CNF: Private School
by Meg Eden
In eighth grade, Kevin Hannigan pointed at each person in the class and said, “May you be anathema!” We weren’t allowed damn and shit and hell, but none of the teachers complained about his application of systematic theology in conversation. At lunch, he’d ask to sit with the teachers, but even they found better things to do, their excuses thin and wafer-like. The rest of us learned how to look out the window when he asked us questions, an art I never fully mastered. The teachers would always pair me up with him, thinking I was kinder than the rest. But I wasn’t. I was only quieter. I don’t want to say it was because he was Catholic in a Protestant school—it wasn’t. As much as Anna argued for Calvinism at recess, the rest of us were just trying to pass. We wanted to survive. A year later, half of us went to public schools, where our best friends damned us on the bus and on the way to class, and we were supposed to be the light that shined without earthly reason, without reward.
Meg Eden teaches creative writing at colleges and writing centers. She is the author of the 2021 Towson Prize for Literature winning poetry collection “Drowning in the Floating World” and children’s novels including a 2024 ALA Schneider Family Book Award Honor “Good Different,” and the forthcoming “The Girl in the Wall” (Scholastic, 2025). Find her online at megedenbooks.com.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Private School”? I start writing in what I know, mining my memories and experiences. I think as someone who believes in heaven and hell, the transition from private school to public school came as a particular shock in how casually we use phrases like damn in American culture. But as I mined my memories, I remembered a kid who sort of got around this by using anathema instead. So these worlds that I thought were so different were maybe not as different as I thought. There’s an ironic humor to this, but also it struck me with a challenge. Thinking about the way scripture challenges believers to be “lights” in the world, not conforming but transforming the world around us by choosing what is good, writing this poem made me wonder: am I really living a good different kind of life? Am I choosing radical love and joy, or am I choosing to imitate and be safe? by Meg Eden When I was in high school, my mother offered to sew curtains for my windows. Don’t you worry that some man will see you change? We lived so far from the road, I didn’t worry—I could’ve danced naked on the front lawn. I think of Bathsheba, bathing in the dimming evening light. She’d just finished her menses—maybe she was tired of being deemed unclean, of unclean meaning hidden away, wanted some fresh air. In my bathroom, the smell of my own blood lingers sticky-sweet like fruit rotting in heat. Maybe she bathed, craving romance. Maybe she missed her husband. Maybe she despised him. Maybe sleeping with the king was the fulfilment of a long-kept secret dream. Maybe it was her greatest nightmare realized. Did her mother also tell her to stay away from open windows? Did she, like me, perceive the thrill—the fear—of being seen so fully? Or because this was war-time, did she not worry about men being around (let alone alive) to look? Or did she not think much about men, one way or the other? Meg Eden’s work is published or forthcoming in magazines including Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, Crab Orchard Review, RHINO and CV2. She teaches creative writing at Anne Arundel Community College. She is the author of five poetry chapbooks, the novel Post-High School Reality Quest (2017), and the forthcoming poetry collection Drowning in the Floating World (2020). She runs the Magfest MAGES Library blog, which posts accessible academic articles about video games. Find her online at www.megedenbooks.com or on Twitter at @ConfusedNarwhal. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “ Bathsheba”? I’ve always been fascinated by the biblical character Bathsheba. We never hear her side of the story. When I was younger, I blamed her for her bath. I thought, what was she doing bathing on a roof? Exhibitionist much? But as I’ve become older, I’ve realized how easily I’ve fallen into victim blaming thought patterns, as if this somehow protects myself from being harmed (a topic I could write a whole series of poems on!). As I started to interrogate my own thinking, I began to see Bathsheba’s story in a much more complex and relatable way. I saw myself in her. Perhaps one of the reasons we don’t hear more about Bathsheba is because this isn’t a story about modesty. It’s a story about David’s sin, and how striving after his sin upended countless lives and modeled sinful patterns for generations to come. It’s not here to chastise Bathsheba for her bath; it’s here to condemn David. oh God of open windows, Meg Eden has been published in various magazines and is the recipient of the 2012 Henrietta Spiegel Creative Writing Award. She was a reader for the Delmarva Review. Her collections include “Your Son” (The Florence Kahn Memorial Award) and “Rotary Phones and Facebook” (Dancing Girl Press). Check out her work at: http://artemisagain.wordpress.com/ What was the origin of this poem? The origin of this poem is from the phenomenon “haikyo”. This is the Japanese word for ruins, used for abandoned buildings and their exploration. This piece was inspired by the haikyo of the Niigata Russian Village (Google it!). I love haikyo as it is a reminder that nothing physical and of the world lasts. To see a world covered in kutzu vines, decaying into the earth only to be forgotten raises in me many spiritual questions, and creates in itself an odd kind of psalm to a creator of an earth that can reclaim itself, despite our peculiar and often foolish constructions.Bathsheba
Looking at an Abandoned Russian Themepark in Niigata, Japan
by Meg Eden
God of new ruins,
God of all-things-green,
God of nine-year-old-
festering-dog-food.
God of Russian peasant
dancer women, God of many
phones, God of outdated
computers, God of molded
woolly mammoth models,
God of broken matryoshka dolls,
who even clothes the sparrow.
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.
Matter Press is now offering private flash fiction workshops and critiques of flash fiction collections here.
Submissions
Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again September 15, 2025. Submit here.
Upcoming
05/04 • Leath Tonino
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