Monthly Archive:: January 2011
Sh*t My Mom Says: Women, Men, and Humor
Ellen, Rosanne, Whoopi, Tina. They’re women, they tell jokes, and we’re on a first-name basis. These comedians have imposing brains but often focus on their thighs: they write frequently about their relationship with food, this being one theme that connects them. On the popular NBC sitcom 30 Rock, Tina
Third Spacing-It in Poetry
Thanks to a suggestion from a friend, I’ve been reading a lot of Homi K. Bhabha’s work on Postcolonialism and communicative politics. I’m not really built for critical theory, so I started with Bhabha’s best-known text, The Location of Culture. The fundamental tenet of the book (and this is
Interview with Joel Brouwer
Like anyone, I have to contend with my own stupidity all the time—forgetting things, ignoring essentials, not listening—but one of my latest and most grossly idiotic moves was waiting until 2010 to read Joel Brouwer. That’s too kind, actually: I didn’t wait, it wasn’t like I’d seen his stuff
Red Pens and Other Ego-Paring Tools
In “Dr. Deneau’s Punishment,” one of eleven excellent short stories in Lori Ostlund’s Flannery O’Connor award-winning collection The Bigness of the World, the title character despairs over the current trend in American schools to reward students for their mediocrity. Under the new regime of the militantly optimistic, the red
Patterns and Need
Our third guest blogger, Adrian Matejka, is a poet whose poem “Eighty-Eight Days in My Veins” appears in our Winter 2010-11 issue edited by Terrance Hayes. Adrian will post on Fridays through April. Paul Hegarty said, “Noise is a system of judgments.” He was talking about the qualitative distinctions
Interview with Ed Skoog
Weston Cutter, our second guest blogger, will post on Wednesdays through April. Weston is a poet whose poem “The Invention of Color vs. The Song of EA” appears in our Winter 2010-11 issue edited by Terrance Hayes. Ed Skoog’s freakishly excellent debut Mister Skylight was one of 2009’s books
Dead Stories: When to Say When
This week we welcome three new Get Behind the Plough bloggers to Ploughshares. The first is fiction writer Christine Sneed, whose story “The Prettiest Girls” appears in our Winter 2010-11 issue edited by Terrance Hayes. Christine will post on Mondays through April. Guest post by Christine Sneed The harsh
An Editing Strategy in Winter
The best way to write is hoeing corn or chopping wood or milking cows or walking the roads. The boots I’ve worn out writing books! – Elliott Merrick Guest post by Megan Mayhew Bergman The last light falls across my backyard. The ground is covered in a