Ploughshares
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Playing a Book
When I got older, I discovered that this sense of play wasn’t limited to the young. There were plenty of adults out there writing radically experimental books formally guided by the notion that a book could be more than a…
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Notes on Craft
“Craft” is a fluid term; used in aeronautics and astronautics to speak of a single vessel, or the skill of deception, or a verb analogous to “make.” Craft in literature is comprised of narrative elements and literary devices: the nuts…
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Reading Poetry Aloud to Keep It Alive
So if, like me, you’re often inclined to bemoan the state of poetry, to assume it is shamefully neglected by our culture and by the young in particular, then do yourself a favor and don’t just read, listen. Take yourself…
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Repeating Death
Placed after a mention of death or dying, Kurt Vonnegut’s “So it goes” refrain throughout Slaughterhouse Five utilizes repetition to explore the inevitability of death. Over at the Ploughshares blog, E.V. De Cleyre considers how Kurt Vonnegut uses repetition in relation…
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Writing Outward to Write Inward
I wrote toward the place that scared me. What happened was that the wellspring from which I wrote ended up nourishing my life. Writing changed me, composed me—behavior and all. For the Ploughshares blog, Alex Chertok explores his fears and…
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Reading Between the Lines
Here is what I mean by meta-fiction: all these books, stories, and bodies of work contain made-up books and bodies of work. Some are based on real books. Some are making fun of real books, a little bit, gently. Some…
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Demystifying Stereotypes
What exactly is a “stereotype”? Over at the Ploughshares blog, Brett Beasley explains what the word really means, and where it comes from, with a little help from Oscar Wilde.
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Building a World with All Kinds of Violence
A good story resides in a world all its own, and I wanted to have the reader understand quickly what this world was like, a world where some people like Toño “La Perra” Becerra have a hard on for violence…
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Leave the Despair to Other Publishers
I don’t mind dark, but I’m not much interested in “despair and die.” I’ll leave that to other publishers. If a reader is going to invest the time and energy into a book I publish I’d prefer there was some…
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The Power of “We”
We amplifies. That’s part of why writers are drawn to the collective voice, I think: it’s louder. For the Ploughshares blog, Clare Beams examines the use of the collective voice in literature.
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Click Here to Read
The form is far more important than the content. They don’t even really have to match. If you’re talking about an author people are a little less familiar with, you’ll want some black-and-white landscape photography or a 19th century painting,…
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A Formula for Imagination
At the Ploughshares blog, Lara Palmquist discusses Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (The Workshop of Potential Literature), or Oulipo, a collective of mathematicians and writers who have been creating works of literature from self-imposed restrictions and formulas since 1960.