Ploughshares Spring 2010 Guest-Edited by Elizabeth Strout

The Spring 2010 issue of Ploughshares, guest-edited by Elizabeth Strout. Ploughshares, a journal of new writing, is guest-edited serially by prominent writers who explore different personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles.

This issue of Ploughshares features selections of poetry and prose by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Elizabeth Strout. In her introduction, she writes, “The first year in college the discovery of those literary journals seemed like my secret alone. No one seemed to talk about them! And so I didn’t either. But I would slip one from the holder and go over by the window and read with hungry happiness…Abundance is the word I think of now. Such an abundance of life: the tiny and the huge–all there. Waiting.”

The issue includes new fiction by Richard Bausch, Mary Gordon, Amy Hempel, Joyce Carol Oates, and E. V. Slate; poetry by Amy Beeder, Paula Bohince, Edward Hirsch, David Kirby, Bridget Lowe, and Katha Pollitt; a Plan B essay by Antonya Nelson; book reviews; and a profile of Elizabeth Strout by Ladette Randolph.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION
Elizabeth Strout

EDITOR PROFILE
by Ladette Randolph

FICTION

Richard Bausch, “We Belong Together”
Lisa Cupolo, “Long Division”
Mary Gordon, “Ars Longa”
Amy Hempel, “Greed”
Carol Keeley, “Cremains”
Marjorie Kemper, “A Memo from Your Temp”
Scott Nadelson, “Dolph Schayes’s Broken Arm”
Joyce Carol Oates, “Distance”
E. V. Slate, “The Sailor”
Kathryn Staley, “Marty”

POETRY by

Amy Beeder
Dan Bellm
Justin Bigos
Paula Bohince
Cathy Smith Bowers
Ha Kiet Chau
Bruce Cohen
Michael Collier
Carol V. Davis
Jehanne Dubrow
Robert Farnsworth
Stephen Gibson
Doreen Gildroy
Bob Hicok
Edward Hirsch
David Kirby
Mark Kraushaar
Dana Levin
Bridget Lowe
Jynne Dilling Martin
Micha