Phoenix (Ploughshares Solos Book 3)

Working off the books at a small goat farm in Vermont, without a birth certificate, a driver's license, or a credit card, Phoenix is as close as a young person can get to disappearing in modern America. Intelligent and lonely, the child of free-spirited parents, she takes her modest pay at the farm and waits for a sense of what her next step should be. As she navigates the mysteries of her own birth and parentage, and lives with the crumbling marriage of the couple that owns the farm, Phoenix looks for direction through her work and her care of another lonely creature, a wounded goat named Jesus.

(This Solo also features an interview with the author about the inspiration behind her work and life in her adopted home-state of Vermont.)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Megan Mayhew Bergman was raised in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. She now lives on a small farm in Shaftsbury, Vermont with her veterinarian husband Bo, two daughters, four dogs, four cats, two goats, a horse, and a handful of chickens. In November 2010, Megan was elected Justice of the Peace for the town of Shaftsbury. She also teaches literature at Bennington College.

Megan graduated from Wake Forest University, and completed graduate degrees at Duke University and Bennington College. She was a fiction scholar at Breadloaf and received a fellowship from the Millay Colony for the Arts in November 2007.

Scribner published her first story collection, Birds of a Lesser Paradise, in March 2012; the paperback version, which includes "Phoenix," will appear in November 2012. Her first novel, Shepherd, Wolf, will appear from Scribner in 2013.

Her work has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in the New York Times, Best American Short Stories 2011, New Stories from the South 2010, Oxford American, Narrative, Ploughshares, One Story, and elsewhere.

PRAISE FOR MEGAN MAYHEW BERGMAN

“Megan Mayhew Bergman apparently possesses, all in one sensibility, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s love of a back-to-the-land self-sufficiency, Amy Hempel’s infinite tenderness towards animals, and Tillie Olsen’s fierce sense of the emotional intensities of motherhood. Birds of a Lesser Paradise features characters who, even understanding it as well as they do, want to mother the world, and their stories are rendered with dazzling compassion, intelligence, and grace.” —Jim Shepard, author of You Think That’s Bad

"Readers will be shocked, amazed, and always entertained by the work of this accomplished writer of short fiction." —Booklist