“I come from at least seven generations of Southern folks—so even though I’ve lived in Vermont for a few years, the South is in me genetically, atmospherically,” says writer Megan Mayhew Bergman, who was born and raised in North Carolina. “It’s in my childhood, my attachment style, my traumas, my joys, and all of that, all of the time, is spilling onto the page.”

Now living in Vermont, Bergman teaches at Middlebury College, where she directs the Creative Writing program and the Breadloaf Environmental Writers’ Conference. On Nov. 14, she’ll head back down South for a spell—to Nashville and to The Porch, where she’ll share her work and teach as part of our Visiting Writers Series. She’ll be in conversation with songwriter and musician Mary-Elaine Jenkins, a fellow Carolina gal and friend who shares a lot of Bergman’s interests: women’s stories and agency, the setting and aura of the South, and more. A few weeks ago, Bergman told me she was working on a new, Southern gothic “true-crime tale” to present at this event, interspersed with music from Jenkins. “It takes place at a bar in Wilmington, NC, in the ‘70s, with a man trying to convince a young woman to go back and see the historic home he’s restoring,” she told me. (I’ve been building pictures in my head ever since of that story-to-come.)

Jenkins, for her part, is also deeply interested in her home region and all its complexities.  “As a native of the South Carolina Lowcountry, I’m interested in how we grapple with its past, revere that profligate beauty, delight in its eccentricity, and celebrate its humanity,” she writes. “My fixation on it is woven into my music and songwriting.”

Bergman’s fiction and journalism frequently interrogates the natural world in a time of climate change, and her stories often foreground women who are attached, for better and worse, to these places undergoing transformation and loss. “In a collection perfectly suited for our moment, Bergman examines what remains of what was given to us and suggests how we might move on as the world continues to change around us,” wrote a reviewer for Booklist of Bergman’s most recent collection, How Strange a Season. 

I recently had the pleasure of featuring both Bergman and Jenkins in a questionnaire-based interview series I run on my Substack, FIELD TRIP, and you can explore those in the links below. We hope you’ll come out to Random Sample, our partner venue, on Nov. 14, and join us in an evening of threaded-together story and song—the kind of thing we at The Porch have a fancy for. 

The Good Southern Women Interview with Megan Mayhew Bergman

The Good Southern Women Interview with Mary-Elaine Jenkins

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