so often. They offer up everything a writer needs,

plot, character, drama, surprise. We can explore how love

does not preclude mystification or exasperation and how we can live with people

day after day and still have no real idea what they're thinking

or feeling.

We can look at the generational aspect of family.

Everyone is someone's child, parent, or grandparent, or was. On this program, two stories that explore family

from unusual perspectives. In the first, the mother-daughter bond becomes a whole history of women.

In the second, we skip a generation to explore the bond between a grandparent and

grandchild.

In real life, it's often true that family can overstay its welcome, but that's less true in

fiction where we seem to only want to hear more about characters who are related to

one another regardless of their personalities. Some of the best fiction ever written is about family. Maybe

it's because the reader knows there's going to be conflict or maybe it's because there's an opportunity

...