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…
Editing an issue of Ploughshares turned out to be more mysterious than I expected. I began by taking a few poems and a story that I thought had form and significance. After that, I found myself looking at manuscripts as if they were fragments of something larger — pieces of glass from a crystal ball…
Once upon a time, the chief business of the good literary magazines was discovery, the seeking and finding of new and gifted writers. They were discovered, and then they moved on to other stages and places. Old world has changed a whole lot since then. For at least twenty years the good literary magazines have…
Editing a literary magazine — and this is the first time I have undertaken a project so fraught with hubris — turns out to be a little like buying birthday presents for your loved ones. You tend to get them things you really want for yourself. In making selections for this issue I have been…
(Or, Sr. Calvino's Shaving Brush) In a note accompanying "A Letter from the Sahara," Italo Calvino described that piece of writing as a page "from life." It was just days before his death last September in Siena, Italy. Had he lived, he would be in the U.S. at the time of publication of this issue,…
When we invited contributions for this issue we said that our theme was “the inter-relationship or overlap of autobiography, biography, and fiction.” We asked potential contributors to “think of the three genres as forming a triangle. We are looking for prose writing — fiction, essay, memoir, journal, etc. — that falls within this area.” We’ve…
The last time I edited Ploughshares I knew all the contributors personally and solicited work from them. This time, the opposite is almost literally true: I deliberately set myself the task of confronting what came unsolicited to the magazine and was more on the lookout for work that promised than for names that clicked. Of…
When, at the age of twenty-four I sold my first short story – for ten dollars to the now defunct Colorado Quarterly – I had already accumulated, by count, 576 rejection slips. I had also, by this time, written seven unpublished novels. About six months before, after an especially discouraging run of rejections, I'd tried…
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