Introduction

Introduction

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…

Introduction

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…

Introduction

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…

Introduction

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…

Introduction

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…

A Confession: Introduction

When Russell Banks and I agreed that our theme was to be Borderlands, we chose it partly for its open-endedness. Literally and figuratively, borderlands strike us as places where powerful forces come into contact with one another, where sparks fly. Specifically, it’s the politics of that point of collision that we’re interested in. Whatever else…

Introduction

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…

Cellar Notes: An Introduction

Again, what’s the theme?” my friend, the painter Stephen Henriques, asked. We had just enjoyed a tasty sidewalk lunch blocks from his studio in San Francisco’s Richmond District. That we should be meeting to choose from his recent work a cover for this issue of Ploughshares seemed natural. Two books of mine — Things Ain’t…