Short stories by Megan Mayhew Bergman

Megan Mayhew Bergman is the author of three books, Birds of a Lesser Paradise, Almost Famous Women, and How Strange a Season, forthcoming from Scribner in March 2022. She is currently writing a book on the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, also with Scribner.
Megan studied anthropology at Wake Forest University, has an MA from Duke University, and an MFA from Bennington College. Her work was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers and an Indie Next selection, and won the Garrett Award for Fiction in 2012. She has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the American Library in Paris. Megan is a journalist, essayist, and critic. She has written columns on climate change and the natural world for The Guardianand The Paris Review. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Tin House, Ploughshares, Oxford American, Orion, and elsewhere. Her short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2011 and 2015, and on NPR’s Selected Shorts. She was awarded the Phil Reed Environmental Writing Award for Journalism in 2020. While at Bennington College, she served as the Associate Director of the MFA program and Director of the Robert Frost Stone House Museum. She currently teaches literature and environmental writing at Middlebury College, where she also serves as Director of the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference. Her work has been optioned for film and translated into several languages. She’s collaborated with choreographer Annie Wang, traveled to Northern Kenya’s conflict zone with The BOMA Project, and can often be found on the coast of Georgia supporting her friends at conservation non-profit One Hundred Miles. Her photography has appeared in The Guardian, Wall Street Journal, and Audubon. Megan recently served as a Senior Fellow at the Conservation Law Foundation. She’s currently a regular columnist at The Guardian and Audubon.

Listing 3 stories.

A single mother whose own mother recently passed away travels to South Carolina with her seven-year-old son in search of her mother's pet parrot, as she hopes to hear her mother's voice again.

A recently divorced woman moves to her deceased grandmother's seaside house in California, hoping to start a new, glamorous life.

During World War II, a young woman from Florida stays on the private island of a woman who enjoys her romantic company—but around their house in paradise, trouble and unrest brew between the women and among the native islanders.