Photo by Julie Sadowski at Grayscale Studios
Megan Stielstra is the author of Everyone Remain Calm, a Chicago Tribune Favorite of 2011, and the Literary Director of Chicago’s 2nd Story storytelling series. She’s told stories for The Goodman, The Steppenwolf, The Museum of Contemporary Art, The Chicago Poetry Center, Story Week Festival of Writers, Wordstock Literary Festival, The Neo-Futurarium, Victory Gardens, Chicago Public Radio, and regularly for 2nd Story, The Paper Machete, and Write Club, along with all sorts of theaters and festivals and bars. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Other Voices, The Nervous Breakdown, Fresh Yarn, Pindeldyboz, Swink, Necessary Fiction, Shareable, Monkeybicycle, Annalemma, and Punk Planet, among others, and have been performed by Theatre Seven of Chicago and Bohemian Archeology in NYC. She teaches creative writing and writing & 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.”
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.”