Megan Mayhew Bergman

Megan Mayhew Bergman (born December 23, 1979) is an American short-story writer, novelist, essayist, environmental journalist, lecturer, critic, and assistant professor at Middlebury College. She received the 2015 George Garrett Fiction Prize and the 2020 Reed Environmental Award in Journalism.

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Quotes

My good habits: I don’t really watch television. I read a lot. I teach, which makes me think about what makes good work. I run, which helps me work out plot points and combat nerves about a first book. I parent, which is radically humbling and physical and informs my characterizations. I always have a short story in progress. I try not to read rejection letters twice.
- as quoted by Aja Gabel, in: "Interview: 7 Questions for Megan Mayhew Bergman". Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts 24.2 Summer/Fall 2012.

As a climate activist, I want to deepen my relationship to the natural world. I have no need to dominate nature, just a desire to live a little closer to it.
When I read the work of female naturalists like LaBastille and Robin Kimmerer, whose work blends the scientific, tribal and spiritual, I sense a shared love and humility in the relationship between self and nature, not the loud note of personal triumph and chest-thumping we hear so loudly in early environmental work.
- (17 July 2019) "Adventuring while female: why the relationship women have with nature matters". The Guardian.

... crying at your own work is like laughing at your own joke — it's just not done.
- (March 20, 2022) "How Strange a Season with Megan Mayhew Bergman". AmericanLibraryParis, YouTube. (quote at 39:10 of 57:41 in video)

Allan Gurganus and I grew up, thirty years apart, in the small town of Rocky Mount, situated on the Tar River in eastern North Carolina. A life-size portrait of Gurganus hung in our local library’s entryway, and I used to leaf through a copy of his best-known novel, “Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All,” while waiting for my piano lessons to start. (Gurganus knew my music teacher, Gene Featherstone, socially. “A sweetheart,” he assured me.) For me, Gurganus was proof that you could come from the place where I lived—a place steeped in propriety, religion, and tradition—and become a writer.
- (April 23, 2023) "How Allan Gurganus Became a Writer (interview)". The New Yorker.

Vermont sort of demands humility and equanimity. No one really cares if you’re fancy or high achieving, and if you lead with that energy you will learn quickly that it’s unwelcome. There’s a coldness here that shocked me for years—but I’ve learned to appreciate the authenticity. No one’s faking much of anything; there’s no lipstick on the pigs here.
- as quoted by Nadeem Kharputly in: (June 15th, 2025) "Small Town Dispatches: Megan Mayhew Bergman". Shenandoah: The Washington and Lee Review.