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…
According to the stories my mother tells, I refused to speak a word until I was almost four. She became so worried that she took me to a doctor — an extreme act in the rural Kentucky region where I was raised; in fact, for the remainder of my Kentucky youth, I would never see…
If you don’t like these stories, you should’ve read the ones I didn’t take. Even though that’s not accurate, it’s probably the only thing I could say in this space to truly arrest the attention of the curious soul bent on simply reading a few good stories (which, in fact, he/she will find here). But,…
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