Welcome to the new Ploughshares website! For answers to commonly asked questions, read here.
I have a writer friend who is a punk, a recovering anarchist, a staunch Zapatista supporter. He plays bass in a punk band, writes poetry in the afternoons. He said to me one time: Why is it that American writers are the only artists in the world dying to sell out?
It’s the time-in-a-place, couldn’t-have-happened-any-other-way moments we keep close like the pillars of our personal pantheons that create lives out of impulsive decisions, unfortunate situations, and well-timed placement. It’s the first times that are finales to culminated forces – sometimes well planned, sometimes purely by chance – and the beginnings of incidences serendipitous. It’s the inspired inspiring, the lives of the lost losing themselves to be found, the findings aligning for the world to read, watch, listen.
On October 26, South African author J.M. Coetzee’s novel Waiting for the Barbarians is published. The unnamed narrator, an imperial magistrate stationed in a colonial settlement on the outskirts of the unspecified “Empire,” enjoys the languorous ease of his privileged position.
Last week, Elon Musk shared SpaceX’s vision to put humans on Mars and eventually start a colony. Colonizing Mars is an appealing idea, especially among those, such as Stephen Hawking, who believe our future as a species relies on our ability to become interplanetary. In science fiction, off-Earth colonies often have disheartening results.
Lately, I’ve been particularly intrigued by the work of Jordan Kantor. His work has prompted me to revisit how I have been formulating the Venn diagram of poetry and painting. Kantor is an artist who gets many things right.
The writers discussed the many ways in which fiction can respond to fiction. Of particular note was the impetus for using a particular source text—what inspired the response—and the extent to which a retelling can or should stand on its own without an intimate knowledge of the original.
Paul Ruffin had me at the title. It wasn’t the spectacle of the hog-killing I was drawn to so much as the way he undercuts the brutality to focus our attention on the weather. I liked the juxtaposition, the audacity of deflecting our attention from the sensational to the mundane.
Though it asks the questions, Here I Am is not here to answer inquiries, eschewing easy answers or clean endings. It may not be a manual for life, but it is a way of locating oneself in the world.
In an earlier post, I wrote about how food writers grapple with the challenge of describing taste and smell. There are many more aspects to the language used to describe food. Stanford University linguist Dan Jurafsky has written a fascinating study, The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu, covering many of these aspects.
No products in the cart.