As someone who has outlined two novels, and then written two totally different books than the ones I’d so carefully plotted, I can testify that simply writing down the journey of characters from point a to point b is not the same thing as storytelling—just as tossing the ingredients for a soup into a pot…
Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, & Me Ellen Forney Gotham Books, November 2012 241 pages $20.00 Genre: Graphic Memoir Concerning: Cartoonist Ellen Forney’s confrontation with her bipolar disorder diagnosis And: what it means for her identity as an artist And: what it means for her creativity and her livelihood Compelling questions explored: “How could I keep…
I hadn’t really thought that much about it until a friend—a non-writer friend, for what that might be worth, a musician—pointed it out. I was wrapping up my first year as a PhD student and had invited some folks over for drinks. This friend glanced down at some of the books laying around my sparsely…
As fiction’s equivalent of messy chemistry experiments, thought experiments play with ideas until they explode. Most commonly found in—you’ve guessed it—speculative and science fiction, thought experiments explore imaginative possibilities in situations unconstrained by reality. Whole civilizations can rise and fall within a novel while an experiment simmers in the background; characters play out their individual…
Welcome to the first ever Ploughshares Fantasy Blog Draft! If you missed our manifesto post, be sure to read it so you understand the rules of the “game.” Today we’ll be introducing our teams, the draft order, and the bracket for the competition. So without further ado, here are our competitors!
The Books We Teach series will feature primary, secondary, and post-secondary educators and their thoughts about literature in the face of an evolving classroom. Posts will highlight literary innovations in teaching, contemporary literature’s place in pedagogy, and the books that writers teach. In the spirit of educational dynamism, we encourage readers to contribute their thoughts…
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 writing and music. For thousands of years…
Bless her heart. That’s what people say in my southern neck of the woods to be half genuine, half patronizing. And that’s exactly what I want to say about Blanche Ebbutt, author of Don’ts for Husbands and Don’ts for Wives, pocket-sized self-help books originally published in England in 1913. It was the year before everything…
As a recent transplant to New York from Arizona, I’ve been a little obsessed with place lately—about what the landscapes of home show us when we live inside them versus when we’re removed, what happens when we start seeing our surroundings as more than just background noise—so I was delighted to come across Laurie Ann…
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