Meg is a writer based in Pittsburgh, PA.
Intro
Hi. I’m Meg. I run long distances slowly, am quite sober, and share my home with the world’s best dog, three demons disguised as cats and my husband. I think a lot about care.
Work
I write to understand my obsessions and satiate my endless curiosity. I write essays because they allow me to chase both, to blend research and personal narrative, not to answer the questions, but to ask better ones.
Recent Work
Microdosing Grief
Thanatos Review
The first time I take a Jello shot, I am 8. It’s unclear to me now if I knew it had alcohol in it, or simply thought it was Jello. I got drunk. By the time I get sober at 28, it will take many, many shots to get me drunk. The first time I run a mile without stopping I am 26. Fourteen months later, I run the Chicago Marathon. Tiny doses. Baby steps. Inoculation. You can build up a tolerance to anything.
Whiskey Days
No Tokens
I am a sober woman with a dog named Whiskey, the irony unintentional. He was named eleven years ago—before I got sober, before I even saw him—after Nikki Sixx’s dog, Whisky, who was named after the Whisky A Go Go. It’s possible I was trying too hard. Too hard to do what is hard to say, exactly. Perhaps to prove to myself, my friends, the world, that despite graduating from college at the top of my class—a year early, no less—and taking a job as a bank manager, I was keeping my rock ‘n’ roll heart.
Exploring the Language of Care in “Lean, Stand, Fall”
Chicago Review of Books
*Named a LitHub “10 Best Book Reviews of 2021”
Though there was a time—before we met, before his diagnosis—when my husband traveled to Antarctica, Robert and Anna’s story is not ours. It is barely even close. But Lean Fall Stand reads like a meditation on the questions we all must someday face: Who am I? What can I stand? Who will be there when I fall?
Staying Sober Through 2020
Catapult
But could I have stayed sober through an insurrection on Day 6, with my companions fleeing the wagon? Would I have said, “Maybe it’s okay for them to quit Dry January. Perhaps they will go back to a glass of wine with dinner on Fridays, a flute of champagne on special occasions, a single pour of whiskey on coup-days. Good for them. Not for me.”