Introduction

If the novel is the bastard child of two passionately but uneasily matched parents -- poetry and journalism -- then the short story seems clearly able to trace its descent from the distaff side. I grant poetry the female gender, for reasons that there should be no need to state. Or if there is a need, the meeting of it may be a task too impossible in its lineaments for this place and time. There are, of course, plot-driven stories; it is the more usual case that a story be plot-driven; but in its intensity of construction and its relationship to a central image or images, the short story is similar in its formation to the poem.

The short story is usually only about one thing; I am deliberate in my vague use of the words "thing" and "about." The thing can be an object, a character, a moment; the thing can be any number of things. And the about can shape itself in any number of ways. The relationship of the one thing to the other things that surround it is, precisely, the story's form. The short story is like a wagon wheel: the spokes must be connected to the hub, or graceful movement is impossible. Or, again, the short story is like a peacock's tail: at the center is a dense circle of color from which emanates the iridescent, resonant shades that spread out to dazzle and delight. But the source of every tone must be the center, and the story will succeed or fail on its relationship to its own center.

I like to think that this was my primary criterion for the stories I selected: did the story relate properly, that is to say beautifully, to its own center? Another way of saying this is: did the story do what it was trying to do in its own terms?

It pleases me to say that I think the terms presented in this issue of
Ploughshares are quite various. Some of the stories follow a straight narrative line and some do not. Some draw richness from the evocation of exotic or unfamiliar times and places. Some reach back to the dreamy purity or cloudiness of childhood; some find themselves enmeshed in the complex process of discovering or inventing adult relationships in a world which seems to offer only unsatisfying or unsatisfactory models. There are parents and siblings, lovers and enemies, strangers, deaths approached or avoided, embraced or run from. There are reflections on the process of making art, and moments of violence, cruelty, and deceit.

Like poetry, short fiction is deeply dependent upon voice, and as a reader I am always drawn to a voice whose texture is in itself a pleasure to me. I rebel against any closing, or closing of possibilities of voice, and I was heartened that the legacy left to us by the flattening hoof of Hemingway was only sporadically taken up by these writers. Although they chose many different degrees of embellishment, the writers of these stories weren't afraid of the lyrical, weren't drawn to a mindless minimalism that automatically rejected the flourish or the furbelow, the jeweled surface, or the embroidered one. Place, clothing, food, weather, light, find their ways into these stories, reminding us of what it is sometimes too easy to forget: that the writer, as well as the reader, has a body.

I was pleased, as well, to be able to include writers at diverse stages of their careers. Some of the writers are well-known, and have received many deserved laurels for their fiction. Some appear here for the first time; to be able to say that you have given a gifted writer her or his first public appearance is a particular joy. In one case, a writer has published in this issue of
Ploughshares for the first time in over fifty years. All of these writers moved me by the originality and acuteness of their vision, by the evidence they give that the short story is lively, only waiting for the proper abode to shelter and nourish its life.