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.
She lives on a farm in Vermont with two daughters and several rescue animals, and directs the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers' Conference at Middlebury College.
*
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 Guardian and 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.
“I wanted, then, to become what I most admired, what now seemed most real to me. I wanted to be that exalted, complicated presence in someone's life, the familiar body, the source of another's existence. But I knew what I wanted was not always what I needed.”
“I knew I was waiting for someone I didn't understand.”
“I want to mother the world, I thought. I have so much love.Then—I have no business being a mother. I am a selfish woman.Then—I can do this. Millions of women have been mothers.Then—I feel very alone. I do not know what I'm capable of.”
“Sometimes you didn't know what you were after, I thought. Maybe there was a speck on the horizon and you followed it, hoping for the best.”
“It was a character-building week, a week that thinned my hair, put circles underneath my eyes.”
“Mothers, I believe, intoxicate us. We idolize them and take them for granted. We hate them and blame them and exalt them more thoroughly than anyone else in our lives. We sift through the evidence of their love, reassure ourselves of their affection and its biological genesis. We can steal and lie and leave and they will love us.”