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2015
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
What is it about birds and death? Two recent North Carolina writers pick up where Poe’s raven left off.
BIRD WATCHING a review by Brian Glover Megan Mayhew Bergman, Birds of a Lesser Paradise: Stories. New York: Scribner, 2012. Lee Zacharias, The Only Sounds We Make: Essays. Spartanburg, SC: Hub City Press, 2013.
BRIAN GLOVER received his PhD at the University of Virginia. He teaches English at ECU, where he received the Bertie Fearing Teaching Award in 2013. He is a member of the NCLR editorial board, and he was awarded a BB&T Active Learning and Leadership Development Incentive Grant for a project related to his use of NCLR in his short story classes. MEGAN MAYHEW BERGMAN grew up in Rocky Mount, NC, studied anthropology at Wake Forest University in WinstonSalem, NC, and completed an MA at Duke University in Durham, NC. She also earned an MFA from Bennington College. Scribner will release her next story collection, Almost Famous Women, in 2015. Her short fiction has also been published in such venues as Ecotone, Greensboro Review, Kenyon Review, McSweeney’s, Oxford American, Ploughshares, and Southern Review. Her nonfiction publications include “Redneck Ballerina, A Case for the Rest of Us” in NCLR 2010. LEE ZACHARIAS is Professor Emeritus of creative writing at UNC Greensboro, where she directed the MFA program and served as Greensboro Review editor. Her books include a short story collection, Helping Muriel Make it Through the Night (Louisiana State University Press, 1975) and two novels, Lessons (Houghton Mifflin 1981), which received the Sir Walter Raleigh Award, and At Random (Fugitive Poets Press, 2013; reviewed in NCLR Online 2014). Her nonfiction publications include essays in NCLR 2004 and 2008.
“Housewifely Arts,” the first story in Megan Mayhew Bergman’s superb debut collection, Birds of a Lesser Paradise, rolls forth from a devilishly clever conceit: what if, after your mother’s death, her voice lived on in her thoroughly disagreeable pet parrot? The protagonist (a single mother and, like all of Bergman’s narrators, a youngish woman with a lot on her mind) finds herself driving with her seven-year-old son from New England to the Carolina coast to retrieve the bird, wondering all the while what its imitations mean – about identity, about human uniqueness in the biological world, and about her own complex relationships with her parents and her child. Here she recalls her first experience with the bird, which her mother acquired after her father’s death: [D]uring breakfast, the bird moved from his perch to my shoulder without permission. Mom, I said. Get this damn bird off of me. Language! She warned. He’s a sponge. She brought her arm to my shoulder and Carnie stepped onto it. She scratched his neck lovingly. I was still grieving Dad, and it was strange to watch Mom find so much joy in this ebony-beaked wiseass. What are you selling? The bird said. I already have car insurance. Carnie spoke with perfect inflection, but he addressed his words to the air – a song, not conversation. You can’t take anything personally, Mom warned. The man of the house is not here, Carnie said. He’s dead. You really take it easy on those telemarketers, I said, looking at Mom. Dead, dead, dead, Carnie said. (6–7)
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In dramatic context, the ironic juxtapositions bring out the best quality of Bergman’s writing: this is fiction of ideas that doesn’t feel like scaffolding for an argument. The parrot, a “sponge” for language, parallels the narrator’s young son, who repeats everything he reads and hears and also competes for affection without really possessing the ability to return it. And yet, can she – or any of us – do better? Through the mirror of the bird, the narrator sees her mother expressing emotions to strangers on the phone as she never would to her own daughter. “You can’t take anything personally, Mom warned,” but what, exactly, does “personally” signify? The compounding layers of meaning make the exchange funny, outrageous, and mortifying at the same time; her stories are first and foremost a great pleasure to read, cleverly constructed and emotionally generous, philosophical underpinnings entirely aside. Yet those philosophical inquiries are prominent and important as well. Every one of the thirteen stories in Birds of a Lesser Paradise concerns animals, engaging in a venerable set of discussions that stretches from Descartes’s automata (and Robinson Crusoe’s parrot) to the more recent Animal Studies movement that has arisen largely in the aftermath of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975). Bergman takes a particular interest in the question of just to what extent we humans may understand the lives and desires of other living things, especially in the emotional connections of reproduction and family. In “The Cow that Milked Herself,” a young woman married to a veterinarian (as is Bergman herself) finds in her pregnancy that