Off the Rails Quarterly

Round four of our free Ploughshares contest! This week, comment to win a copy of our Spring 1987 issue, guest edited by Derek Walcott and featuring work by Rita Dove, Jorie Graham, Seamus Heaney, and many more. For those of you that don’t know the drill: comment in our response section below telling us why…

First, a confession: I’m lousy at prioritizing fiction writing. I let everything else in my life take precedence. I even let other writing take precedence—articles, book reviews, syllabi, comments on student work, status updates, replies to all. And yet, good things have happened to the fiction I’ve written. I know a lot about fiction and…

I sometimes take comfort in categorizations. The world can always be divided into two populations, it can be obnoxiously insisted: those who send thank-you notes and those who don’t, those who have seen American Idol and those who haven’t…those who get to class on time and those who can’t, for some reason, and on and…