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…
You know the way you hear a voice sometimes, muffled, as from another room, and what you hear is intonation, and you can tell, almost right away, if someone is arguing with someone, or just talking, or making love, or if a child is there, or children. Intonation: the rise and fall of sound and…
This issue of Ploughshares engages in an old ritual, an occasion that can be confusing to anyone not close to literary careers: literary discovery. What? An issue about discoveries? Columbus? An issue of stories and poems in which someone has to discover something? One of those party-game types of thing? Well, no. This is an…
The West is a big place, but not my West. The West for me is where I lived — it is a house. And it's how I lived, and who I lived with. It's some people, and some streets, a border fence with Mexico in the distance, an arroyo across the highway, a dry landscape,…
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…
We have long admired Ploughshares — not only for its eclecticism, which has proven an energizing force in contemporary American letters, but also for its nineteen-year history of consistently excellent poems, stories and essays. That’s why we gladly agreed to edit this issue. Once the prospect of filling two hundred pages loomed large, however, we…
An Introduction There is no such thing, that great figure of American morality Andrew Mellon said, as an act of virtue that goes unpunished. It often seems that the act of addressing the very subject of virtue is its own punishment. Wherever we turn these days we hear a latest crisis described in terms of…
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