Nonfiction

Introduction

Grizzly bears, electric bears, fire bears—these three are the most dangerous bears, my three-year-old daughter informs me. I don’t know how she knows what she knows, yet she knows many things. Lately it is all about bears. Electric bears? I ask her. I’ve never seen an electric bear. If you go into his cave, he…

Introduction

For this fortieth anniversary issue, I invited former guest editors to contribute new work of their own, to nominate and introduce an emerging writer, or to give an account of turning points in their careers. Among the twenty-five who responded, I include here fiction writers, nonfiction writers, and poets. Longtime Ploughshares readers will recognize the…

Introduction

It was 1986 and I was staying with my brother in Omdurman close to Khartoum, where the White Nile and the Blue Nile meet. Omdurman was vast, the size of the city, but it was not a city in any way that I recognized. There were no wide streets or squares or municipal buildings, and…

Introduction

Sometimes when I’m asked to account for my weirdness—by those sympathetic enough to have not given up on me—I remember that Edward Gorey responded to the same request by remarking that the first two books he remembered reading as a child were Alice in Wonderland and Dracula, and so I offer my own origins story,…

Introduction

There was something secretive about it. When I walked into the library and turned right and kept walking, they were there. Had I ever seen a magazine before I got to college? I had. Had I ever seen a literary journal? I had not. I was a seventeen-year-old girl who left high school a year…

Correspondences

Sex and the dead, Yeats wrote in a letter to Olivia Shakespear, are the only subjects of interest to the studious mind. He was, I suppose, trying to chat her up; and far from the only one to have noticed the links between our comings and goings, the ins and outs of life, such as…

All My Children

I began naming my children when I was four. The habit launched itself via the succession of dolls that were quickly discarded, and the numerous stuffed animals exhausted from affection. There were also objects like the secondhand family car and the rubber plant. Sometimes I named tools like pencils, or apparel like shoes. Naming was…