Good, bad, and utterly bananas.

Children remember at all sometimes forever.

On the next selected shorts, a child in that impressionable time of life

recalls an influential teacher in Richard Yates's classic,

Fun With a Stranger. It's also a personal favorite of mine.

She was strict and humorless, preoccupied with rooting out the things she held intolerable. Mumbling.

I'm your host Meg Walritzer, slumping.

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.

When we're young and impressionable, the adults in our lives have an enormous outsized influence on us.

Not just on our day-to-day lives, including what we wear or

what time we go to bed, but also on our developing values, how we see the world and who we end up

becoming somewhere down the road. In this show

our stories look at ferocious figureheads. Each one has a profound impact on the

young people around them. One of the characters is a mother, one is a school teacher. Both of

them are seen through the eyes of adult protagonists childhood memories. For this

reason I think the most compelling characters feel larger than life and entirely

unforgettable.

It's that same indelible impression that I might get if I bumped into, say, Malala or Banksy or Beyonc, that's not going to happen.

Our first story, Lumberjack Mom, is by writer Caribbean Fragosa.

Her fiction has been published in places like Baum and her first

collection Eat the Mouth that Feed You came out in 2021. This story about a

matriarch's heroic efforts to mourn and then move on contains a familiar theme for Forgoza.

...