Introduction

At the beginning of the process of reading fiction for this issue of
Ploughshares, I worried briefly -- foolishly -- that I might not find enough stories to fill my allotted pages. Now, months later, my single regret is that I didn't have space for more of the fine work I had the opportunity to read.

One hears much lately about the problems that writers of literary work face: the bottom-line corporate climate of New York publishing houses; the tyrannical power of corporate bookstore chains; and the even more dire predictions that books -- in fact, the printed word itself -- will soon be obsolete. From that perspective these are bleak and threatening times for writers and readers of literary fiction.

But to my mind these are also tremendously exciting times in which to write. Writers, perhaps, to some degree, out of impatience with the compartmentalization one finds in academia and numerous writing programs, have stepped up the exploration of the borders between poetry and fiction, and fiction and nonfiction. Forms such as the short-short and the nonfiction novel are not only vehicles that allow for this, but symptoms of a deeper desire on the part of writers to situate themselves not in categories but along a fluid continuum -- to be able to move Hermes-like through various literary dimensions.

I must confess that I thought about turning this issue into a forum on prose forms. I visualized a compendium of stories, tales, personal essays, meditations, memoirs, fables, prose poems, short-shorts, and, if possible, heretofore unnamed forms and anti-forms. (Perhaps, the short-short still belongs among the unnamed, as it's a cumbersome term that no one seems quite satisfied with. Grace Paley once quipped to me that short-short sounds more like a stammer than a literary form. Finding a label for them seems to demand nearly as much invention as writing them, and so we have sudden fictions, flash fictions, snap fictions, four-minute fictions. Two women students from the Warren Wilson program who studied with me took to referring to the short prose pieces they were writing as jockeys, and David Foster Wallace calls the short piece of his in this issue a nano-story.)

But as I began to read the fiction submitted to the magazine -- I solicited only a small fraction of the work that appears here --

I quickly discarded any leaning towards a particular agenda. Or, more accurately, I was quickly
seduced away from programmatic notions. Seduced not just by the authentic mystery, the vibrant and sometimes gorgeous imagery, and the guileless wisdom that pervades these stories, but also by laughter. What a strange, all too rare, and welcome feeling to hear yourself, an audience of one, laughing uproariously in an echoey room. (The story I was reading was "Bad Jews," and, not content to remain an audience of one, I took it into my writing classes the next day to read aloud and shamelessly took the gratitude of my students' laughter as if
I deserved it.)

As numerous prior guest editors of
Ploughshares have inescapably remarked, I picked stories that moved me; stories that seemed to have compelled their authors to write them; stories that I thought were good -- brilliant in some cases -- and all of them beautiful.

A few more words by way of introduction on a couple of the pieces in this issue. The four short chapters by Kelly Simon are designed to function as what she calls independent "memory links"; they're excerpted from an unpublished book-length memoir.

"Islands," the story by A. Hemon, is one the earliest stories he's written in English. Mr. Hemon is Bosnian, and he settled in the United States, where he was traveling in 1992, when the war in Bosnia prevented his return. He wrote "Islands" in the spring of 1995, after enduring a three-year period in which he found that he could no longer write fiction in his native language, but could not write yet in English, either.