Join me in this live two-hour class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about the lasting connections between mothers and sons – from five short stories by five great American writers.

My name is William Giraldi, and I hope you will join me for my upcoming two-hour class, Five Things I’ve Learned about Mothers and Sons – from Five Great American Short Stories.

For me, the focus – mothers, sons, and the many ways to understand the bonds between them – is an important one. I was raised by a single father in a tiny, working-class New Jersey town—my mother left our family when my siblings and I were very young—and so the mother/son relationship has always been something of a personal enigma to me, a question mark stamped into the front of my psyche. As a reader and a writer, I’ve long sought out those stories, novels, poems, and plays that explicitly concern the bonds, from eternal to fractured, between mothers and sons.

I needed to see what I’d missed out on in my own life, that’s true. But there remained another, more important, motive too: as a novelist and a storyteller, I deal in human relationships, and in the conflicts that are ignited between the individuals in those relationships. That’s where the story lives: in the conflict and its possible resolutions. I’d always felt myself at a deficit when it came to creating mothers and sons in my fiction—how could I not? So I did what T.S. Eliot, in 1920, encouraged mature poets to do: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” I went in search of the mother/son stories I could steal from, and in my 2022 novel About Face, I like to think that this motherless son got that mother/son relationship right.

But what is the mother/son relationship? How many permutations can it assume?

When Freud uttered, “If a man has been his mother’s undisputed darling, he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it,” he was restating a pithy dictum by Emerson: “Men are what their mothers made them.” Every parent/child relationship has its own DNA, its own particular dynamism and significance, in addition to its own generalizations and stereotypes, both of which are difficult to elide. The mother/son relationship can be the most ferociously intimate because the son is the mother’s first great possession, one that she must eventually relinquish to the world. But where do the generalizations and stereotypes of the mother/son relationship shade into verity?

Join me for this class and we will examine together five stories of mothers and sons by five American masters: Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” Katherine Anne Porter’s “He,” Raymond Carver’s “Boxes,” Richard Ford’s “Communist,” and John Edgar Wideman’s “Solitary.” Collectively these masterful stories spotlight the sheer emotional magnitude of the mother/son bond, the sheer depth of its meaning, and each has its own idiosyncratic way of doing so. What emerges when we read them together is the fact that there is no monolithic mother/son union, but rather as many unions as there are mothers and sons. Of all the mother/son short stories I’ve studied to see what I missed and also what I can use in my work, these five mean the most to me, and I want to show you precisely why.

We will have a conversation, not a sermon, about the felicities, difficulties, truths, and misconceptions of the mother/son relationship, its unequivocal uniqueness, and the extent to which our five stories uphold, dispel, or further complicate the accepted wisdom. We’ll also talk about how these five great writers go about telling these stories, and how the stories work to leave us understanding more about this this unique relationship than when we began.

Whether or not you are yourself a mother or a son, and whether you are long familiar with these five stories or new to them, I hope you’ll join us.

I look forward to seeing you.

-William