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…
At the beginning of the process of reading fiction for this issue of Ploughshares, I worried briefly — foolishly — that I might not find enough stories to fill my allotted pages. Now, months later, my single regret is that I didn’t have space for more of the fine work I had the opportunity to…
If the novel is the bastard child of two passionately but uneasily matched parents — poetry and journalism — then the short story seems clearly able to trace its descent from the distaff side. I grant poetry the female gender, for reasons that there should be no need to state. Or if there is a…
"I like songs I can relate to,” Ray Charles said in an interview in 1960, long before “relate” became part of the ubiquitous psychobabble. And I guess that was Jane Shore’s and my one persistent criterion for the work we’ve included in the following pages. In some fundamental, surprising, persistent way, the poems and stories…
The crossroads is a real place between imaginary places — points of departure and arrival. It is also a place where negotiations and deals are made with higher powers. In the West African and Haitian traditions of Legba, it is a sanctified place of reflection (mirrors are used in symbolic travel). The crossroads is a…
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