Ploughshares Spring 2014 Guest-Edited by Jean Thompson

The Spring 2014 issue of Ploughshares, edited by Jean Thompson. Ploughshares, a journal of new writing, is guest-edited serially by prominent writers who explore different personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles.

Acclaimed novelist and short-story writer Jean Thompson (The Year We Left Home) guest-edits this issue of prose and poetry. As she writes in her introduction, "The thing that gives me hope for the enterprise of writing is the incredible variety and vigor of the terrain." With poets ranging from Erin Belieu to the Uruguayan Tatiana Orono, and stories that move from the eerie (Peter Rock's dreamlike story of a mysterious stalker, "Go-Between") to the comic (Elizabeth McCracken's story "Hungry," about an overweight young girl) to the tragic (Dan Chaon's "What Happened to Us," about a family transformed by fostering a disturbed child), Thompson's issue celebrates writers as they “grapple or dance with the world we live in, reflect or distort it, embrace or escape it.”

The issue also features Jesse Lee Kercheval's Plan B essay about learning to play the accordion ("Welcome to Hell"), and an exploration of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities by John Domini.

INTRODUCTION
Jean Thompson


EDITOR PROFILE
Ladette Randolph


FICTION

"The Rink Girl," by Mark Brazaitis
"What Happened to Us," by Dan Chaon
"The Meat Place," by Kim Chinquee
"The Sky in the Glass-Topped Table," by Elizabeth Evans
"Sublimation," by Jennifer Haigh
"A Christmas Letter," by Robert Hellenga
"Hungry," by Elizabeth McCracken
"Go-Between," by Peter Rock
"Seizure," by Donna Trump

NONFICTION

"Nature Walk," by Stephen Dau

POETRY by

Erin Belieu
Malachi Black
Jae Choi
Alice Derry
Denise Duhamel
Rebecca Morgan Frank
Rick Hilles
James Kimbrell
Kent Leatham
Karyna McGlynn
Campbell McGrath
Sarah Rose Nordgren
Tatiana Oroño
Ben Purkert
Tony Sanders
Jacob Sunderlin
Ronald Wallace
Jonathan Wells
Mike White

MISC

"Welcome to Hell," a Plan B essay by Jesse Lee Kercheval
"Chessboard & Cornucopia: Forty Years of Invisible Cities," a Look2 essay on Italo Calvino by John Domini

POSTSCRIPTS

Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction Winner Elise Juska