Editor's Introduction

Radios

Of late, I have been collecting vintage radios, a distracting hobby that I am mostly ambivalent about in comparison with sincere radio enthusiasts, which explains why I only own a handful. They are scattered throughout my house. The Fisher Model 100 sits regally aged in the living room between the fireplace and my bay window…

Introduction

When you visit the statue of Montaigne in Paris, you find him amidst overgrown greenery, almost sequestered in the bushes across from the Sorbonne, as if preferring, in bronze, the margin he chose in life. The first thing you notice is his shoe. Even at night, when I came upon him, the shoe emerges first,…

Introduction

Grizzly bears, electric bears, fire bears—these three are the most dangerous bears, my three-year-old daughter informs me. I don’t know how she knows what she knows, yet she knows many things. Lately it is all about bears. Electric bears? I ask her. I’ve never seen an electric bear. If you go into his cave, he…

Introduction

For this fortieth anniversary issue, I invited former guest editors to contribute new work of their own, to nominate and introduce an emerging writer, or to give an account of turning points in their careers. Among the twenty-five who responded, I include here fiction writers, nonfiction writers, and poets. Longtime Ploughshares readers will recognize the…

Storyteller

Not long ago, I met a woman in her eighties in the parking lot of a library in Florida. I had been at the library to give a reading, and one member of the audience waited for me after everyone else had left, despite the brutal, engulfing heat. The stranger was attractive, elegant, and well-dressed,…

Introduction

It was 1986 and I was staying with my brother in Omdurman close to Khartoum, where the White Nile and the Blue Nile meet. Omdurman was vast, the size of the city, but it was not a city in any way that I recognized. There were no wide streets or squares or municipal buildings, and…

Introduction

Sometimes when I’m asked to account for my weirdness—by those sympathetic enough to have not given up on me—I remember that Edward Gorey responded to the same request by remarking that the first two books he remembered reading as a child were Alice in Wonderland and Dracula, and so I offer my own origins story,…

Introduction

There was something secretive about it. When I walked into the library and turned right and kept walking, they were there. Had I ever seen a magazine before I got to college? I had. Had I ever seen a literary journal? I had not. I was a seventeen-year-old girl who left high school a year…