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…

When I think of those early years, I think of hard labor in brutal conditions — ridiculous, I know, patently false and nostalgic, as if we were working in a gulag, an outpost in the literary tundra. I first volunteered to read manuscripts for Ploughshares in 1986, then began working part-time as an assistant editor…

When I think about my beginnings as a writer, I think of the floor. I suppose I could think about burning desire, or tenuous talent, but really I have to say that without the particular place where I sat on the floor, I might never have become a writer. Because it was cold in New…

Growing Up Rich was my fifth novel. It was published in 1975 by Little, Brown. Up until then, my novels had surfaced briefly and were immediately forgotten. I don’t know how he came across it, but James Randall, who was one of Ploughshares’s several editors way back then, decided he liked my novel and wrote…

I harbor a painful memory of a day and an evening in the life of Ploughshares in its early days. It was early afternoon on October 6, 1979, a Saturday, and I was living in New Hampshire at the time. DeWitt Henry, the founding editor, had invited me to introduce the Irish writer Mary Lavin,…

Excerpts from a co-editor’s journal and from letters to Tess Gallagher: Letter, April 25, 1986: I’ve been reading until I’m nearly cross-eyed, so I’m taking a break to walk to the mailbox, having followed your wise suggestion and bought my very own postal scale-weighs up to five pounds-on sale at Arvey’s. At the moment, it…

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…