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Thanks to a suggestion from a friend, I’ve been reading a lot of Homi K. Bhabha’s work on Postcolonialism and communicative politics. I’m not really built for critical theory, so I started with Bhabha’s best-known text, The Location of Culture. The fundamental tenet of the book (and this is a very loose interpretation): in a…

Like anyone, I have to contend with my own stupidity all the time—forgetting things, ignoring essentials, not listening—but one of my latest and most grossly idiotic moves was waiting until 2010 to read Joel Brouwer. That’s too kind, actually: I didn’t wait, it wasn’t like I’d seen his stuff and ignored it before, I’d just…

In “Dr. Deneau’s Punishment,” one of eleven excellent short stories in Lori Ostlund’s Flannery O’Connor award-winning collection The Bigness of the World, the title character despairs over the current trend in American schools to reward students for their mediocrity.  Under the new regime of the militantly optimistic, the red pen is suspect, likewise the honest…

Our third guest blogger, Adrian Matejka, is a poet whose poem “Eighty-Eight Days in My Veins” appears in our Winter 2010-11 issue edited by Terrance Hayes.  Adrian will post on Fridays through April. Paul Hegarty said, “Noise is a system of judgments.” He was talking about the qualitative distinctions we make about music, but it…

Weston Cutter, our second guest blogger, will post on Wednesdays through April.  Weston is a poet whose poem “The Invention of Color vs. The Song of EA” appears in our Winter 2010-11 issue edited by Terrance Hayes. Ed Skoog’s freakishly excellent debut Mister Skylight was one of 2009’s books which desocked me in pretty phenomenal…

This week we welcome three new Get Behind the Plough bloggers to Ploughshares. The first is fiction writer Christine Sneed, whose story “The Prettiest Girls” appears in our Winter 2010-11 issue edited by Terrance Hayes. Christine will post on Mondays through April. Guest post by Christine Sneed The harsh truth is this: Sometimes it’s time…

The best way to write is hoeing corn or chopping wood or milking cows or walking the roads. The boots I’ve worn out writing books! – Elliott Merrick   Guest post by Megan Mayhew Bergman   The last light falls across my backyard. The ground is covered in a foot and a half of snow,…

Guest post by Fan Wu I was awakened at 3:36 a.m. by my two-year-old daughter’s crying. I went to her room and lay down beside her, as I always do when she wakes up in the middle of the night. Half an hour later she fell sleep, while I was wide awake. I thought about…

Guest post by Greg Schutz “Writing a novel,” E.L. Doctorow has observed, “is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” For me, at least, the same could be said about writing short stories. Perhaps my headlights just don’t…