In this episode, Julia F. Green and Ralph Walker welcome Jennifer Savran Kelly to discuss Megan Mayhew Bergman’s short story Housewifely Arts, published in her collection Birds of a Lesser Paradise.
Read: Housewifely Arts
“I am my own housewife, my own breadwinner.”
In this heart-wrenching story, a woman goes on a road trip with her son to find the African gray parrot that can still mimic her dead mother’s voice. This conversation explores how the author deftly moves through the front and back story and uses specific detail to create a deeply emotional narrative. They discuss the themes of the story, including expectations of mothers, gendered roles around parenting, mother/child relationships, and parental loss, and the deep character and precision of literary fiction.
Prompts:
* Find a book of photography and flip through it till you find an image that makes you stop and linger. Take it in for another minute then go to your notebook and write.
* Pick one of Jenny Holzer’s Truisms and use it as a writing prompt.
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Guest Bio:
Jennifer Savran Kelly (she/they) lives upstate New York, where they write, bind books, and work as a production editor at Cornell University Press. Their debut novel Endpapers was a finalist for a 2024 Lambda Literary Award and was a fall/winter 2023 Indies Introduce pick. Their short work has been published or is forthcoming in Short Story, Long; Potomac Review; Black Warrior Review; and elsewhere.
Read Jennifer’s latest story, Man Next Door.
You can find Writing in the Dark on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and subscribing is a great way to support this work. Thanks, as always, for listening.
Writing in the Dark is co-hosted by Julia F. Green (Substack, Bluesky, website) and Ralph Walker (Twitter, website) and edited by Aaron Fyler, with cover art by Jarmusch.
