Megan Mayhew Bergman
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People and Poetry: A Conversation with Kim Fu
Poet and novelist Kim Fu discusses her new novel, The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore, how poetry impacts her fiction, and the expectations that accompany a book about lost children.
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This Week in Short Fiction
When literary magazines publish “Women’s Issues,” they can run the danger of making women into a theme. As if fiction by and about women is a curiosity, something to enjoy for a moment, in one issue a year, before returning…
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Hunting the Pages
I find the threat of predation satisfying in a short story because, when done well, it solicits a visceral reaction. The etymology of the word visceral can be traced to the Latin word viscera, which was used to refer to…
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Writing and Collecting
When I left the house on Pace Street and moved to Vermont, I became a writer. I became a writer because I was so broken down by early motherhood that I stopped fearing criticism long enough to throw my work…
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This Week in Short Fiction
Robert Stone’s fictional universe was vast. The minds of Vietnam vets. Sailors on the open sea. Hidden romances at a prestigious university. But last weekend, one of our better explorers of the darker corners of American life was lost when…
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Notable NYC: 1/3–1/9
Monday 1/5: Jason Sokol and Brent Staples talk about All Eyes Are Upon Us: Race and Politics from Boston to Brooklyn. Greenlight Bookstore, 7:30 p.m., free. Tuesday 1/6: Nellie Hermann discusses her novel The Season of Migration with Chris Adrian.…
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The Wide Open (And Increasingly Traveled) Road
For The Kenyon Review “Credo” series, Megan Mayhew Bergman offers some thoughts on “socially-conscious writing”: I’m not sure if it was becoming a mother, or publishing my first book—because these events happened in essentially the same year—but when it comes to…
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When I Loved Reagan
When I see this video of eleven-year-old me, I burn inside. Maybe I should take it easy on myself, but I see a fumbling, painfully awkward girl supporting a politician whose influence still buttresses today’s anti-feminist conservatives
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The Last Book I Loved: West with the Night
Her mother was a nurse, shot in World War II in Nepal. She—my mother-in-law—was an Ivy League-educated, motorcycle-driving, garden-planting veterinarian in Vermont… with a pilot’s license. When she passed away after a bout with cancer, two weeks after the birth…