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My friend Clytia dropped me off near Point Reyes Station for a writers’ retreat at Mesa Refuge. It was my first writers’ residency, and as a scientist I had no idea what to expect. For so long I had organized my days with precision to pack in the tasks that made my career. Would I…
Our nonfiction winner is Ennis Smith, for his piece “Happy New Year.” This year’s nonfiction judge was Elisa Gabbert. Of Smith’s essay, she writes: This beautiful, swift, and complex portrait of a friend (“if that’s what you called that in-between place where ex-lovers lived”) is also a remembrance for times and places lost, for youth and…
We had a knife. A pot. Shoes. We had spoons, and needles, and glasses that shattered when we dropped them on hard floors. In the age of objects we worked out ideas with winches and rope. Levers and chocks. Muscles were trained to remember their jobs. Ideas moved down an arm to pens or hammers….
My beloved grandmother, who just turned 90, used to bring me a stack of books every summer and say, “Whenever I want to go somewhere, I just open a book.” This is why I love the work in this issue of Ploughshares—it opens doors into new and deep explorations of internal and external worlds. It takes…
For as long as I can remember, my mother wanted to get back home. She delighted in many things (Elvis Presley, migrating birds, black raspberry ice cream, figures of women and birds sculpted from stone) but for eighty of the eighty-three years she walked this earth, my mother was best defined by her desire to…
New York City is seventy degrees and sunny in late October, and on a bench outside the MET Cloisters Museum, my friend Sarah and I celebrate with a picnic. We sip coconut water, sop up hummus with pita, and savor the last dregs of summer. After a whole day in the museum, we cut through…
I’ve been noticing rocks everywhere I go—small or large, boulders or pebbles. My friend Thor began rock tumbling as a hobby while bored during the pandemic. He and his wife, Sara, moved temporarily into a small duplex while their dream house was being built on a bluff overlooking the Salish Sea, and polishing these rocks…
There is nothing particularly remarkable about a man my age having two artificial knees, except that everything about it is rather remarkable. Let’s start with the idea that a surgeon can take an electric saw, excavate the knee joint and portions of the adjacent femur and tibia, swap in a man-made hinge, re-wrap the existing…
When I left the house this morning, there was a ruckus in the grass, a rustling buzz, something digging under leaves. As I got closer and the buzzing intensified, I saw a cicada, pinned by a yellow and black, hard-shelled wasp. The cicada fought and shuddered and stilled. Then tried again to right itself. The…
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