Ploughshare n., pl. ploughshares 1. The sharp edge of a plough that cuts a furrow in the earth. 2a. A variation of the name of the pub, the Plough & Stars, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Ploughshares was founded. 2b. The pub's name was inspired by the Sean O'Casey play about the Easter Rising of the Irish "citizen army." The army's flag contained a plough, representing the things of the earth, hence practicality; and stars, the ideals by which the plough is steered. 3. A shared, collaborative, community effort that has endured for thirty-five years. 4. A literary journal that has been energized by a desire for harmony, peace, and reform. Once, that spirit motivated civil rights marches, war protests, and student activism. Today, it still inspires a desire for beating swords into ploughshares, but through the power and beauty of the written word.
It sounds like folklore, but Ploughshares really did start in a bar. On Massachusetts Avenue, between Central and Harvard squares in Cambridge, the Plough and Stars was a pub known more for the Guinness and Bass on tap than the literati. But in 1970, a group of writers gathered around DeWitt Henry, a Harvard Ph.D. student, and Peter O'Malley, an Irish expatriate who was part owner of the pub. Henry, who had been raised on Philadelphia's Main Line, had edited the undergraduate literary magazine at Amherst College and had attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop for two years. He was finishing his dissertation on Shakespeare, but he was a fiction writer at heart who also had a long-standing inclination for the publishing trade (he'd had his own hand printing press in high school). O'Malley was well-versed in a number of subjects, having studied law at the University of Dublin and music at Berklee and Harvard, and he had been bred in the literary traditions of the Irish Revival. So this idea that was being bandied about in the Plough and Stars — that the group should put out a literary publication of their own — not only engaged the two men, but seemed relatively feasible.There was no real literary outlet for young writers in Cambridge or Boston then, and everyone was tired of waiting for the trade publishing world to fill the void, both regionally and nationally — a restlessness fueled by the general movements for counterculture and reform at the time. "A new generation of writers was coming of age, but the commercial publishing industry was losing touch," says O'Malley. "The seventies homogenized cultural options. And we found ourselves basically standing up for that single individualist that argued intelligently the point."
At first the founding group considered issuing a broadside series, but then opted for a full-fledged journal. The mission was to act as a catalyst for a new literary community in New England, and foster readings, book fairs, and support for other independent publishers. Mainly, though, they wanted to wake up the staid publishing and university establishments and force them to recognize the viability of contemporary writers and their works, the richness and diversity of styles and concerns being explored. The group at the Plough and Stars also had faith in the public, that there was more of an openness to new voices in serious poetry and fiction than was allowed, and that people would welcome Ploughshares. The magazine would help develop, the founders believed, a larger movement across the country, a small-press revolution that was being spawned and nurtured by the National Endowment for the Arts.
But the question became, What kind of magazine? And who would edit it? With what sort of aesthetic values? Besides Henry and O'Malley, who were designated co-directors, there was a core group that included fellow Harvard students, Iowa Workshop graduates, New York School and Bowery veterans, and experimental Black Mountain poets. It was obvious they'd never be able to reach an editorial consensus. "We didn't agree with each other about whom to celebrate or even much about each other's work," Henry recounts. "We were competing in the sense of going after work to support our individual tastes and convictions, and it became clear that the magazine, as a cooperative effort, must embody controversy, and must in its format involve the question, rather than any one final opinion, of what is good." Thus, they settled on the novel concept of a revolving editorship, with each member taking a turn as the editor of an issue and the others given a certain number of pages for individual agendas. The magazine, in essence, was edited by committee, using a point system to vote on manuscripts, with the editor of the moment acting as arbitrator. Not only was each issue representative of an internal debate over tastes and forms, but each successive issue also spoke to those before it with a new, collective, often contradictory voice.
Peter O'Malley raised $2,000 for the first issue. Ploughshares hung a shingle, invited submissions, and six hundred manuscripts promptly arrived at the pub. Henry pasted up galleys and stripped negatives at a South End printshop, and Vol. 1, No. 1, of Ploughshares — 126 pages of poetry, fiction, and line drawings — was published in September 1971, with a print run of 1,000. About six hundred were sold for two dollars each. Over the next three years, three more issues were published, with the round table of editors regularly including Lloyd Schwartz, Ellen Wilbur, James Randall, Thomas Lux, David Gullette, Fanny Howe, Norman Klein, George Starbuck, Robert Pinsky, Aram Saroyan, Jane Shore, Bruce Bennett, George Kimball, and William Corbett.
