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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Posts Tagged: Megan Mayhew Bergman
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 to your regularly scheduled old white men programming. The title itself can imply that the […]
...moreHunting 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 internal organs; the plural term, viscus, refers to “flesh.” A visceral reaction refers to an […]
...moreWriting 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 out into the world. Moving into an old farmhouse, I began collecting again, amassing things […]
...moreThis 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 Stone died at the age of 77 from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. A writer of […]
...moreNotable 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. BookCourt, 7 p.m., free. Wednesday 1/7: Megan Mayhew Bergman reads from her story collection Almost […]
...moreThe 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 my writing career, all I can tell myself is: make it matter. Make it count.
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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
...moreThe 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 of my first child, I decided to read her favorite book, Beryl Markham’s West with […]
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