People of the Book is an interview series gathering those engaged with books, broadly defined. As participants answer the same set of questions, their varied responses chart an informal ethnography of the book, highlighting its rich history as a mutable medium and anticipating its potential future. This week brings the conversation to Erika Boeckeler, assistant professor…
For Those About To Write (We Salute You) will present a writing exercise to the Ploughshares community every few weeks. We heartily encourage everyone reading to take part! Holy smokes, pals, we’ve almost been at this for a year now! YES! How’d we all do gettin’ small? I’ve always loved and really appreciated short prose, so…
I was only a few pages in when I understood I wouldn’t be finishing The Outdoor Girls In a Motorcar, a 1913 book from a series called, appropriately, The Outdoor Girls. I’ve already written about not finishing good books, and that wasn’t the issue this time. In fact, it was quite the opposite. The whole…
Okay writers. You may be secretly planning to tread water until the New Year, at which point you’ll of course begin tackling your epic plans for Writerly Greatness.2014 is my year, you scrawl in your Moleskine. Now where is my pie? But there are all kinds of reasons to write what you can RIGHT NOW. So…
In our Roundups segment, we’re looking back at all the great posts since the blog started in 2009. We explore posts from our archives as well as other top literary magazines and websites, centered on a certain theme to help you jump-start your week. Food and family are the most common holiday traditions. For those of us celebrating, it’s…
John Henry Fleming’s forthcoming story collection, Songs for the Deaf, is full of haunted characters: haunted by the deaths of loved ones, memories of lovers, knowledge of truth. The range of characters—aliens, bigfoot look-alikes, cloud readers, floating girls—lends itself to satire, creating a new mythology out of crises of faith. Most importantly, though, these stories…
I don’t know about you, but when I write my rough drafts, I’m staggering around in the dark. There are plot holes, dropped story lines, and unanswered questions—all the good, gnarly stuff that goes into the early part of the writing process. The key for us writers is—when the time is right—to find the answers…
One of the perks of working in academia is ordering desk copies of books. While more often than not these things are tedious tomes that would put me to sleep, never mind my students, sometimes I happen upon gems, such as The Twentieth-Novel: An Introduction by R.B. Kershner. I’ll admit I don’t remember ordering this…
Like Whitman, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” And in my case, the multitudes are on Facebook. I have eight different profiles to my name—or rather, not to my name. The characters in my harem—born of inside jokes, fictional stories, collaborative projects, and, of course, procrastination—are each their own unique and special flower, complete with birthdays, profile…
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