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Elizabeth Strout’s had quite a year. Her third work of fiction, Olive Kitteridge, still sits on the paperback bestseller list. Last April, she earned the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. This Thursday, she headlines the Ploughshares Reading Series, where she will read one of Olive’s stories (“I often make that decision when I arrive in town”),…

Fresh from the AWP conference in Denver, we are back to the blog. This week, we welcome our new Get Behind the Plough bloggers, chosen from the pages of the Spring 2010 Ploughshares. Our Winter 2009-10 contributors were all poets, so we’re glad to add fiction voices to the mix this go-around. Starting this week,…

Guest post by James Arthur Between the ages of 18 and 24, I did consider myself to be a writer, though I wouldn’t have known whether to call myself a poet, novelist, screenwriter, literary critic, or playwright, and I wrote almost nothing. My occasional literary effort fizzled out after a page or two. To my…

Guest post by James Arthur Somehow I never got around to taking my driver’s test. I make various excuses for not having a license (I grew up in a city with a subway, I’m doing my part for the environment, I have bad eyesight, cars are expensive, gas is expensive, etc.), but the truth is,…

  Guest post by Alicia Jo Rabins One of the fantastic things about the Torah as a literary work is how it combines impossibly broad swaths of narrative (the world is created, a flood destroys it, etc.) with precise details (Rachel, having stolen her father’s idols and hidden them in a camel saddle, sits on…

Guest post by Peter B. Hyland In 1877, Joseph Ray, M.D.–“late professor in Woodward College”–published Ray’s New Practical Arithmetic. I own a copy for some reason, part of a small collection of nineteenth-century books that my father-in-law gave me, containing everything from an abridged version of Livingstone and Stanley to The Early Poems of John…

Guest post by James Arthur During the last few years I’ve been lucky enough to have some opportunities to travel, and not surprisingly, the places I’ve visited have begun showing up in my poems. In fact, these days when I sit down to write, I usually begin by flipping through my journals, which are full…

  Guest post by Alicia Jo Rabins There’s nothing like those years when you don’t yet have what you are working for. There’s a lot of freedom because there’s so much possibility. You need friends who are working for something, too…Everything starts with an all-night conversation. Find a spiritual twin to walk the city streets…

Guest post by Peter B. Hyland In book five of The Odyssey, the sea goddess Ino comes to the aid of a storm-tossed Odysseus. She emerges from the waves and loans him her veil, a talisman that ensures he will arrive in one piece on the island of Scheria, his last stop before returning home…