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…
Reprinted from Issue 3 of Ploughshares, Winter 1972. (guest edited by James Randall) Richard Yates was born in Yonkers, New York, in 1926. He graduated from the Avon School in 1944, served in the last years of World War II, and until 1952 worked at a variety of jobs, ranging from newspaper rewrite man to…
I knew I was back in New York when I saw children walking to school with books open in their hands. I’d lived away for fifteen years. Now down the streets of Brooklyn they drifted, novels spread wide between their palms, the actual world comprising a mere running margin of asphalt and high-heeled shoes and…
Diane stands on the bar of the trapeze, pacing and gesturing nonchalantly as a professor lecturing on the ground might. We stand in a circle at her feet, self-conscious in our leotards. We look up hopefully, with awe…we are hoping that she can teach us to fly too. I suspect that as little girls we…
From Years Ago, a memoir Tory Fukada showed me how to crank the corners and I practiced, abandoning the graceful strokes of cursive she’d also taught for the bold design, which seemed meant to be carved but smoldered like a brand. Dozens whirled like pinwheels on the barbed-wire page. I loved the prickly maze, the…
A map unfolds into a world where new poems, new ways of writing them, a new way of living, become possible. My turning points have included the discovery of the city of Istanbul, where I spend a few weeks every year, and my eventual immigration to Ireland, where I now live. With an accent instantly…
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…
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,…
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…
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