Nonfiction

From Six Nights on the Acropolis

Saturday, late at night. I've returned from the outside. I know tomorrow's waking and the daily uphill climb. The streets were quiet; the mind light; the soul with all her windows open. Life's despair, sentiments condemned to end, man's wretchedness, the inevitable death – were circulating through the openings and didn't bother me. I am…

Editor’s Note

I last edited an issue of Ploughshares (Vol. 1/4) nearly 12 years ago. It was a pleasure doing it once more and I would be glad to do it again in the future-say, in another 12 years. The emphasis in this issue is on younger / newer poets. In many cases, I chose to accept…

Griffis in Fukui

Twenty-seven-year-old William E. Griffis, a native of Philadelphia, took a leave of absence from Rutgers Theological Seminary in the fall of 1869 in order to accept a three-year position as a teacher of natural science in Fukui, a Japanese feudal domain (feudalism ended in the fall of 1870) just beginning to modernize. Arriving in Yokohama…

Four Bits

In Transit There are times out of mind, times spent alone in a strange place waiting, times when the mind is alive and the body almost ruined, when you hallucinate on the real, and see it in the context of its meaning. These are the airplanes and buses of student fiction. Your thoughts quicken when…

November Journal

November 9, 1981 Late Monday afternoon It is not yet 5 p.m. now and already near to completely dark, just the sky is still that deep dark blue just before it becomes black. Much to write about, though I have been avoiding sitting down here. What first? The good news or the bad? Last Tuesday…

John Gardner: The Return Home

On a spring day in 1945, not long before his 12th birthday, Bud Gardner headed out to plow his father's fields. His younger brother Gilbert came along for the ride. Sandy, the boys' sister, lingered within earshot. Gilbert climbed on the cultpacker, a two ton machine which, towed in the tractor's wake, crushed the freshly…