Nonfiction

By then-1947-I had gone back to Harvard to earn my master’s degree in comparative literature and quickly completed the required credits. Hugely pregnant with my first child, I flunked the Latin exam, for which I was underprepared (the French exam was easy). Harry Levin, who had been my tutor during my senior year, interceded for…

I have one powerful reflection regarding the issue I edited of Ploughshares. A friend, a former student, a poet, an ally in the battle against the Vietnam War, a wiry little Irishman with a great sense of humor, phoned me about that time and asked if I were busy; he was in town and wanted…

I remember the office on Waverley Avenue in Watertown and the karate studio next door; periodically the floor would vibrate and the walls would thump with energy I like to think we reciprocated. On my first day as managing editor, I remember sorting through hundreds of three-by-five index cards with names of subscribers, none of…

Twenty years ago when I guest-edited a fiction issue of Ploughshares, I wrote in my introduction about a scoreboard I had been keeping for the previous seventeen years: a sheet of paper I kept tacked to the wall beside my desk upon which I listed various items out in the world (stories, novels, scripts, essays)-where…

During the early years of Ploughshares, from about 1971 to 1974, a group of us, an informal literary board, met at Joanne’s and my living room on Harvard Street in Cambridge. The people I remember were David Gullette of Simmons, the poet Paul Hannigan, Katha Pollitt, George Kimball of the Phoenix, Peter O’Malley, one of…

Excerpted from his article “Ploughshares: Breaking New Ground in Literary Magazines,” which was published on January 19, 1982, in The Boston Phoenix: My first contact with Ploughshares came in 1974 with Vol. 2/3. The coordinating editor was David Gullette, director of drama at Simmons College and one of the charter members of Ploughshares. Gullette was…

Preface & Dedication Late last night, January of 2001, temperatures on this Vermont hill farm dropped below zero. Jeff was in the loft of our cabin, sleeping under two blankets and a down comforter, while downstairs in my pajamas and slippers, with a blanket draped over my head and around my shoulders, I stepped outside…

I didn’t exactly grow up on them-not like the way my teenage years were permeated with the music of Josh White, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Bob Dylan, and the Beatles. The Rolling Stones grew on me later, late in the sixties when I was in my early twenties and my subconscious was searching for some kind of…

After two and a half years in Hollywood, I came back home to Boston in 1980 feeling like the cartoon man in a barrel. After making the most money I’d made in my life, from writing a TV series I created called James at 15, I was (amazingly) broke. In addition to being out of…