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…
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…
When I edited my issue so many years ago, featuring Amherst poets, I knew I wanted to have Saint Emily preside over our doings. So I got Jerry Liebling, then teaching at Hampshire, and a very distinguished photographer with many awards and shows at places like the Guggenheim in New York, to agree to take…
DeWitt Henry (without whom there would be no Ploughshares) running the magazine out of his Brookline Street, Cambridge, apartment, a book-crammed fifth-floor walkup, and later from a storefront next to a pizza shop on Waverley Avenue, Watertown: DeWitt, who kept the faith and wrote the grant proposals and answered the mail and talked endlessly of…
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