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  • About Nick Flynn

    Asking two memoir writers to have a conversation, as Ploughshares’ editor did when she suggested I write Nick Flynn’s profile, almost assures an interview without biography. Memoir writers are vague on matters of record. We’re interested in using fact and detail. We’re interested in the gorgeous influence of pain in all its mystery and nonsense….

  • from Alienation Effects

    3 In hospital I convalesced and read the melodrama presented in Le Figaro: “On the morning of 16 November, it is alleged, Professor of Philosophy Louis Althusser strangled his wife during what has been ruled a psychotic break.” I am not psychotic, though I have indeed killed my wife. She is dead, it’s true. Not…

  • Swimming: A Plan B Essay

    She swims in open water, the alternate self. There is no boat. She is alone. There is no predicting the conditions. Some days, the water is flat and still, her strokes pushing through a membrane of surface warmth and into a chill beneath. Some days, the waves are so vast they lift her high on…

  • What the Desert Said

    At the beginning of the third book of the Odyssey, Telemachus’ ship pulls into the harbor of sandy Pylos, as the morning light burnishes the sea. Homer tells us: The sun rose from the still, beautiful water Into the bronze sky, to shine upon the gods And upon men who die on the life-giving earth….

  • The Bathers

    What a reprieve from all this stultifying heat. And all the threats implicit in that heat: the sweep and snare of blackberry, razor barb of concertina wire. The bluish teasel nearly chafed you with its bracts. You’ve made it through some muck with your absolute body still intact. So far, the Camp Far West lake…

  • Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction

    The Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction Ploughshares is pleased to present Angela Pneuman with the first annual Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction for her short story, “Occupational Hazard,” which appeared in the Spring 2011 issue of Ploughshares, guest edited by Colm Tóibín. The $1,000 award, given by acclaimed writer and Ploughshares advisory editor Alice Hoffman,…

  • Didn’t Anyone Tell You

    Last summer, with a serial rapist roaming Ann Arbor, I asked my undergraduates to read an essay called “In the Combat Zone” by Leslie Marmon Silko, in which she argues that if women felt comfortable using firearms, they wouldn’t present such passive victims for men intent on harming them. One of my female students, fair…