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 Walitzer and in this

edition of Selected Shorts fiction that explores an iconic area of the country

and the space it 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, non-fiction, poetry, even children's books.

Her titles include The Round House, The Sentence, and Love Medicine.

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