Ploughshares
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The Generosity of Kristin Dombek
In her new book, The Selfishness of Others, Kristin Dombek turns her deliberate inquisition and dry humor on the suddenly ubiquitous if “sketchy” word narcissism. In conversation with Laura Creste at the Ploughshares blog, Dombek talks about the origins and offshoots of…
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Voting Across the Pages
The political becoming local and, in effect, personal, is what I think we saw playing out all across Columbia last week. If Ocosingo War Diary teaches us anything, it’s that what might seem like an obvious choice—ending a war of…
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Finding Your Voice
Authenticity of voice can only come from authentic work. And authentic work doesn’t come from the head; it’s an outgrowth of authentic feeling. In a post for the Ploughshares blog, Annie Weatherwax considers how writing an artistic statement can help…
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Where Our Favorite Stories Lived
Particularly in the case of children’s writers, some part of me might hope that these tourist sites will be living manifestations of beloved stories, of stories that seemed like physical locations, places to escape, as real as real life. Maybe…
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You Are Never Alone If There’s a Poem
I’ve often wondered if my turn to poetry in times of loneliness and uncertainty is a behavior that’s naturally implicit within the genre or if it upholds some cliché notion of what poetry is and should be. Is poetry a…
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Diversity for the Campus Novel
At Ploughshares, Bryan Washington explores the lack of racial diversity in the “campus novel” genre, where the students rebelling against their educational establishments are still overwhelmingly white.
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A Tumblr Full of Lolitas
On the Ploughshares blog, Mishka Hoosen explores the phenomenon of young women claiming for themselves the “nymphet” moniker on various Tumblr pages. Hoosen argues that it is more than simplistic fetishization of the themes induced by Nabokov’s Lolita—these women are owning…
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Jaquira Díaz
Jaquira Díaz discusses the challenge of writing about family members, her greatest joy as a writer, and her literary role models.
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Carving the Uncanny Valley
Any Luddite with half a brain has already begun stockpiling nonperishables for the inevitable moment the robots rise up against us. Over at the Ploughshares blog, Joelle Renstrom recounts how writers were awakened to the threat of artificial intelligence: A…
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Rooting for Folk Tales
But the question that’s been on my mind for a while now is how and why we’ve come to recognize certain tales as perennial (and universal) and have relegated others to complete obscurity. Or, to be more exact, how we’ve…
