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Apparently, E.L. Doctorow once taught a course that only had one book on the syllabus. The class read the one book and decided from there what the next book should be. If it was Jane Eyre, somebody might then suggest The Wide Sargasso Sea, which was a prequel and written by another writer at a…

Up to the age of four, as my mother testified, I told only the truth, but after that I must have come to my senses – Marina Tsvetaeva I made an Easter quiche yesterday, and as I worked I thought about Marina Tsvetaeva, what I could tell of her that couldn’t be found in Wikipedia….

Gatekeeper, seasons wait for your nod. / Gatekeeper, you held your breath, /made the summer go on and on.—Feist Here’s a confession, Ploughshares readers: I’m a musical dinosaur. I have an unabashed love for Green Day and Counting Crows, and I’ve listened to Wu Tang Clan’s 36 Chambers almost weekly for eight years. If pressed,…

You can get into Half Moon pose in any number of ways, but here’s the sequence I like best: 1. From down dog, lift your right leg, inhale. 2. Step the leg between your hands into a low lunge, exhale. 3. Rise up into Warrior I, inhale. 4. Windmill open into Warrior II, exhale. 5….

When I was writing Track Conditions, a memoir about my mostly drunken experience as a groom to Swale, the 1984 Kentucky Derby winner, a strange thing happened to my body—it went back to the way it looked during the time the book was written about. Through diet and exercise (two practices which had been foreign…

As the recent VIDA graphs all too clearly indicate, there’s a wide disparity between the number of men and the number of women published in well-known literary journals. One explanation for the lack of women’s voices in literature may be that so many of us tend to our careers in the small gaps between making…

Editors aren’t what they used to be. I admit that I don’t have much authority to say so: I’m young(ish), my editorial “career” spans a whopping four years, and I didn’t grow up with a quill-pen in the days before simultaneous submissions, hand-delivering my poems in the snow, up-hill both ways. Still, it seems obvious…

When asked about the experience of improvising Two Thousand Year Old Man with Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner famously said, “I always tried for something that would force him to go into a panic—because a brilliant mind in panic is a wonderful thing to see.” Panic (or, to use less panic-inducing terms: fear, uncertainty, garden-variety doubt)…