I hadn’t really thought that much about it until a friend—a non-writer friend, for what that might be worth, a musician—pointed it out. I was wrapping up my first year as a PhD student and had invited some folks over for drinks. This friend glanced down at some of the books laying around my sparsely furnished graduate-student living room, picked up a few and read the back covers. “Dude,” he said, “how come all your books are about sad-ass families?” Continue reading →

Ursula K. Le Guin

As fiction’s equivalent of messy chemistry experiments, thought experiments play with ideas until they explode. Most commonly found in—you’ve guessed it—speculative and science fiction, thought experiments explore imaginative possibilities in situations unconstrained by reality.

Whole civilizations can rise and fall within a novel while an experiment simmers in the background; characters play out their individual lives on the grand scale of ideas, which combine to break down fictive paradigms. Unconstrained by the readers’ reality, an author creates a world, or a series of scenes, based upon a Big Idea. This Big Idea can be astonishingly simple, but it is guided by using the story not only to ask deeper questions, but to obtain the results from big experiments.

In this post, I’ll discuss the nature of thought experiments and examine one famous example (The Dispossessed), then proffer suggestions for how close analysis of thought experiments enables you to write your own.

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Welcome to the first ever Ploughshares Fantasy Blog Draft! If you missed our manifesto post, be sure to read it so you understand the rules of the “game.” Today we’ll be introducing our teams, the draft order, and the bracket for the competition. So without further ado, here are our competitors!

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The Books We Teach series will feature primary, secondary, and post-secondary educators and their thoughts about literature in the face of an evolving classroom. Posts will highlight literary innovations in teaching, contemporary literature’s place in pedagogy, and the books that writers teach. In the spirit of educational dynamism, we encourage readers to contribute their thoughts in the comments section.

Matt Bell’s debut novel In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods will be published by Soho Press in June 2013. He is the author of Cataclysm Baby, a novella, and How They Were Found, a collection of fiction. He is the Senior Editor at Dzanc Books, where he edits the literary magazine The Collagist. He teaches creative writing at Northern Michigan University.

Matt was kind enough to chat with me about what he’s teaching at NMU, why he’s teaching it, and how his writing and teaching lives inform each other.

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In our Roundups segment, we’re looking back at all the great posts since the blog started in 2009. We explore posts from our archives as well as other top literary magazines, centered on a certain theme to help you jump-start your week. This week we have posts on writing and music.

For thousands of years writing and music have been entwined (think Greek poetry and lyres). Today, perhaps more now than ever, we are seeing writers writing about music, and writers drawing inspiration from music.

The following is a compilation of some of our favorite posts about writing and music:

Ploughshares Posts:

• Need some good music to write to? “Writing Soundtrack: A Step-by-Step Playlist” and “Ploughshares Playlists: When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Moving” will start you off.

• Ever put on jazz or classical music when you write? Read “Music to Write By.” Continue reading →

Dear Ploughshares,

What if I want all my AWP Boston advice and recommendations gathered in one place?  You’ve published five posts so far, and that’s a little overwhelming.  What’s a conference attendee to do?

Sincerely, Concerned Attendee

Well, AWP attendee, look no further.  Here, for your reading convenience, is a roundup of our AWP focused posts and more from around the web.  Stop by the Ploughshares booth (213) in the Book Fair to say hi!

• Get advice on how to make the most of AWP in “The AWP13 Post You’ve Been Waiting For,” featuring contributions by The Collagist, Kenyon Review, New England Review, The Review Review, Barrelhouse, and Paper Darts.
• Still have questions? Try this list of AWP FAQs from Tin House.
• Find out where to write, and where to drink (in a classy, literary way) in our Boston Litboroughs blog post Part 1 and Part 2. Continue reading →

Bless her heart. That’s what people say in my southern neck of the woods to be half genuine, half patronizing. And that’s exactly what I want to say about Blanche Ebbutt, author of Don’ts for Husbands and Don’ts for Wives, pocket-sized self-help books originally published in England in 1913.

It was the year before everything changed. Even as the First World War loomed, women were already fighting their own war—for the right to vote. Meanwhile, if you were a woman of the upper class, to whom Ebbutt’s books are directed, you married, kept the home and watched your man leave for work. You’d likely find yourself pregnant rather quickly.

In her preface to the Wives book, Ebbutt writes: “It takes a perfect artist to remain married—married in the perfect sense of the term; but most of us have to be content to muddle through.” And to the husbands: “You are neither as bad nor as good a fellow as you might imagine yourself to be. No doubt you know a good deal about women, but (if you are in the early years of your married life) not nearly as much as you will in another decade.”

Ninety-six years after A&C Black first published the manuals, Bloomsbury (who acquired A&C Black in 2000) republished them. Continue reading →

As a recent transplant to New York from Arizona, I’ve been a little obsessed with place lately—about what the landscapes of home show us when we live inside them versus when we’re removed, what happens when we start seeing our surroundings as more than just background noise—so I was delighted to come across Laurie Ann Cedilnik’s story “Wake Turbulence” in issue 71 of West Branch. The story grapples with loneliness and place, what it means to live or grow up near a public tragedy, and how to connect with other humans when physical proximity is close but emotional distance is great.

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