Nonfiction

"I like songs I can relate to,” Ray Charles said in an interview in 1960, long before “relate” became part of the ubiquitous psychobabble. And I guess that was Jane Shore’s and my one persistent criterion for the work we’ve included in the following pages. In some fundamental, surprising, persistent way, the poems and stories…

According to the stories my mother tells, I refused to speak a word until I was almost four. She became so worried that she took me to a doctor — an extreme act in the rural Kentucky region where I was raised; in fact, for the remainder of my Kentucky youth, I would never see…

If you don’t like these stories, you should’ve read the ones I didn’t take. Even though that’s not accurate, it’s probably the only thing I could say in this space to truly arrest the attention of the curious soul bent on simply reading a few good stories (which, in fact, he/she will find here). But,…

It’s been a great joy for me to work as an editor again, to have the privilege of sampling the range and richness of contemporary writing at its sources, and of compiling some of that writing in what’s essentially a book, created as much by its internal juxtapositions as by individual pieces’ indelible strengths. Prose…

The six stories in this issue speak for themselves — forcefully, lucidly — and whatever I might say about them is irrelevant to their value as literature. The very notion of an “introduction,” at least in this context, strikes me as peculiar to the brink of weird. A good story introduces itself, stakes its own…

I admit it: I’ve written some introductions. Except for not being able to worm out of it with Best American Short Stories 1987, though, I’ve confined my remarks to books of photography. You know: The photographs are right there, easily viewed as fast as your fingertips can turn a page, so I’ve tended to write…

When Ploughshares first called me about editing this issue, it was a cool afternoon, thanks to an early fog rolling in from the San Francisco Bay, and I was in the garage working out with Gerardo G., a kickboxer and recent graduate in electrical engineering from UC Berkeley. He was pummeling me next to a…

I knew an editor once — alas, an editor whose magazine commanded a good deal of national attention — who hated to publish fiction unless he could be assured that it was “true,” that it “had happened.” Having restricted his interest to the documentary, one must assume his list of approved works could not have…

This issue marks a transition for Ploughshares — a small but not insignificant change in editorial policy, one of several that have occurred over twenty-three years of publication. Originally, Ploughshares was edited by a committee of writers who had founded the journal: Harvard graduate students, Irish expatriates, Iowa Workshop refugees, New York School and Bowery…