About
Megan Staffel’s stories have been published in The New England Review, Ploughshares, Northwest Review, Seattle Review, and other journals, and collected in The Exit Coach (Four Way Books, 2016) and Lessons in Another Language (Four Way Books, 2010). She is the author of the novels, The Notebook of Lost Things (Soho Press) and She Wanted Something Else (Northpoint Press) and a first collection of stories, A Length of Wire And Other Stories (Pym Randall Press). She has published essays on craft in A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on their Craft edited by Andrea Barrett and Peter Turchi; Letters to A Fiction Writer, edited by Fred Busch; and Cerise Press, Spring, 2013. She divides her time between Brooklyn, New York and western New York State and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Featured Work
The Exit Coach
How do we find the courage to change? In The Exit Coach, a collection of seven stories and a novella, the characters arrive at an impasse that requires them to step out of the wreckage of their habituated lives. It is the entrance of an unexpected voice-- a visitor from France, a retired talent scout, an invisible friend, a midnight phone call, or even a wild animal--that disrupts their patterns of behavior and illuminates the possibilities they’ve been blind to, pointing the way to an exit they’ve dreamt of, but lacked the courage to enter.
Other Works
Awards and Recognition
- Michigan Council of the Arts Award, Foreword Reviews Award, Independent Publisher Book Award, shortlisted for Best American Short Stories, finalist for AWP novel award. Staffel's forthcoming novel, The Causative Factor, was awarded the Petrichor Prize and will be published by Regal House Publishing in October, 2024.
