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Merrill Joan Gerber has been writing fiction, essays, and memoirs—and getting her work published regularly—for well over half a century. I was curious about her long writing life and her various routes to publication, and she generously shared some honest writerly truths with me.
Susan K. Perry: What was your impetus to publish this latest book of yours, a compilation of past stories?
Merrill Joan Gerber: After I had published my book of essays, Revelation at the Food Bank, in 2023, my publisher himself, Jacob Smullyan, suggested that now might be a good time to gather together a collection of my best short stories.
For this newest book, Some Should Know This Story: Selected Stories, I chose 25 from my 127 published stories with the intention to express the arc of a writer’s life from the 1960s to the present. It’s nice to have these old friends, my stories, together between covers.
Most of those in the new book had been published in earlier collections and are now out of print. The 42 stories that I sold to Redbook over the years are represented by two stories in this new book: “A Daughter of my Own” was the first story I wrote at Stanford as a Wallace Stegner fiction fellow in 1962, and the second one, “Good-bye, Arny Goldstone” was written 20 years later in 1982 when I was a visitor at Yaddo Writer’s Colony.
SKP: Like you, a lot of writers have turned to smaller, indie presses. How did you find yours?
MJG: I discovered Sagging Meniscus Press, which describes itself as a press that “publishes nonconformist, esthetically self-determined literature—books that want to be themselves,” when a friend of mine published a book with them. The head of the press is a creative, brilliant man who runs his press from his home in New Jersey.
Saying Goodbye to One’s Archive
SKP: How did it feel after you completed the vast task of donating your lifetime of writing-related materials to Yale Beinecke Rare Books Library?
MJG: I have never thrown away a piece of paper in my life. We moved into our home in 1968 and 50 years later it appeared as if I would have to make some decisions about my stuff. When it seemed that Yale was interested, I had to consider these absolute realities. My age, for example. I must let my papers go or let them eventually be burned in a giant bonfire.
I offered the archivist access to my file cabinets which contained folders of all my childhood writings, all my short stories, all my essays, all my memoirs, and all the novels I’d written. I also had folders of years-long correspondences with many writers, such as Cynthia Ozick, Robert Stone, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Norma Klein, and teachers Andrew Lytle and Wallace Stegner.
I packed up more than 100 banker boxes where they would be kept safely (till the end of time?) and sent them off to Yale. Now and then I badly miss some item I included (like my high school yearbook) and I feel sad. But I did what was true to my heart.
How to Persist
SKP: Merrill, you’ve suffered from depression at various times. You’ve even written that you were considering not writing anymore. Yet you’ve always returned to writing. How do you explain it?
MGJ: When I wrote that I “must give up writing,” I was making a heartfelt and bitter complaint as opposed to putting a final stamp on the certainty that I would never write again. I secretly wished that inspiration might overcome lethargy and hope might overcome despair.
I also knew that I didn’t know another way to live. Like my grandfather, Morris Sorblum, who was a tailor all his life and what mattered to him every day was sitting down at his sewing machine with a piece of cloth and his needles and thread, I had to sit down at my typewriter each day with my sheet of typing paper, my pencil, and my round rubber eraser. We knew what to do and had to do it.
