Megan Mayhew Bergman

North Carolina · connectedBorn 1979

American writer

Studied at Duke University

novelist

Quotations with a citation

My good habits: I don’t really watch television. I read a lot. I teach, which makes me think about what makes good work. I run, which helps me work out plot points and combat nerves about a first book. I parent, which is radically humbling and physical and informs my characterizations. I always have a short story in progress. I try not to read rejection letters twice.

... crying at your own work is like laughing at your own joke — it's just not done.

Vermont sort of demands humility and equanimity. No one really cares if you’re fancy or high achieving, and if you lead with that energy you will learn quickly that it’s unwelcome. There’s a coldness here that shocked me for years—but I’ve learned to appreciate the authenticity. No one’s faking much of anything; there’s no lipstick on the pigs here.

Recorded without a firm citation

Kept here, labelled, rather than mixed in above.

As a climate activist, I want to deepen my relationship to the natural world. I have no need to dominate nature, just a desire to live a little closer to it. When I read the work of female naturalists like LaBastille and Robin Kimmerer, whose work blends the scientific, tribal and spiritual, I sense a shared love and humility in the relationship between self and nature, not the loud note of personal triumph and chest-thumping we hear so loudly in early environmental work.

Allan Gurganus and I grew up, thirty years apart, in the small town of Rocky Mount, situated on the Tar River in eastern North Carolina. A life-size portrait of Gurganus hung in our local library’s entryway, and I used to leaf through a copy of his best-known novel, “Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All,” while waiting for my piano lessons to start. (Gurganus knew my music teacher, Gene Featherstone, socially. “A sweetheart,” he assured me.) For me, Gurganus was proof that you could come from the place where I lived—a place steeped in propriety, religion, and tradition—and become a writer.