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Welcome to another fiction writer, Carol Keeley, who will post every Friday. As always, thanks for reading, and we welcome any and all comments these guest blogs provoke. Guest post by Carol Keeley Young women of a certain temperament tend to have a Frida Kahlo period. Mine bloomed post-Plath, pre-Rilke. I was bewitched by the…

Meet our second new blogger from the Spring 2010 issue: Bridget Lowe. She recently became a “Discovery”/Boston Review winner, and has poetry you can read online in Boston Review and Nth Position. Guest post by Bridget Lowe I recently stumbled upon a used copy of Samuel Pepys’ Penny Merriments, Being a Collection of Chapbooks, full…

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…