Guest post by Fan Wu We’re all familiar with Anna Karenina’s famous opening: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” It applies to authorship, too. All unpublished writers are alike–wanting to be published; each published writer is unhappy in his or her own way. Before I was published…
Guest post by Megan Mayhew Bergman “You can’t go […] back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time — back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.” – Thomas Wolfe In her introduction…
Guest post by Greg Schutz In “Gershwin’s Second Prelude,” the first story in Charles Baxter‘s first book, the 1984 collection Harmony of the World, the elderly piano instructor Madame Gutowski leans back to admonish Kate, her pupil. “Now listen,” she says. “You children think you are so new with your misery, with your morphia. Pain…
Guest post by Fan Wu Larry, a retired history professor and a friend, emailed me recently to recommend a book he was reading. “It’s a must-read. I’ll lend it to you after I finish it,” he wrote. Fifteen minutes later, he emailed again. “Sorry, cannot lend it. I forgot that I got the book from…
Guest post by Megan Mayhew Bergman Donald Hall is a thing of beauty. I’ve had the pleasure of hearing him speak–seeing him speak–twice at Bennington. The second was in June 2009–six weeks after my first child was born, a week after attending my beloved mother-in-law, Anna’s, memorial service, and days after leaving my family in…
Guest post by Aimee Nezhukumatathil And so we have come to the end of summer, Dear Reader. As Fall starts a slow creep here through Western New York, my stint as a blogger for Ploughshares is at its end. I’m so grateful you’ve checked in on me here from time to time here at…
Guest post by Aimee Nezhukumatathil Dear Reader, As I type this, I can see that the usually quiet streets of my small town are now full and crowded by trucks with mattresses tied to the roofs, the various construction vehicles that peppered campus are slowly disappearing, and our big-box store is filled with harried…
Guest post by Aimee Nezhukumatathil Dear Reader, I am covered in ice and snow for most of the year. But summers here in Western New York mean a bevy of fresh fruit from any of the local cherry orchards, blueberry fields, or strawberry patches. I live within five miles from several farms that allow…
Guest post by Bridget Lowe I still remember the first blog I ever saw–it must have been 2000 or so, and my friend Adam had created a place online for his hilarious interpretations of interracial buddy films of the 1980s and ’90s. I was completely enthralled and mystified by this external, widely accessible version of…
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