WHO SHE?
Photograph by Joanna Welborn
REBECCA BENGAL
Born and raised in rural western North Carolina, formerly of Austin, Texas, currently living in Brooklyn, plus many places in between, I’m a writer of fiction and nonfiction. My collection Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists was published in June 2023 by Aperture, with an essay by Joy Williams. A new short story by me appears in Kristine Potter’s monograph Dark Waters, also just published by Aperture.
I am a MacDowell fellow, a contributing editor at Oxford American, and a past editor at DoubleTake, American Short Fiction, The Onion, and Vogue.com, among others. I received my MFA in fiction from the Michener Center for Writers in Austin and my BA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. My stories, interviews, essays, reported pieces, and collaborations with artists have been published by The New York Times, The New Yorker, Criterion Collection, Vogue, Vanity Fair, The Paris Review, The Believer, The Guardian, Aperture, Guernica, Pitchfork, The Washington Post Magazine, SSENSE, and Transgressor, among others. My short fiction has been published in Southwest Review, Greensboro Review, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and by Aperture Books. Many of my stories center on place; all on language. My sister, the photographer Joanna Welborn, and I are working on a project about our family’s history of Deafness, a unique rural sign language, and moonshine. (I’ve written short fiction loosely connected to this for Southwest Review, edited by Ben Fountain). I write about literature, photography, music, film, and nature (I’ve reported extensively from Standing Rock and the U.N. on the climate emergency).
Some of my other favorite stories to write are the hardest to classify: whether looking into the unsolved disappearance of the musician Jim Sullivan, dropping in on Prince’s former houses in Minneapolis, with the Artist’s onetime neighbor Alec Soth, or telling the story of eden ahbez. But I’m also partial to an essay I wrote about Charles Portis’s Norwood, and this one, looking back at the time I interviewed Linda Manz.
Contact me here for inquiries and commissions.