At AWP 2013 in Boston, author Melanie Rae Thon read the following during the panel “The Literary Legacy of Andre Dubus.” Ploughshares founding editor DeWitt Henry attended the panel, and thought the piece was so beautiful that, with Melanie’s permission, we are reproducing it here. —Andrew Ladd, blog editor In the introduction to Fires in the…
Welcome to Round 2 of the Ploughshares Fantasy Blog Draft! As far as I, your humble commissioner, am concerned, this is when the draft really begins. The chosen editors have been shuffled into their imaginary Fantasy Blog Team locker rooms, behind the stage of Radio City Music Hall; the unselected editors like Thomas Higginson have…
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, centered on a certain theme to help you jump-start your week. This week we have posts on literary hoaxes. We promise this post contains no hoaxes. It’s…
In my last post I discussed the frequent dissimilarity between the actual American suburbs and their depictions in most novels we tend to think of as “suburban.” This is not to say, though, that the reality of contemporary suburban life remains unaddressed in today’s fiction. Here I’d like to suggest that over the course of…
SacrilegionL. Lamar WilsonCarolina Wren Press, February 2013$17.9579 pages Dear Dr. Poetry, I don’t expect you to understand me, because no one does. My sorrow is darker than a thousand layers of guyliner. I just wanted you, as the foremost expert on poetry, to confirm my isolation—the way my own poetry does. —Empty Malaise of Towering…
Every March my eyes turn south toward spring training. The sunburned announcers report from director’s chairs on games that don’t count. The players work on their autographs and perfect their sunflower seed spits. Teenagers called up from the lowercase “a” team —hardly more than little leaguers—pitch, bat, and field, hanging crooked numbers or laying goose…
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! Well, my plan was to do a prompt a day since the last post, ten minutes a pop. That did not happen; life was a little busier…
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…
Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler, a 2008 poetry collection inspired by Hurricane Katrina, reads like a broken heart. It is open and honest and raw. The voices of those who survived Katrina, and those who did not, are both unspeakably sad and incredulous. “Louisiana,” says one nursing home resident in the poem “34,” “goddamn. You lied to…
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