Nonfiction

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…

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…

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…