Nonfiction

After graduating from Amherst College in 1963, I lived in Manhattan for the summer and worked at Redbook, of all places. At night, I pounded out Kafkaesque short stories, which I promptly sent to The New Yorker and which were promptly rejected. In the fall, I headed for Cambridge. I had been granted a Woodrow…

Ploughshares Vol. 2/1-the issue that I edited-was published twenty-seven years ago. Contained in its pages are the markings of a very specific period in Boston, including a line drawing of Peter O’Malley sitting in the Plough and Stars, cap pulled low, newspaper raised, and notices for the Grateful Union Bookstore, Guinness stout, and Emerson College’s…

from a memoir in progress 1. El hombre que yo amo The night before I left my mother, I wrote a letter. ” Querida Mami,” it began. Querida, beloved, Mami, I wrote, on the same page as el hombre que yo amo, the man I love. I’d struggled with those words, because I wasn’t certain…

In the past, readers and critics expected serious novelists to catch the spirit of the new in their fiction, to absorb the particular experiences of living and thinking in a specific time and place. The form and language of fiction evolved to fit changing times and tastes-sometimes briskly, sometimes slowly-to reflect or critique transformations in…

Much has been written about the influence of the academy on the writer who teaches there. But what about the influence a writer may have on the academy? On our way to the airport after her visit at my campus, Lucille Clifton, speaking of poets who teach, asks: “Who else can teach students about the…

Stephen Dobyns is the author of nine books of poetry, including Concurring Beasts, Griffon, The Balthus Poems, Cemetery Nights, Body Traffic, Velocities, and Common Carnage. He is also the author of a collection of essays on poetry, Best Words, Best Order, and nineteen novels, ten of which comprise a very popular series of detective books,…

My mother is dressed for the occasion in a purple, lime green, and chartreuse Pucci peignoir and matching toreador pants, a latter-day transgender Joseph in her robe of many colors. I am wearing harlequin sunglasses and my father’s undershirt. My sister, as yet unborn in this recurring pageant, stands by in the persona of a…

My father was a dreamer and a rainbow chaser and sometimes he took me along for the ride. My favorite times were driving in the car with him going nowhere, being nomads, him listening to some inner music, his upper lip caught in his lower teeth. It felt very restful after my mother’s shrieking. I…

For my mother’s fortieth birthday, my father brought home two coats-a Persian lamb and a karakul-and told her to choose between them. She set the boxes on the dining room table and opened the first. When she lifted the coat from the box, the tissue paper fluttered upward like a wing. She tried it on…