The first time I met Tom Sleigh, he was stealing my suitcase. I had just gotten off a charter bus in Mérida, Mexico, where I’d be spending a week at a conference, and in the rush and shove of passengers, I lost sight of my black roller among the pile into which the driver was…
Often, when I’m writing, I open up my Internet browser onto poems I’ve found to be particularly instructive or compellingly enigmatic, poems that connect me with the reasons and, indeed, the questions about why I write and return to poetry as a reader, a parishioner, a believer. I’ve collected these poems via links I’ve emailed…
Last summer on Martha’s Vineyard, Lauren Groff and I went running. I have a lot of endurance—I ran a marathon back in 2001—but my usual pace is middling: I tend to run nine-minute miles. But my first mile with Lauren clocked in at 6:52 (I know because I have an app on my phone that…
Poets love a revolution. Many poets I met, in the years I spent running the Poetry Society in London, seemed to foster secret fantasies of living in a time when samizdat pamphlets, typed on hidden typewriters and smuggled to readers who treated them as if they were stone tablets, could change the world. Most poetry,…
As a child—“I mean really little,” Jean Thompson says, “teething and waking up at night crying”—her sleep-deprived parents put a stack of graham crackers in one corner of her crib and a stack of Little Golden Books in the other. “Whenever I woke up with sore gums, instead of screaming, I’d find my books and…
I once told Percival Everett that of the impressive people it’s been my good fortune to meet, he is the least impressed with himself. His response was characteristic and delivered in a complete and sincere deadpan, “Well, I’ve met me.” This willingness to foreground the work over the artist is especially notable about someone who…
The novelist and short-story writer Peter Ho Davies was born in 1966 in Coventry, England. Peter’s father had grown up in North Wales and Peter spent most of his boyhood vacations there with family, amid countryside he has described as beautiful but also—from a boy’s perspective—“slightly dull.” His mother was of Chinese descent and met…
If, in the 1980s, you had been a resident of one of those communities associated with the term, “urban renewal” might occur to you as double-edged with its bureaucratic optimism, and the implied whitewashing—easy as calling a do-over—of recent history. And if parts of your community were within the expansion radius of an ambitious university,…
Ladette Randolph is Editor-in-chief of Ploughshares and the author of three books of fiction: two novels—Haven’s Wake (forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press, spring 2013) and the award-winning A Sandhills Ballad (University of New Mexico Press, 2009)—and the short story collection This Is Not the Tropics (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). Randolph is on the…
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