“Women carry so much of this love and its afterlife”: An Interview with Megan Mayhew Bergman
The stories in Megan Mayhew Bergman’s third collection deal with the idea of inheritance—what parts of themselves women bequeath to their children, to one another, to men, and what’s left once those parts are given away.
Writers and Their Pets: Megan Mayhew Bergman
The ‘Writers and Their Pets’ series began with my own desire to celebrate my dog Sally, and over the coming months I will also invite other writers to share with the rest of us the details of their lives with beloved pets. We also ask contributors to the series to tell us
Portraits of Motherhood and Grief
Stories by Megan Mayhew Bergman, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, and Lorrie Moore portray mothers transformed by grief, their ideas of motherhood complicated by the crises that befall them.
“We’re standing on the edge of the cliff”: An Interview with Lauren Groff
Following the conclusion of her Climate Visionaries project undertaken with Greenpeace, Jason Katz speaks with Lauren Groff about writing climate fiction, her climate-related work, and talking to our youngest about climate change.
Gulfs and Storms
The presence in Belle Boggs’ new novel of the Gulf of Mexico parallels an exploration of the other gulfs that threaten us: between politics and art, art and money, and between people of different beliefs.
Bodily Shifts
I’m currently about five months pregnant with our second child, and I’m finding this state no less strange the second time around. It’s plenty of other things too—miraculous, exciting, fascinating, wonderful—and I’m very grateful for it; but in describing the actual daily, bodily experience, that’s the word that first
Tracing Literary Family Trees: An Interview with Mark Wunderlich
Mark Wunderlich is a poet from the Midwest living in Hudson Valley, teaching at Bennington College. He’s received many fellowships, including those from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Megan Mayhew Bergman interviewed him for Ploughshares on craft, place, and essential
Letter to myself: On fatherhood and poems
A published letter is a strange act. It’s like a whisper made into a loudspeaker. It’s a secret note the town’s tacked onto the city hall bulletin board after the carrier pigeon nosedived into the public square. It’s intimacy externalized. Some letters seem to speak to no one at
Artistry is a Kind of Citizenship – Ploughshares Interviews Allan Gurganus
I’ve been aware of Allan Gurganus since I was a few years old; we hail from the same small town, Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and his books lined the shelves of homes I visited, and the local library. Turns out his name was also in the New Yorker, and
Don’t Just Read It – Help Me Write It
Over the next couple of days, we ask you to join us in a literary experiment. Our test subject is Megan Mayhew Bergman, the lovely author of Birds of a Lesser Paradise: Stories and former contributor to an issue of Ploughshares, our Ploughshares Solos series, and this very blog.