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 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
An hour and a half north of Bishop, up a road with a view of Death Valley; that’s where to find the ancient bristlecone forest, and when I say ancient, first, there are trees in those woods who—who? That? Who—trees who are two to three thousand years old, who fully remember who they’ve always been. They…
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…
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