Welcome to the new Ploughshares website! For answers to commonly asked questions, read here.
As we look forward to updating the Ploughshares blog for the new year, we’re also looking back at all the great posts since the blog started in 2009. Our weekly roundups explore the archives and gather past posts around a certain theme to help you jump-start your week. This week’s theme: revision. If you are…
As we look forward to updating the Ploughshares blog for the new year, we’re also looking back at all the great posts since the blog started in 2009. This week we’re introducing a new roundup post that explores the archives. Each Monday we’ll gather past posts around a certain theme to help you jump-start your…
It’s an old garden story; it started with the fall. I was making my way across some stones that my husband had set, into a section of my garden that was obscured by weeds—big, shoulder-high ones, upstart saplings, overeager goldenrod, a mass of sprawlers and climbers like wild grape vine and poison ivy. I was…
We were immersed in the beauty of our place in far northeastern Washington—ponderosa pines, red firs, tamaracks, even spruce trees against the sky, and the Columbia River rolling by. For forty years, my wife, Joanna, and I have enjoyed our vacation home, the more so during the last five when we have lived in it…
DeMisty D. Bellinger’s new novel beautifully showcases the way history endures within us, and how while someone else’s past may influence our present moment, we still have agency.
While many have praised the book’s feminist themes, none have noticed that the Hulu adaptation highlights Atwood’s special warning intended for women writers, historians, artists, and documentarians. In a patriarchal society turned radical and violent, a woman’s voice will be stifled by taking away the written word.
Fifty-six years ago I picked up a musical instrument for the first time with intent to commit jazz. It was a trombone left behind by another kid at the jazz record store where we both hung out. (He’d been snatched by Selective Service for the Korean War. I’d 4-F’ed out.) I got a single lesson…
Cold drops like a hawk on Blue Hill, Maine. It bores into the skin, the heart, claws the eye. She craves and fears the imprint of weather: piles of leaves waiting for a ceremony of scented smoke, the shrinking day, the sun’s oblique afterthought, cool on rooftops. The stubbled field. A lace of frost. She…
We are the Holocaust Girls The Holocaust Girls, the Holocaust Girls We are the Holocaust Girls, We like to dig in the dark. -to the tune of “Lullaby League and Lollypop Guild,” from The Wizard of Oz 1. You don’t have to be Jewish to be a Holocaust Girl. But it helps. It…
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