Nonfiction

  • Editor’s Note

    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…

  • Introduction

    So much in this world we can’t make better. So much in this world we can’t understand. For those reasons, literature sustains us. We need, more than ever, language that expands human perception, that opens us to the broken world. We need the compassion and outrage and tenderness and horror of language that nibbles at…

  • Chooutla

    Education got us into this. – Murray Sinclair I will go to the archives. What will I look for? Another place, simply, where the past speaks? I call Linda Johnson, former Territorial Archivist of Yukon. I tell her I am going to the archives. What should I do there? What should I look at; what should…

  • Unknown Territory

    I find in this wilderness a being who only wears pants, has always only worn pants. Lucky Brand jeans for dates, Levi’s for swagger, Carhartts for work. A self who carries a pocket knife everywhere because I never know when it might be necessary to open the straight-edged locking blade sheathed in the polished, blond…

  • Fourteen Specimens

    Autumn Blaze Maple October is warmer than usual. All weekend, social media friends post pictures of high school homecoming dances. Their daughters wear short tubes of colorful fabric held in place with hip bones and spaghetti straps. The homecomings I remember were chilly. The popular girls wore Irish knit sweaters that swung like thigh-length hoop…