Two issues in 1974 significantly changed the format, however, and were precursors to the way Ploughshares is edited today. DeWitt Henry, in Vol. 2, No. 2, wanted to use the issue to make a statement that realism in contemporary fiction wasn't moribund, and, as a solo editor, he proved his assertion with stories by Andre Dubus, Brian Moore, Tim O'Brien, and Richard Yates.
Another watershed was Frank Bidart's issue, Vol. 2, No. 4. Invited by Henry and O'Malley to join Ploughshares and given full editorial control, Bidart solicited work from Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Richard Howard, Mark Strand, Helen Vendler, and Octavio Paz (translated by Elizabeth Bishop). In addition, there was a new translation by Jonathan Galassi of Eugenio Montale's masterpiece, Xenia, which was then out of print in English, accompanied by an explication of the poem by F. R. Leavis. Bidart's issue would have been a turning point for Ploughshares just in the breadth and quality of work selected, but it had an equally important impact on how Ploughshares was produced. Bidart funded the redesign of the magazine, changing the layout and typefaces, commissioning artwork, and enforcing rigid standards of copy editing and proofing. An example: when the issue was printed, Robert Lowell's poem "In the Ward" just didn't look right, and a typo was discovered. Out of pocket, Bidart had the spine of finished copies stripped, the poem reset, and the pages rebound.
From that point on, Ploughshares redefined its editorial procedures and its mission. The principal mandates — to offer different opinions on what is valid and important in contemporary literature, and to discover and advance significant literary talent — remained the same, but guest editors, prestigious poets and writers who were increasingly selected from outside the local Ploughshares circle, now had complete editorial autonomy, a policy which remains today. Over the years, the aggregate list of editors has included Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Rita Dove, James Alan McPherson, Philip Levine, Gerald Stern, Raymond Carver, Rosellen Brown, Maxine Kumin, Donald Hall, Marilyn Hacker, Yusef Komunyakaa, Mark Doty, Richard Ford, Sherman Alexie, and Lorrie Moore. Ploughshares editors have been the recipients of Nobel and Pulitzer prizes, National Book Awards, MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships, and numerous other honors.
By its tenth anniversary, Ploughshares had gained a national reputation as a magazine of real influence, primarily for the variety of views and works presented by its guest editors, for challenging provincial or fashionable tastes, and, in particular, for showcasing unknown and underpromoted writers. The track record of "discoveries" by Ploughshares has become its trademark. The critic William Pritchard calls the magazine "the major organ in the country where new talent — both in fiction and in poetry — may be encountered." Some of the writers whose first or early works have appeared in Ploughshares are Thomas Lux, John Irving, Russell Banks, Sue Miller, Mona Simpson, Ethan Canin, Tim O’Brien, Robert Pinsky, and Jayne Anne Phillips.
Throughout its history, Ploughshares was and continues to be hailed for its consistent quality — no small feat considering the logistical difficulties of the guest-editor format, which requires new works to be selected in a cohesive fashion for each issue, like an anthology. Ploughshares has had more selections in The Best American Short Stories than any other literary journal in the past ten years (a record four out of the twenty stories in the 2001 edition), and nearly every year, stories, poems, and essays published in Ploughshares have been reprinted in annuals such as The Best American Poetry, The O. Henry Awards, and The Pushcart Prize.
All of this success has been surprising, in light of the magazine's modest resources. For the first six years, the magazine operated out of DeWitt Henry's second bedroom, and no one received a salary of any sort. Finally, in the late seventies, Ploughshares was able to secure a permanent office, though the storefront space in the blue-collar suburb of Watertown was hardly luxurious. Financially, the magazine still existed from one printing bill to the next, depending almost entirely on individual donations, volunteerism, and grants from the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines, the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities, and, later, the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1989, Ploughshares became affiliated with Emerson College, a premiere communications and performing arts college in Boston and host to one of the best M.F.A. programs in creative writing in the country. It was a significant development — that allowed fiscal stability and expansion of paid staff. The following year, Ploughshares received the first of three large grants from the Wallace-Reader’s Digest Funds, and thereafter came rapid growth, state-of-the-art computers, a new design, and aggressive marketing campaigns.
Ploughshares has undergone many changes over the years. But from its humble beginnings in founding editor DeWitt Henry’s spare bedroom, to its storefront office between a pizzeria and a dry cleaner’s, to its current home at Emerson College under the influence of previous editor-in-chief Don Lee to current editor-in-chief, Ladette Randolph, one thing hasn’t changed: the love of literature, and the desire to publish the best fiction and poetry Ploughshares can find.