I woke to find the cougar curled at the foot of my bed. Or, at least, I thought I did. I accidentally bumped the sleeping cat with my foot. He rose with a gleam in his eye, arched his back in a dramatic stretch. Heat emanated from his hyper-muscular body. He began to walk the…
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 alone in my old Victorian in…
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 foot and a half of snow, soft from…
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, How it Feels to Be Forcibly…
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 a focus on the protagonist’s redemption…
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 first: Why did you decide to…
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 story that stays with you, the…
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 white plastic Wal-Mart bag caught in…
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 point his gun at the Von…
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