In the Plan B essay series, writers discuss their contingency plans, extraliterary passions, and the roads not traveled. The way my husband tells the story, I slipped on the ice, got a concussion, and when I woke up, said, “I want to learn to play the accordion.” It is true that, after a concussion,…
According to my diary, it was on May 29, 1998, that I received an invitation to the Séance Book Club. The letter from a Mrs. Lisette Visser read in part, “We would appreciate your being with us on eight consecutive evenings, during which we will summon the characters from your novel, The Museum Guard, and…
As you head south and east, with your back to the sea, the city of Alvito draws you uphill along ever-smaller roads, tightening spirals and switchbacks that soon have you confused over what’s the approach and what the close-clustered town itself. Around just which curb-hugging rise and turn did you finally arrive? Nothing so defines…
Truth lies within a little and certain compass. –Viscount Bolingbroke It took my Aunt Toby twenty years to profit enough from fictohistoriographia to give up teaching, to release the two of us from New York, to realize her dream to buy a house on Lake Piscataqua in New England. But at last, the year…
The Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction Ploughshares is pleased to present Elise Juska with the third annual Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction for her short story, “Transfer Station,” which appeared in the Spring 2013 issue of Ploughshares, guest-edited by Major Jackson. The $1,000 award, given by acclaimed writer and Ploughshares advisory editor Alice Hoffman, honors…
File 2011/Electronic Copy of Revenant Composition, “The Ghost Writer,” in Word DOCX (Former Sex: Female; Deceased: circa 2011) The word ghost derives from the Anglo-Saxon gast, breath or spirit. So to “give up the ghost” is to die. At the same time, in being relinquished by the body, the ghost escapes the confines of mortality:…
In the Plan B essay series, writers discuss their contingency plans, extraliterary passions, and the roads not traveled. As a student in Tokyo in the 1980s I would often go to the local Shinto shrine just to listen to the quiet. Small and undistinguished, a gap between concrete commercial buildings, the shrine was…
This practical kid, bornCapricorn, actuary of the stars, he’s planning my death,sure of the thermodynamic heaven he’s invented. Because energymust go somewhere in this system, in his I’ll be repurposed as a tree.And this comforts me, as no discount coupons for paradise ever could.Finally fitting, I’ll meet my zero as the absolute, container of soot…
O tulip, tulip, you bloom all day and later sway a deep-waisted limbo above the dinner table, waiting for a coin to drop into your well,for the stars to pin your stem to their lapel. Soon, on ocean winds, dawn cries its devotion, our world entranced once more into being.Let go your sumptuous rage, darling.All…
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