Nonfiction

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…

Twenty-five years ago a poet from Ireland came to the University of Montana to replace Richard Hugo for a year. Hugo had a Rockefeller and he was going to spend a year in Italy to work on a book of poems based on his World War ii experience as a bombardier, flying missions out of…

It is perhaps the height of optimism to try to structure an issue of a literary magazine around some single subject or theme. There is clearly the notion that, floating around out there, waiting to be beckoned, are the requisite ten or twelve or fourteen fine stories which will exactly fit, which will make an…

My first thought in editing this issue of Ploughshares was to put together a collection of autobiographical and fictional writings that tested the border between those preposterously rough groupings. And the very first piece that crossed my desk, Susan Bergman's "Imago," confirmed me in this intention. "Imago" is a brilliant family portrait whose narrator claims…

I am honored to serve as editor for this issue of Ploughshares, but with this sense of honor comes an interesting perplexity. The magazine has presented issues on special topics, issues on issues, and issues devoted to specific genres. For a number of reasons, I decided to offer an installment that was as generous a selection…

To celebrate twenty years of Ploughshares is to celebrate the idea of our revolving editorship, a series of guest-edited issues directed and moderated by the magazine's staff, with each issue and guest editor speaking to others in the progress of the series. For this issue, with the assistance of Don Lee, our managing editor/associate fiction…

Earlier in this century, literary magazines would occasionally publish "work-in-progress" issues to show interesting new work, often (as in a famous instance by Joyce) experimental, while it was still in the making. The main purpose — to put it another way — was to present relatively self-contained portions of longer works whose overall structure and…