Solos By Genre | Ploughshares

“This thing that had felt so threatening for so long, so jarring in its ragged constancy and intermittence, so irrational, so exhausting, sounded trivial and hysterical as we listened to ourselves trying to describe it.” 

"There is a distinctive cool cinderblock smell to math departments everywhere. Conference posters fluttering on the office doors, the glossy canary-yellow spines of Springer textbooks. A red-bearded man in black socks and sandals walks amiably down the hall carrying a cup of coffee and a pad of paper, a one-armed wristwatch pinned to his breast pocket.

"When my parents died, I inherited all of their photographs and papers as they had inherited their parents’ photographs and papers and so on back a few generations. . . . When an historian looks through archives, it’s often for clues to the things that are not there: lovers, important friendships, deleted sentences, political alliances, and shameful secrets. If the secrets are shameful enough, there’s been an attempt to hide them, but there are always clues.

On September 7, 1978, Bulgarian writer and journalist Georgi Markov was assassinated by the Bulgarian government. Since moving to London in 1970 and working as a newscaster for the BBC’s Foreign Service, he had become one of the most vocal critics of the regime, broadcasting narrative essays about life in Bulgaria.

In 1978 James Alan McPherson made history as the first African-American writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Told from the perspective of one of McPherson’s closest friends and students, “Old School” is a celebration of writing, memory, and true friendship and its importance in our lives. It provides a brief yet touching glimpse into the life of one of the United States’ most distinguished writers.

In 2013, Eli Mandel decided to recreate the 642-mile trek that John Keats completed in the summer of 1818, hoping to learn more about the famous poet who died at the age of twenty-five. As Mandel matches his “ghostly companion’s” journey step-for-step, the moments of discovery turn inward and Mandel is forced to face his own ghosts.

In 1990, the avant-garde jazz musician Sun Ra arrived at Dartmouth to collaborate with the school’s jazz band, where Michael Lowenthal–an anxious, 20-year-old senior–played trumpet. As rehearsals got underway and two musical worlds collided, Lowenthal struggled with the improvisation that Sun Ra’s sparse, yet spiritual, melodies demanded. In this essay, Lowenthal recounts his “otherworldly” experience with the famous jazz star who claimed to be from Saturn.

In this touching and humorous essay, John Philip Drury recounts coming of age during the Vietnam Era. With a low draft number and an exit from college looming, Drury faces the imminent possibility of fighting in a war that he opposes. In the meantime, he tries and abandons a dream to become a songwriter, labors mightily to lose his virginity, and looks to the adult world around him for models of what he most wants to be -- an artist.

When Robert Howard is assigned James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in his Catholic high school, his teacher, a Jesuit priest, announces, "Other people may read about it, but you are LIVING it!" As promised, the young Howard, growing up in 1970s Detroit, feels an intense identification with the protagonist of Joyce's first novel, Stephen Dedalus.

In this meditative and flavorful essay, Alexandra Johnson visits Viggiano and the large, extended Italian family that would have been her own—had she married the youngest son, Giorgio, her old boyfriend. Now married to another man, she returns to the house to help Giorgio improve his English as he thinks about leaving southern Italy and its struggling economy behind.