This Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...morePosts Tagged: Ploughshares
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 her interest in narcissism, refracted by the memoir form, polyamory, and a kind of basic […]
...moreVoting 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 52 years—from the global perspective actually might be quite a bit more complicated when the […]
...moreFinding 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 artists and writers find their voice. She writes: “As an artist, the artistic statement requires […]
...moreWhere 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 it has something to do with seeking to make literal the metaphorical experience of being […]
...moreYou 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 cause of loneliness or a balm against loneliness? Emilia Phillips explores the effect and personal […]
...moreDiversity 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.
...moreA 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 their forbidden sexuality within the protections allowed them. Like the Lolita character, they claim this […]
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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.
...moreCarving 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 certain likeness to humans inspires kinship, but when the line blurs, that kinship turns to […]
...moreRooting 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 codified and solidified certain interpretations of certain folk tales as the unalterable classics and neglected […]
...moreA Multilingual Writing Self
At the Ploughshares blog, Bruna Dantas Lobato shares how learning a new language inspired her writing, and describes the constant, bilingual research required to find the right words: If writing in a second language is like hunting, I’m both a stalker and an animal who explores the woods, both the archer and the prey.
...moreWhat’s in a Name?
But as writers, what are we supposed to do if we have a super common name? Do we get a pen name? Do we find an SEO expert? Do we just kind of ignore the issue and hope our names will float to the top of the Google search results someday, somehow? Over at the […]
...moreConsider the Weather
These are not stories about the weather, these are stories about life and death. Over at the Ploughshares blog, E.V. De Cleyre considers the importance of weather in the works of Kathryn Schulz, Anthony Doerr, and Claire Vaye Watkins.
...moreOf Boston and Poetry
But any poet today who shared Longfellow’s taste would be laughed out of the room. He wanted heroism; we want the ordinary. He wanted grand dramas; we want insightful understatement. He wanted music; we want images. Over at the Ploughshares blog, Tim Ellison writes about wandering through Boston with American poetry in his mind.
...moreAfrofuturist Worries
Underwriting the words on that page are the counterposing sentiments I see in many writers I know, especially writers of color: At one pole there’s, I just want to be okay; I want my family/community to be okay. At the other pole there’s, If I only reach the mountaintop I’ll be respected, valid, wealthy, etc. […]
...moreReshaping Humanities in the Middle East
Though every time I hear it, I can’t help but cringe a little. It reeks of insularity. Have you read what’s coming out of the Arab world right now? I thought when I heard that question again this year. That’s mostly what’s on my mind these days. Are you seeing what these writers are doing […]
...moreDissecting the Essay
How does an essay comes to its final shape? What’s the morphology of nonfiction’s popular form? Over at the Ploughshares blog, E. V. De Cleyre dissects works by Ander Monson, Claudia Rankine, Eula Biss, Leslie Jamison, and Maggie Nelson to get to core of the essay’s structure.
...moreSubway Stories
The project brings physical books back into the public’s routine, and in some ways obviates the debate over the necessity or function of the print object. The Ploughshares blog recently featured an innovative project by a Brazilian publishing house to promote literacy on the subway: issuing books as subway tickets!
...moreThe Empathy of Latin America
I can’t say I was surprised by the level of empathy my barber expressed for the victims of the Paris attacks, though I was intrigued by the empathy of a man whose daily life is so intertwined with the drug wars in Mexico, a war that has (by conservative estimates) claimed over 165,000 lives and […]
...moreAn End Has a Start
At the Ploughshares blog, E. V. De Cleyre considers the many ways to find the right moment to end a nonfiction story: The aftermath, Cusk writes, is “life with knowledge of what has gone before.” Writers are not seers. Armed with the “knowledge of what has gone before,” we mold events, truths, into narrative, and hope […]
...moreReading on Reading on Reading
For Ploughshares, Clare Beams talks about the strange effect of reading a story in which someone reads a story: Paintings of people looking at paintings, like this one, can make me fall into a dizzy sort of hole. Gazing at the painting to find, there, painted people gazing at a painting, suddenly I’m not quite […]
...moreLittle White Lies
Over at the Ploughshares blog, Alex Chertok writes about every author’s necessary little white lies: As adults, we should hold each other’s work to high standards, and our own work to the highest of all. As writers, we shouldn’t settle for a single pale line. But before the poem is written, I say, we should lie to […]
...moreThe Fiction of Work
Most work is not fulfilling, and by the time we finally realize it all the friends we’d like to turn to for support have been scattered across the globe in pursuit of fulfilling work. At Ploughshares, Tim Ellison looks at the world of work in fiction.
...moreGrowing Up in the American Dream
Ploughshares talks to Jennine Capó Crucet about her new novel, Make Your Home Among Strangers, and what it was like growing up with parents who bought into the American Dream: I mean, my parents named me Jennine after the Miss America runner up the year I was born (though spelled differently, I think)—so it goes that deep […]
...moreA List of Literary Teachers
Just in time for back-to-school season, Ploughshares has this list of some of the most memorable teachers in literature.
...moreThe Antithesis of Context
e.v. de cleyre, writing for Ploughshares, offers a look at the art of omission from Rankine to Fitzgerald: what it means to omit something from the story, whether it be context or framework, and the implications of that omission on the reading of a work and the discourse on it.
...moreYour Next Story
WRITER: Thank you. Thank you. Really. Because my whole problem is I’m incapable of noticing things I might want to write about. I walk through this world blind, and it’s not till helpful people shove things in my face and suggest that I write about them that I ever have an idea. Over at the Ploughshares blog, Rebecca Makkai writes […]
...moreGrowing Up with Little Women
Four sisters, each vivid, but composed, really, of just a few brushstrokes. Here, neatly categorized for us before we’ve made it out of the first chapter, are four different ways of being a girl. There’s something tempting about this drawing of lines. For the Ploughshares blog, Clare Beams discusses why Little Women continues to appeal […]
...moreRescuing Asian Art from American Artists
Generations of American writers have approached Asian cultures with the best of intentions but repeatedly missed the mark. How can we rescue Asian artists and thinkers like Hokusai from our own desire to experience them as foreign? How can we experience Hokusai not as the Japanese artist, not as one of the roots of European […]
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