Phoenix (Ploughshares Solos)

by Megan Mayhew Bergman

Overview

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 Ploughshares Solos

Ploughshares Solos is a digital-only series of stories, essays, and novellas published by Ploughshares Literary Magazine in Boston, MA. Pshares Singles launched on July 31, 2012. Roughly every month, a new Solo will be released on digital publishing commerce platforms.

Ploughshares, founded in 1971, publishes short stories, poems, and essays three times a year (April, August, and December). It has published the early work of some of today's most respected writers, including Tim O'Brien, Sue Miller, Robert Pinsky, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Edward P. Jones. Over the years, Ploughshares has sometimes received longer submissions that were difficult to publish due to space considerations in the print issue. Ploughshares Solos is a forum for these lengthier stories and essays.

For more information about Ploughshares, visit www.pshares.org or connect on social media: @pshares, and Facebook.com/ploughshares. Current and back issues of Ploughshares are also available as eBooks.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940015683646
Publisher:	Ploughshares / Emerson College
Publication date:	09/20/2012
Series:	Ploughshares Solos , #3
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	691 KB

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.