Author Archive

Bring In the Old: The Writer as Collector

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There was a time in my mid-twenties when I was unhappy, for reasons that now seem ridiculous to me but were no less potent because of their ridiculousness. I wanted to be a writer, but I worked a business consulting job from home and spent a lot of time

An Editing Strategy in Winter

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The best way to write is hoeing corn or chopping wood or milking cows or walking the roads. The boots I’ve worn out writing books! – Elliott Merrick   Guest post by Megan Mayhew Bergman   The last light falls across my backyard. The ground is covered in a

Nightwood, Revisited

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Guest post by Megan Mayhew Bergman Or, perhaps I should say, Nightwood–finally visited. As readers may recall, I publically chided myself for my inability to get through a book I truly wanted to read–Djuna Barnes’ novel, Nightwood. Fond of her other work (Ryder, Creatures of an Alphabet, Ladies Almanack,

The Power of Redemption Narratives

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Guest post by Megan Mayhew Bergman Two things caught my eye before the Thanksgiving holiday: 1) Michael Vick’s electrifying performance against the Redskins 2) James Frey’s “Fiction Factory”, and his alleged tactic of asking his employed writers to follow a Greek three-act narrative structure in their commercial work, with

Q&A: Literary Agent Julie Barer

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Guest post by Megan Mayhew Bergman Q: I used to think agents were really scary, city-savvy people only concerned with the bottom line. However, the more agents I’ve met, the more I realize how many of them truly love literature and care about the authors they represent.   Basics

Playing Favorites

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Or, My Zealous Adoration of Faulkner’s “The Bear” “The Bear’ is at once so simple and so complex that it surrenders its meaning to the conscious mind only after repeated readings and much brooding,” Daniel Hoffman, Faulkner’s Country Matters, 1989 Guest post by Megan Mayhew BergmanYou’ve read it, too–the

Anger Management

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Guest post by Megan Mayhew Bergman I’ve never worn anger well, especially the self-righteous kind. Last year I was in a park outside Raleigh, where a beautiful plot of farmland was being developed and new McMansion owners were shooing hikers away from parking on the street. I saw a

Staying With the Tension

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Guest post by Megan Mayhew Bergman When we were in elementary school, my sister and I would always cut our viewing of The Sound of Music short because: A) it was a seriously long movie, and B) I couldn’t stand to watch Rolf crouch down in his jodhpurs and

This Is Not a Breakup Letter

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Guest post by Megan Mayhew Bergman Dear Djuna, Look. It’s nothing personal, but every time I start reading Nightwood, I get four pages in and quit.   Even T.S. Eliot writes, in his introduction to the novel, “When I first read the book I found the opening movement rather

Writing the Southern Landscape

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Guest post by Megan Mayhew Bergman The present state of the South is one wherein nothing can be taken for granted, one in which our identity is obscured and in doubt. In the past, the things that have seemed to many to make us ourselves have been very obvious