Award-winning author Megan Mayhew Bergman (Almost Famous Women, Birds of a Lesser Paradise) returns with an evocative and engrossing collection about women experiencing life’s challenges and beauty. In How Strange a Season, Bergman portrays women who wrestle with problematic inheritances: a modern glass house on a treacherous California cliff, a water-starved ranch, and an abandoned plantation on a river near Charleston. Author and editor Leigh Newman, who writes about women navigating the wilds of male-dominated Alaskan society in her exhilarating debut collection, Nobody Gets Out Alive, joined Bergman for a discussion of short story craft and our turbulent, intimate relationship to the natural world.
Photos by Kelsie Lynn Bennett
Featured Books
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How Strange a Season
By Megan Mayhew Bergman
Published by Simon & Schuster
A recently separated woman fills a huge terrarium with endangered flowers to establish a small world only she can control in an attempt to heal her broken heart. A competitive swimmer negotiates over which days she will fulfill her wifely duties, and which days she will keep for herself. A peach farmer wonders if her orchard will survive a drought. And generations of a family in South Carolina struggle with fidelity and their cruel past, some clinging to old ways and others painfully carving new paths.
In these haunting stories, Megan Mayhew Bergman portrays women who wrestle with problematic inheritances: a modern glass house on a treacherous California cliff, a water-starved ranch, and an abandoned plantation on a river near Charleston. Bergman’s provocative prose asks the questions: what are we leaving behind for our descendants to hold, and what price will they pay for our mistakes?
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Nobody Gets Out Alive
By Leigh Newman
Published by Simon & Schuster
Set in Newman’s home state of Alaska, Nobody Gets Out Alive is a collection of dazzling, courageous stories about women struggling to survive not just grizzly bears and charging moose but the raw, exhausting legacy of their marriages and families. In “Howl Palace”—winner of the Paris Review’s Terry Southern Prize, a Best American Short Story, and Pushcart Prize selection—an aging widow struggles with a rogue hunting dog and the memories of her five ex-husbands while selling her house after bankruptcy. In the title story, “Nobody Gets Out Alive,” newly married Katrina visits her hometown of Anchorage and blows up her own wedding reception by flirting with the host and running off with an enormous mastodon tusk.
Alongside stories set in today’s Last Frontier—rife with suburban sprawl, global warming, and opioid addiction—Newman delves into remote wilderness of the 1970s and 80s, bringing to life young girls and single moms in search of a wilder, freer, more adventurous America. The final story takes place in a railroad camp in 1915, where an outspoken heiress stages an elaborate theatrical in order to seduce the wife of her husband’s employer, revealing how this masterful storyteller is “not only writing unforgettable, brilliantly complex characters, she’s somehow inventing souls” (Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light).
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In Conversation
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Megan Mayhew Bergman
Megan Mayhew Bergman
Megan Mayhew Bergman is the author of Almost Famous Women and Birds of a Lesser Paradise. Her short fiction has appeared in two volumes of The Best American Short Stories and on NPR’s Selected Shorts. 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. She teaches literature and environmental writing at Middlebury College, where she also serves as director of the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference. She lives on a small farm in Vermont.
Photo Credit: Nina Subin
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Leigh Newman
Leigh Newman
Leigh Newman is the author of Still Points North, a memoir about growing up in Alaska which was a finalist for the National Book Critic Circle’s John Leonard Prize. Her stories have appeared in Harper’s, the Paris Review, Tin House, McSweeny’s Quarterly Concern, One Story, and Electric Literature. In 2020, she was awarded the Paris Review’s Terry Southern Prize, a Best American Short Story, a Pushcart Prize, and an American Society of Magazine Editors’ Fiction Prize for her work in the Paris Review. Previously, she cofounded the indie press Black Balloon/Catapult where she still works as editor-at-large. Her essays, book reviews and general musings have appeared in the New York Times; Bookforum; Vogue; Real Simple; O, the Oprah Magazine; and other publications.
Photo Credit: Nina Subin