Ploughshares
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A 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…
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What’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…
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Consider 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.
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Of 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,…
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Afrofuturist 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…
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Reshaping 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…
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Dissecting 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…
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Subway 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…
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The 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…
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An 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…
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Reading 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…
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Little 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…