Miriam Gershow
Miriam Gershow is a novelist and story writer, with occasional forays into creative nonfiction. Her debut short story collection, Survival Tips, is forthcoming from Propeller Books in 2024. Her novel, Closer, is forthcoming from Regal House in 2025. Her debut novel, The Local News (Spiegel & Grau), was hailed as “unusually credible and precise" and "deftly heartbreaking” by The New York Times, as well as “an accomplished debut” (Publisher’s Weekly) with a “disarmingly unsentimental narrative voice,” (Kirkus Reviews).
Miriam’s stories appear in The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast and Black Warrior Review, among other journals. Her flash fiction appears in anthologies from Alan Squire Books and Alternating Currents, as well as in Pithead Chapel, Had, and Variant Lit, where she is the inaugural winner of the Pizza Prize. Her creative nonfiction is featured in Salon and Craft Literary among other journals.
She is the recipient of a Fiction Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and an Oregon Literary Fellowship, as well as writing residencies at Playa, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Hypatia-in-the-Woods, and Wildacres. Her stories have been listed in the 100 Distinguished Stories of The Best American Short Stories and appeared in the Robert Olen Butler Prize Stories. Her writing has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes and was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award (Ken Kesey Award for the Novel).
She received her MFA from the University of Oregon, and has since taught fiction writing at the University of Wisconsin as well as descriptive writing to gifted high school students through Johns Hopkins University. She has taught writing to first-graders, retirees, and everyone in between. Miriam lives with her family in Eugene OR, where she teaches writing at the University of Oregon.
(Photo Credit: Livia Fremouw)
“But this was how I'd always been... finite in my capacity for tolerating simple day-to-day contact. I could handle it just fine, all the way up to the point that I couldn't anymore, as if I existed on a tether, and not a particularly long one, finding myself able to wonder only so far into the territory of another human being before snapping back into myself. ”
“If ever there was a sentence more quickly imprinted in my consciousness, more oft repeated, one that stood as more of an arbiter against which to judge all else, I do not know it. In the beginning, the repetition was the numb sort, the words impenetrable. Only occasionally did they have the power to stop me midstep as I walked upstairs. Or seize my stomach as I ate. Or clear my head as I attempted to speak.”
“Having a plan softened by spine into the mattress, quelled the rising simmer within me, setting me right in the same way that reading the first question of a dreaded exam or the first page of a new book set me right, those moments when wide-open uncertainty was, if not resolved, at least whittled into something more tangible and concrete.”