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Three Excerpts from Spring ’10 Fiction
We have shifted gears to the Spring 2010 Ploughshares–look at the new color scheme on our home page! As a bonus to our loyal blog readers, here are three brief excerpts from pieces Elizabeth Strout...
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Roundup: Writing Centers
As we launch a new blog format for the new year, we’re also looking back at all the great posts since the blog started in 2009. Our roundups explore the archives and gather past posts around a certain...
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Grant Boxing Your Favor: On Joyce Carol Oates’ On Boxing
Really did enjoy her time with Iron Mike. Under Review: On Boxing by Joyce Carol Oates (2006, Harper Perennial, 271 pages) It’s an awesome and unlikely image: Joyce Carol Oates, the gaunt and whispery...
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Walking to Write
Avenue of Oaks, SC. 2013. Melanie Masson. It should be no surprise that walking relieves stress and anxiety and increases creativity, but now a recent study at Stanford University has found that...
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Between Optimism and Pessimism: How to Set Our Baby Monitors?
Pessimism is not particularly hard. I thought of this last month when I spent an hour in my brother’s kitchen near the baby monitor through which I could hear my poor twenty-two-month-old niece hacking...
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The Words Beneath the Sound: Music Inspired by Literature
As Virginia Woolf famously observed, the best writing often begins with a rhythmical “wave in the mind,” an inner tempo around which syntax and diction are arranged, a guiding beat of artistic...
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Fiction Responding to Fiction: Anton Chekhov and Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates’s story “The Lady with the Pet Dog” is a clear response to Anton Chekhov’s classic story “The Lady with the Little Dog.” Almost 75 years separate the two stories, and Oates, though...
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Fifty Shades of Heathcliff: Why WUTHERING HEIGHTS Isn’t a Love Story
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë is often considered one of the great Victorian romances, mentioned in the same breath as classics like Pride and Prejudice and her sister Charlotte’s most famous...
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Crafting A Novelscape
In the words of my own personal goddess of literature, Joyce Carol Oates, one should “…never underestimate the power—benevolent, malevolent, profound and irresistible— of place.” These words make my...
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Big Picture, Small Picture: Context for Joyce Carol Oates’ WHERE ARE YOU...
This blog series, Big Picture, Small Picture, provides a contextual collage for a chosen piece of literature. The information here is culled from newspapers, newsreels, periodicals, and other primary...
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Review: WRITING HARD STORIES by Melanie Brooks
Writing Hard Stories Melanie Brooks Beacon Press, February 7, 2017 248 pp; $16 Preorder: paperback | eBook Reviewed by Amanda Forbes Silva With Writing Hard Stories, Melanie Brooks makes the task of...
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Fiction Responding to Fiction: James Joyce and Joyce Carol Oates
The Fiction Responding to Fiction series considers the influence that a short story has on another writer; previous entries can be found here. All stories that are written as a response to another...
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