As the MFA vs. NYC book launches, as Emily Gould’s essay from said book makes the rounds, and as the bookternet explodes over the latest publishing controversy, I can’t help but be bored by the whole school vs. experience argument. I mean, forget all that. We’ve been arguing that one to death for eons. What…
The ‘Writers and Their Pets’ series began with my own desire to celebrate my dog Sally, and since then I have also invited other writers to share with the rest of us the details of their lives with beloved pets. Today, please enjoy this essay by Nancy Welch. You can also submit your own essay to the series. Read…
Justin Kaplan, award-winning biographer, editor, and friend of Ploughshares, passed away on March 2 at the age of 88. Kaplan guest edited the 1984 issue of Ploughshares with his wife Anne Bernays. In their introduction to this issue, Kaplan and Bernays wrote “More and more, biography and memoir writing has come to be considered, by…
Because I love transparency and being generally helpful to writers, or because I am a masochist, I let writers query me by Twitter. It says in my bio that if you can squeeze your pitch into three tweets I’ll respond. I’ll admit I have a few stock responses, but on probably every tenth pitch, I…
It’s not polite to eavesdrop. But how many gold nuggets of dialogue have you overheard in your life? I always feel at a loss when I don’t have a notebook and pen in my purse to jot down ideas and strangers’ intriguing utterances. Recently, in a restaurant in Seattle, I heard a man say to…
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Until thirteen unwelcome dwarves and a wizard came and took him away on an equally unwelcome adventure.
Sonnet XVIII, William Shakespeare
Okay Writers. Confession: my last couple months disappeared in helpless Waiting: to hear from an interested publisher, to hear about grant funds, to get word on research, jobs, schools, where the hell I’ll be living in six months… It’s excruciating. And I’m not alone. Thousands of you are sending out resumes, submitting manuscripts, obsessively checking gradcafe.com, hearing…
People of the Book is an interview series gathering those engaged with books, broadly defined. As participants answer the same set of questions, their varied responses chart an informal ethnography of the book, highlighting its rich history as a mutable medium and anticipating its potential future. This week brings the conversation to Mara Mills, a professor…
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