Editor’s Note
My beloved grandmother, who just turned 90, used to bring me a stack of books every summer and say, “Whenever I want to go somewhere, I just open a book.” This is why I love the work in this issue of Ploughshares—it opens doors into new and deep explorations of internal and external worlds. It takes me places I’ve never been.
These stories and essays are, like the Platz in Fortunato Salazar’s story “The Bet I Won,” “site[s] of remembrance, [affirmations] of historical continuity.” In longform writing, as a reader, I can find shelter, or surrender to memory and grief; I can move, like so many characters in this issue, into a new era of selfhood—evolved, meditative, and captivated by the beauty of great writing. As Salazar writes, “there is beauty in the euphoria that resonates within ourselves on the rare occasions when we are privileged to witness the silence and stillness of the world…” As a poet, I am invested in how moments of silence and long periods of stillness can bear testimony and reject hegemonic structures of power.
When presented with the opportunity to serve as the fourth-ever Editor-in-chief of Ploughshares, I knew an enormous, rare, and important task lay at hand. I thought of those who came before me: my grandmother, who instilled in me a love of literature; the writers and poets who have shaped my work and scholarship; the editors who have made this journal one so many readers and writers hold in esteem. When DeWitt Henry and Peter O’Malley conceived of Ploughshares in 1971 at the Plough and Stars, an Irish pub in Cambridge, a new Boston literary mainstay was born. I hold this legacy close as I envision a new chapter for Ploughshares. At a time when the arts are vulnerable, I consider it my duty to work diligently and creatively for writers whose stories, essays, and poems resist myopia and bestow a freshness of voice and vision on their readers.
Ladette Randolph, who served as Editor-in-chief for seventeen years, spearheaded our annual longform issue and carefully curated the issue you hold in your hands now. Cover to cover, the writing in this issue surprises, challenges, and delights, exploring themes of evolving selves, of family—both inherited and adopted—of loss, remembrance, and justified defiance. It is a pleasure and privilege to introduce this great writing to you in my first issue as Editor.
To evoke a traditional Irish sláinte: a bird never flew on one wing. Here’s to the ones who came before us, and to many more years of great literature.
