In our Roundups segment, we’re looking back at all the great posts since the blog started in 2009. We explore posts from our archives as well as other top literary magazines and websites, centered on a certain theme to help you jump-start your week.
From Roald Dalh to Shel Silverstein, Ploughshares bloggers have explored children’s books and what we can learn from them about writing.
Down the Rabbit Hole Juan Pablo Villalobos FSG Originals, October 2012 96 pages $12.00 When a writer makes a child the narrator of literary fiction, a certain amount of pretension has to be involved. After all, in order to handle the existential and symbolic weight of the story, the child will need to be unusually…
Although I’m not religious, there are days when I wish I could teleport my writing students back for just a few sessions of my childhood religious-study classes. Surely, those teachers who once schooled me in old-fashioned text learning didn’t think they were training me to be a fiction writer. But they did exactly that—for which…
One of my best students was a plagiarizer. I felt stupid, when I found out—I had known her for two years, and I had worked with her intensively as her thesis adviser, for months. And I wasn’t the one who caught her, either, which was embarrassing because the poets and poems she plagiarized were ones…
