The problem with writing a profile of Megan Stielstra is that she’s already done most of the work herself. Once you read her two essay collections, Once I Was Cool (Curbside Splendor) and The Wrong Way to Save Your Life (Harper Perennial), you’ll know where she was born (Alma, Michigan), what her parents were like (kind, loving, and supportive, even after the divorce), her hopes (love, understanding, great writing), her fears (the mortgage, her father’s death, the bigotry and violence that emerged with the rise of Donald Trump), her interests (books, theater), her crushes (Pete, Todd, Dave) and love affairs (the college boyfriend who followed her to Italy, the future husband who followed her to Prague), the most dramatic events of her life (like the time her apartment building almost burned down), and the more mundane ones (like the slow, inexorable process of losing a job that she loved).
She had a story about when I took her pheasant hunting, and she had herself with a shotgun with a scope. You don’t hunt pheasants with scopes. In her book, she had a boat I built with some friends that are more talented than me, and she said I had a wood stove in the boat, and the notion gives it a real Alaskan kind of feel. But you would never have an open flame in a boat. That would be inordinately dangerous. Propane would be OK. But you would never find an open flame. A couple of other little things. And she, I think, more to pacify me than because it had any tremendous appeal to her, made the change in the final rewrite.
Her career at Columbia College almost exactly paralleled my own as chair, and images rise easily from those years. She knocks on my open office door, offering temporary relief from memos, and we launch into talk about a piece of her writing, the intricacies of point of view, a problem student in her class, music, books, academic and national politics. I see her the night before a writing conference joining Lott and me on the balcony of a New Orleans club, the Dragon’s Den, where the great drummer, Stanton Moore, is driving a beat through the thick night heat.
We’ve even written the same story unknown to each other from our separate perspectives. We’d started writing the stories separately about when we first became friends and started hanging out. So when Megan was looking at publishing her collection of short fiction called Everyone Remain Calm, she asked me if it would be OK to include a version of us playing our game called Oscar and Veronica. I said, “What? You wrote that as a story too?” Of course we’d both written it. The [online magazine] Nervous Breakdown published both of them (hers and mine). But from then on, we confer with each other before publishing.
It was such an enormous thing to her, and it makes me think—one just never knows how the little tiny things that you do can have the most life-changing impact on somebody else. You might never see that person again, but it feels particularly meaningful, I think, to have some of that reflected back to you by someone who . . . well, in many ways, Megan and I grew up together as humans and as artists.
Megan Stielstra is my best friend. Which means that we often wear the same dresses from Nordstrom Rack. In fact, I’ve been known to buy two just in case she can’t find it at the one in Chicago (I live in Oakland, California.) We are sisters that ended up in the wombs of two different moms, seeded by two different dads; but sisters, nonetheless. For close to 25 years, she has been writing about our relationship, how it affects her growth, my growth, our kids, our understanding of race, local and national politics, teaching and learning, and things as basic as where to buy bras.
