A certain college professor used to say that one sits down to write ABC, but in the process discovers — ah! — DEF! He was talking about writing nonfiction, but there is DEF in fiction, too. We discover through writing that we know more than we know — hopefully, if we’re writing with honesty and…
For the first time in my life, I had writer’s block. This writer’s block was so bad, so pervasive, so debilitating and humiliating (and so pretentiously stereotypical) that I couldn’t write anything. Or perhaps, more accurately stated, I couldn’t write anything with any sort of confidence. The words still filled up the page, but I…
Just one of the many delights of putting together this issue of Ploughshares had to do with the sense of discovery I experienced as I came upon submission after submission which challenged, and changed, my notion of the world. However familiar I might have been with the work of my colleagues in Princeton University’s creative…
It’s probably a shame to say so, at least at the outset of an introduction to this issue of Ploughshares, but I may not be a particularly good or efficient reader of other people’s fiction. By nature I am somewhat distractible. And although my distractibility is matched at times by my ability to concentrate, these…
The old year’s over. So, too, the old century, the old millennium. Two thousand years of Western Civ! . . . Finished, achieved, collapsed. Silly, of course, but it’s how people think. Some people (oh, definitely a smaller set) are wondering whether the shiny new millennium which has just begun will have much literary fiction…
The millennial moment. We can’t know what it will mean, though we’ll live through it and be lived by it. But with the new millennium in mind, we’ve chosen for our cover Strong Winds, a painting by the Minnesota artist Kate Borowske, seeing it as an emblem of the moment — the poet, or fiction…
It’s a December afternoon in Houston, and I’m stuck in traffic on Westheimer, in a strip of shopping centers — an unrevealing detail, since Houston mostly is a strip of shopping centers, more retail opportunities stretched endlessly along these roads than you’d think even the fourth largest city in America could ever make use of….
In a brief introduction to the last issue of Ploughshares I guest-edited (Spring 1985, Vol. 11, No. 1), I noted that nearly twelve years had passed since the first issue I edited (Summer 1973, Vol. 1, No. 4) and that I’d be happy to do it again in another dozen years or so. Blink: a…
Not so long ago, in trying to dislodge a student from some writing that — due to her fear or complacency — was overly safe and conventional, I experimented with a bit of pedagogical brutishness. I looked her in the eye, held up her story, and said, ” I could have written this.” Now I…
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