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Juneteenth and Some of Its Books
Today is June 19. For those that don’t know, this is a holiday celebrated in some parts of America as Juneteenth. Also known as Freedom Day, it marks the day that the Union army arrived in Texas in...
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Fantasy Blog Draft – Round 6 – Final Wildcard Picks!
March Madness has come and gone, as have the NFL draft, the NBA draft lottery, most of the NBA and NHL playoffs, and the start of the MLB season—but the Fantasy Blog Draft competition is only just...
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Ploughshares Fantasy Blog Draft Round 2 – The Mighty Duck Palahniuks vs The...
After a fevered start to the competition, with spirited fights from each side, the competition slowed this last week as Buckle Your Corn Belts and Vonnegut to the Chopper! tortoised their way through...
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From the Slush Pile: Don’t Fall Flat
Alfred Hitchcock says, “Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.” That is absolutely true for the stories that are being passed on to editors. It is your job to tell the story but get rid of the...
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Ploughshares Fantasy Blog Draft Finals: The Holden Caulbabies vs What the...
It’s been a long, tortuous path from the inception of the Fantasy Blog competition to the finals, full of upsets and surprises—but here we are, left with two teams standing after the semifinals three...
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Dancing About Architecture
“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” said Elvis Costello once, probably quoting someone else. And yet, and yet… It is apparently a strong urge to write about (or somehow with)...
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Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems
Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems James Baldwin Beacon Press, April 2014 120 pages $16.00 Buy: book | ebook The cover of Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems features blurbs by none other than Toni Morrison and...
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The Ploughshares Round-Down: The Calvary Film and the Purpose of Art
“[T]he barrier between one’s self and one’s knowledge of oneself is high indeed. There are so many things we would rather not know! – James Baldwin John Michael McDonagh’s film Calvary begins with...
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Back to School Special: Thoughtful Imitation
Mimicry in South African Butterflies – chromolithographic frontispiece of The Colours of Animals by Edward Bagnall Poulton, 1890. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons I didn’t study...
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(Writing) Exercise: Self-compassion
I’m talking here of memory’s difficulty. Difficult not in the way I have to wrack my weak brain to remember what happened, but in the way I’m forced to face that time I let my brother, bleeding from...
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Letter to myself: On fatherhood and poems
A published letter is a strange act. It’s like a whisper made into a loudspeaker. It’s a secret note the town’s tacked onto the city hall bulletin board after the carrier pigeon nosedived into the...
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A Recommendation
Just west of Houston, before you reach Texas’ most remarkable stretch of nothing, there’s a crumbling Latin diner I take my kid brother on Fridays. It is refreshingly un-Yelpable. The family’s owned...
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Grace Paley’s “Wants”: Activism and Civic Involvement for Writers
Photo by Erich Ferdinand After years of dodging PTO meetings and volunteer opportunities, I became involved in a school overcrowding issue in my town because I didn’t want my children’s class sizes...
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Other Countries
Sometimes I have to remind myself that the Black Writer In America is a cosmopolitan entity. The news can do that to you, even in February. Obviously there’s Harlem, and before that, there was the...
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Booze, Books, and Boys: Literary Friendships Throughout History
Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker Oscar Wilde was the son of Lady Jane, an eclectic socialite who collected artists like trophies. Bram Stoker was a frequent feature in her Saturday night salons, although...
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“Why not now go towards the things I love?”: The Aftermath of Being Queer
Some part of me broke last Sunday. I kept scrolling this week through the news articles that listed the victims of the Orlando massacre, the pain in my heart growing with each name. It seems we’re...
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My Uncle’s Books
A year and a half ago, my uncle Chuck died unexpectedly. My family wanted me to have his books because I was a reader like he had been, and I was also a writer. And I wanted the books, especially his...
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Reading in a Brown Body
During my first week of college, at the University of Iowa, several of us students were playing cards in my dorm room, when, unrelated to the game or to the conversation, one of the other freshmen...
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Writ in Water: Millimeters to the End of the World
How do you write about the end of the world? Or avoiding the apocalypse? The drying up of our water or our overdue adaptation to living with less? How do you imagine—and make real—global superstorms...
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What Country?
“What country, friends, is this?” Viola demands of a naval captain upon arriving on a foreign shore in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. After being told “Illyria,” she says, “And what should I do in...
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