Rosellen Brown is full of contradictions. She appears friendly and voluble, and admits she loves to perform in front of an audience, but she considers herself shy, and claims she is crippled with discomfort at parties. About writing novels, she says, “I have to struggle with my almost total inability to tell a story,” although…
No author for this fall landscape, nor signs Of limits tested, except the fence just yards From I-89, and a stray Holstein Unfazed by traffic heading for the border. How different from your time in California, Those LSD trips at Zabriskie Point, Warm nights spent cruising, or in Castro’s bars With studded whips and chains,…
Not long ago I accompanied a Trappist abbot as he unlocked a door to the cloister and led me down a long corridor into a stone-walled room, the chapter house of his monastery, where some twenty monks were waiting for me to give a reading. Poetry does lead a person into some strange places. This…
Cohen Awards Each year, we honor the best poem, short story, and essay published in Ploughshares with the Cohen Awards, which are wholly sponsored by our longtime patrons Denise and Mel Cohen.Finalists are nominated by staff editors, and the winners are selected by our advisory editors. This year, we combined the fiction and nonfiction categories,…
The waiter called me over from my table with a wave. It was a wave first with his hand, but then with his eyebrow and his smile, and with a nod of his head to be sure. He called me over more with these than with his hand, and so I got up. In an…
Cold. Wet. Sloppy. Traffic on the bridge is heavy even though I waited for morning rush hour to end. Perhaps there is no end to rush hour. Fax. E-mail. Supersonic jets. We’re all racing at greater and greater speeds, going around and around, stuck behind each other on the bridge. Except Mom, who in her…
Cohen Awards Each year, we honor the best poem, short story, and essay published in Ploughshares with the Cohen Awards, which are wholly sponsored by our longtime patrons Denise and Mel Cohen.Finalists are nominated by staff editors, and the winners are selected by our advisory editors. This year, we combined the fiction and nonfiction categories,…
MASTHEAD Guest Editor James Welch Executive Director DeWitt Henry Managing Editor & Fiction Editor Don Lee Poetry Editor David Daniel Assistant Editor Jessica Dineen Editorial Assistant Stephanie Booth Founding Publisher Peter O'Malley Staff Assistant: Jodee Stanley. Interns: Kristen Cudmore and George Carner. Poetry Readers: Mary-Margaret Mulligan, Linda Russo, Karen Voelker, Jason Rogers, Tom Laughlin, Renee…
A bitter Wichita, Kansas, winter day. The air is hard, and everything tempted to appear in an afternoon hour or two of tepid sunlight moves with recognition of that hardness, circles overhead as if turning an adamant mill wheel (crows), or raises a lavish tail the shape-and I would swear the brittleness-of the ice-fronds on…
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