Welcome to the new Ploughshares website! For answers to commonly asked questions, read here.
Some writers that I know are at times so unsure of whether a story is theirs to tell that they will shelve a project for years at a time, waiting for some kind of permission to be granted, or for forgiveness, or for a death. But sometimes those things come in the wrong order.
My Twitter timeline is big on one meme these days: me then, me now. Sometimes it’s “me in 2006, me in 2016,” but mostly it’s “me at the beginning of 2016, me at the end.”
British mystery writer Agatha Christie follows the news of the ordeal with interest, using the circumstance for her classic novel, Murder on the Orient Express, first published in the U.K. on January 1, 1934.
If Julia Child and Avis deVoto were here today, they’d be great Facebook friends. Julia and Avis bonded over food—buying it, cooking it and eating it. But since they were without technology, they wrote letters, which Joan Reardon collected into a book titled As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto.
I could spin many narratives for why I wanted this series. Instead I’ll be honest with you: it was mostly for my own sanity. Maybe you’ve got a better handle on this than I do, but my way of engaging with our daily media does not feel particularly healthy, or intentional, or useful.
From the increase in hate crimes in public libraries to Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, here are last week’s biggest literary headlines: In recent weeks, public libraries have seen a rise in hate crimes. Reported incidents include the defacement of books about Islam with racist language and imagery, anti-Semitic graffiti, and the attempted removal of…
I originally met Rhonda Douglas back in 1992, when we took the same creative writing (poetry) workshop at the University of Ottawa, conducted by Ottawa writer Mark Frutkin.
The Canadian literary scene has been tumultuous lately, following Stephen Galloway’s dismissal from UBC following allegations of sexual assault.
Like many of Alice Munro’s stories, her Christmas stories are occupied with work and explore the subtleties of how work defines identity. Of the three stories I’ll discuss, “The Turkey Season” (1980) is the most explicitly about Christmas, ending with a snowy tableau on Christmas Eve.
No products in the cart.