I came early in the evening to lower Manhattan, more than an hour before the showcase reading that night at Poets House. I came to browse the showcase shelves and to meet a friend and share a bit of supper near the Hudson. I came early to see familiar faces and to be sure of…
I’m not usually one to pick on my own, but for illustrative purposes only there’s a line to which I’d like to draw your attention from Anne Gray Fischer’s most recent “Women In Trouble” column: The stakes are perhaps too low in this quiet novel for it to qualify as a “saga.” Ah, yes, the…
My friends and colleagues Darcey Steinke and Douglas A. Martin and I all got together one afternoon during a break from the Goddard College MFA low-residency program where we all teach to talk about the MFA degree in general, what we feel is different about Goddard and how teaching one-on-one informs us as writers and teachers. Our first and longer video,…
What fascinates me most about Qiu Jin is the near absence of her work in America, especially considering our love of a rebel and a martyr. Sure, if you Google her name, several sites will offer a version of the same information: Qiu Jin lived from 1875 to 1907. Her family was wealthy, she had…
Let’s Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir Jenny Lawson Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam, April 2012 336 pages $25.95 From humble beginnings (blogginnings?), Jenny “The Bloggess” Lawson has built a new media empire writing for mommy blogs, reviewing porn in her SEXIS column, and tweeting her way into a feud with William Shatner (among other…
This will be my last post for Ploughshares on small presses. It’s been fun and I’ve learned a lot in the process myself. I thought this would be a great opportunity to post about other small presses that readers have suggested. Since I’m an egalitarian type, I always wonder, who am I to make such…
1. How do your essay ideas typically come to you? Lia Purpura: Let me reroute the notion of “typical” here. Single words, images, scents, incongruities, awe, toothache—all of these offer possibilities, though the moment of launch is always, at heart, mysterious. Knowing what starts you up shouldn’t in any way suggest that you then go about…
Post by guest-blogger Michael Klein. My friends and colleagues Darcey Steinke and Douglas A. Martin and I all got together one afternoon during a break from the Goddard College MFA low-residency program where we all teach to talk about the MFA degree in general, what we feel is different about Goddard and how teaching one-on-one…
The Literary Boroughs series will explore little-known and well-known literary communities across the country and world and show that while literary culture can exist online without regard to geographic location, it also continues to thrive locally. Posts are by no means exhaustive and we encourage our readers to contribute in the comment section. The series will run on our blog…
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