In an interview on her second short-story collection, Megan Mayhew Bergman talks about her upbringing:

I come from the Southern tradition. I was in the South for thirty years before moving to Vermont and, even though I’m incredibly secular, I grew up in a church and I think most Southerners have sermons imprinted in their brains forevermore, and that’s a very short speech-driven, sound-driven, punchy narrative and with a pretty healthy whiff of drama in it. And on top of that, you know, the short story format is a Southern tradition that’s so strong. You grow up on Flannery O’Connor.

She also observes the difficulty she had being an atheist in North Carolina. “It was something I was ashamed of and had this closeted feeling and endured wave after wave of patronizing questions,” she says.