Nonfiction

It had been twenty years since I’d taken a turn in the editorial trenches, so the invitation to return to Ploughshares for one of its anniversary issues seemed an irresistible symmetry, a chance to observe directly some of the changes in the magazine and perhaps, by extension, in American poetry. Three differences are clear. First,…

A certain college professor used to say that one sits down to write ABC, but in the process discovers — ah! — DEF! He was talking about writing nonfiction, but there is DEF in fiction, too. We discover through writing that we know more than we know — hopefully, if we’re writing with honesty and…

Just one of the many delights of putting together this issue of Ploughshares had to do with the sense of discovery I experienced as I came upon submission after submission which challenged, and changed, my notion of the world. However familiar I might have been with the work of my colleagues in Princeton University’s creative…

It’s probably a shame to say so, at least at the outset of an introduction to this issue of Ploughshares, but I may not be a particularly good or efficient reader of other people’s fiction. By nature I am somewhat distractible. And although my distractibility is matched at times by my ability to concentrate, these…

It’s a December afternoon in Houston, and I’m stuck in traffic on Westheimer, in a strip of shopping centers — an unrevealing detail, since Houston mostly is a strip of shopping centers, more retail opportunities stretched endlessly along these roads than you’d think even the fourth largest city in America could ever make use of….

In a brief introduction to the last issue of Ploughshares I guest-edited (Spring 1985, Vol. 11, No. 1), I noted that nearly twelve years had passed since the first issue I edited (Summer 1973, Vol. 1, No. 4) and that I’d be happy to do it again in another dozen years or so. Blink: a…

Not so long ago, in trying to dislodge a student from some writing that — due to her fear or complacency — was overly safe and conventional, I experimented with a bit of pedagogical brutishness. I looked her in the eye, held up her story, and said, ” I could have written this.” Now I…

At the beginning of the process of reading fiction for this issue of Ploughshares, I worried briefly — foolishly — that I might not find enough stories to fill my allotted pages. Now, months later, my single regret is that I didn’t have space for more of the fine work I had the opportunity to…

If the novel is the bastard child of two passionately but uneasily matched parents — poetry and journalism — then the short story seems clearly able to trace its descent from the distaff side. I grant poetry the female gender, for reasons that there should be no need to state. Or if there is a…