Introduction

The six stories in this issue speak for themselves -- forcefully, lucidly -- and whatever I might say about them is irrelevant to their value as literature. The very notion of an "introduction," at least in this context, strikes me as peculiar to the brink of weird. A good story introduces itself, stakes its own artistic claims, connects itself both to the world and to literary matters. Obviously, since I selected these pieces, I am excited about their debut in
Ploughshares, yet all I can do is urge that the coming pages be turned with care, hopefulness, and an open heart.

In a way, I am now a cheerleader. Lee K. Abbott, for example, is a writer whose work never fails to grip my heart, and "A Creature Out of Palestine," which appears here, is a story that makes me do cartwheels and yell, "Wow -- read this!" It's the
wow that matters. Not the
how. I could elaborate, with a gun at my head, on Abbott's use of voice and irony and structure, but in the end such abstraction would amount to the unweaving of a well-made tapestry, displaying threads, destroying fabric. With good writing, I think, the most profound response is finally a sigh, or a gasp, or holy silence. As evidence, I offer the last sentence of "A Creature Out of Palestine: "He honked
adiós, and for a time I listened to him go south, his a motor with rumble enough to make you smile, until there was only silence and me, blessed as are the dumb and well-fed, alone at my place." I have no desire to analyze such prose. Voice, sure. Irony, sure. But what about goose bumps? But what about chills and tremors? It's the woven
wow that endures.

Similarly, in the case of "Easy Lay" by Joyce Carol Oates, I could devote enthusiastic paragraphs to issues of narrative strategy, to the author's cunning mix of reliable/unreliable narrator, but to do so would be a terrible disservice to the power and poignancy of the fiction itself. Better to yell
Bravo at a line like this one: "Girls in my neighborhood were jealous of me the way their mothers were jealous of my mother with her blond hair, her face and figure and clothes and bronze Cougar." The pathos shines in a single vivid sentence; theme curls around physicality; reliability becomes not a just literary but a fully human problem, a chancre of the heart.

As I reread the stories by Janet Desaulniers and Gina Berriault, I feel a little dumb -- that is, struck dumb, speechless -- both unwilling and unable to say intelligent things. Intelligence isn't appropriate. Stomach squeezes mind. Desaulniers's "After Rosa Parks" leaves me sad and helpless, almost forlorn, almost queasy. As with Abbott's story, my eyes keep returning to the concluding sentence: "She knew she should turn around, start on dinner, but she stood a moment longer, staring out at the dark, and felt rising in her own mind the strangest and most fearsome comfort."
Fearsome comfort! How do you analyze language like that? To what end? At what cost? Gina Berriault's "Who Is It Can Tell Me Who I Am?" has a similar effect on my intellectual appetite. I don't
want to think. I want to feel, and keep feeling, as Berriault's prose does its lap and splash: "Further, he was a rarity for choosing to reside in what he called the broken heart of the city, or the spleen of it, the Tenderloin, and choosing not to move when the scene worsened."

I could cite equally deft, equally compelling sentences in the stories by Robert Cohen and Edward Hardy. In fact, I
will. Cohen: "Pain, in her experience, never disappeared; it merely retreated for a while and then came back when least convenient in another form." Hardy: "Some days he was barely a let's-get-out-of-the-driveway sort of person."

But what's the point? The art in these six stories does its own internal explication, as art must, defining itself through the song of storytelling. If we like the music, we'll sometimes find ourselves humming a few bars, which is what I've done in this introduction.