Photo by Julie Sadowski at Grayscale Studios
Megan Stielstra is the Literary Director of 2nd Story and co-editor of their print anthology, Briefly Knocked Unconscious by a Low-Flying Duck: Stories From 2nd Story (Elephant Rock Books 2012). She’s told stories for The Goodman, The Steppenwolf, The Museum of Contemporary Art, The Chicago Poetry Center, Story Week, Wordstock, The Neo-Futurarium, Victory Gardens, Theater on the Lake, and Chicago Public Radio, among others, and is a regular performer with 2nd Story, The Paper Machete, and Write Club. Her story collection, Everyone Remain Calm (Joyland/ECW 2011), was a Chicago Tribune Favorite of 2011, and her writing has appeared in Pank, The Rumpus, Make Magazine, F Magazine, Other Voices, Bluestem, The Nervous Breakdown, Fresh Yarn, Pindeldyboz, Swink, Necessary Fiction, Shareable and elsewhere. She teaches writing and performance at Columbia College and The University of Chicago.
She has a more informal bio, too. And also some press:
Time Out Chicago: “Stielstra—collector, curator and facilitator of so many stories—also writes beautifully and kinetically. Her work possesses a rare aural quality, no doubt the result of so much time on stage, or even in front of a classroom… in Everyone Remain Calm she gleefully tests the boundaries of the short-story form.”
CBS Chicago, Best New Chicago Books: “Her theatrical performances are intense, composed of a powerful cadence of speech and strong storytelling you won’t find anywhere else. Somehow she has bottled the presence of her performances and sprinkled a little bit on each story contained within Everyone Remain Calm.”
New City Lit 50: “In what has proven to be a brilliant experiment in developing a literature-theater hybrid, [2nd Story's Stielstra and Delheimer] continue to push the already wide boundaries of creative nonfiction.”
Chicago Literary Examiner: “Stielstra has staked her career on live performance storytelling that is often emulated but never duplicated. In print and especially live, she urges the audience to come with her on adventures that can get both hysteric in pitch and absolutely still: few performers can teeter their audience between these extremes while still engaging such a personal connection. It is the story that regins supreme, that dictates what will happen on stage. Her delivery is just one part of the show, like the musicians that back her, or the singer that swaps a story duet, or the brass band parading around her.”
The Collagist: “Everyone Remain Calm is a daring and inventive debut. Stielstra’s use of language, while dynamic, is focused and unexperimental – plot is where she exercises her flair for innovation. The developments that unfold in these eighteen stories are consistently imaginative and unexpected (one character has athletic rebound sex with The Incredible Hulk!).”
Toronto Review of Books: “The recent work of writer Megan Stielstra is an emblematic example of the hybridity that characterizes new short work infused with online elements… In the collection’s captivating short story ‘I Am the Keymaster,’ Stielstra’s protagonist uses a distinctly digital mechanism—Craigslist—to approach a thoroughly corporeal problem—a need to secure affordable birth-control pills.”
Gaper’s Block: “Citing the definitive Stalin quote ‘a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic,’ Stielstra notes that the experience of hearing individuals tell their stories humanizes the storytellers in a unique way that emphasizes similarities between the storytellers and the audience. ‘We see numbers flash on the news and say whatever, until we hear the people’s individual stories,’ she says. ‘What made me want to be a writer—my favorite thing about stories and my favorite thing about literature—is what we learn about other people.’”
Time Out Chicago: “A noted fiction writer whose unique, dynamic readings often include elements of live music, distancing her from the pack of her hushed, floor-gazing peers on the lit-reading circuit… Her specific brand of performance—pairing quirky Sedaris-style musings with unexpected theatrical trimmings like on-site musicians (she once used an entire New Orleans brass band)—is a text-based variation on the ‘story theater’ style used by many Chicago theater artists.”