In his essay “Cante Moro,” Nathaniel Mackey describes a kind of singing that has “a sound of trouble in the voice. The voice becomes troubled.” The quality he identifies here, via the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, “is something beyond technical competence or even technical virtuosity. It is something troubling. It has to do with…
Time doesn’t move, we move, says Tolstoy, but I am standing still in a trolley as it moves through a provincial city in the USSR—a country that no longer exists—in which two old ladies, who look just like my deceased mother, are speaking a strange mash-up of Yiddish, Ukrainian, Russian (and another language I cannot…
On the first day of my graduate workshop, sometimes I will ask the writers to draw an undersea creature and put it on the chalkboard. They do it willingly, and some are surprisingly good artists, making convincing jellyfish and eel out of chalk. Another might draw a blob of a whale, someone makes the classic…
In Lost Children Archive, Valeria Luiselli writes: “I suppose that documenting things—through the lens of a camera, on paper, or with a sound-recording device—is really only a way of contributing one more layer, something like soot, to all the things already sedimented in a collective understanding of the world.” I’m writing this introduction in the…
This is a letter from the past to the future. All writing is, of course. In our moment in time, we put words on paper and hope that later someone will read them and recognize the people and the feelings we’re describing. No matter how many miles or years separate us from our readers, if…
One evening early in the new year, my ten-year-old confided that she was worried about something. Between the demands of school and the dynamics of friends, let alone all the changes dawning around and within her, I wasn’t surprised to learn she might be nervous about something. But her fear caught me off guard. “I’m…
Every time I am asked to edit something, I tell myself, Don’t do it. You hate editing. And every time I finish editing something, I am always relieved. Nothing has differed for this issue of Ploughshares. So why did I take on the guest editor role? Because editing matters. I am committed to literature as…
Not long ago I walked into my graduate poetry workshop at Rutgers-Newark, where I have been teaching for the last decade. It was a Monday, and I carried into the classroom the weight of a new burden: the US Department of Health and Human Services had just proposed to establish a legal definition of gender…
There are many things I look for in a story—a vivid character or place, a memorable situation, a new way of seeing something. I like to be pulled in for a ride where I’m not quite sure where I’m going but feel confident that the driver does know and will indeed deliver me to the…
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