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Articles by DeWitt Henry
Fall 2001
Thirtieth Anniversary Issue The Fall 2001 issue of Ploughshares, guest-edited by Donald Hall. Ploughshares, a journal of new writing, is guest-edited serially by prominent writers who explore different personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles. This double issue, guest-edited by poet Donald Hall, marks the 30th anniversary of Ploughshares.
IN-PERSON: Poetry Night with DeWitt Henry, Caitlin Krause, and Adam Scheffler
April is National Poetry Month and Wellesley Books will be hosting events throughout the month. First up is an evening with poets DeWitt Henry, Caitlin Krause, and Adam Scheffler. ------------------------------------- ABOUT THE AUTHORS DeWitt Henry DeWitt Henry’s most recent books are FOUNDLINGS: FOUND POEMS FROM PROSE, (Gazebo Books/Life Before Man, 2022) and RESTLESS FOR WORDS: POEMS (Finishing Line Press, 2023).
Fall 2022
The Fall 2022 Issue of Ploughshares features longform work by E. K. Ota, Ben Stroud, Daniel Peña, and others. Title Genre Epidemics of Ordinary Time Snapshots of a Life in Flight: An Essay in Cardinal Directions Isabella; or, The Coin Purse Zara The Great Naked and Afraid Baking Show The Paper Artist The Land of Long Days Budapest Number 474 In Praise of José Watanabe
Rabbit - Plume
RABBIT Regard the luckless cotton-tail, cat-sized, brown fur, an adult survivor from our river path or nearby woods. While foraging in last week’s blizzard, which had emptied the mall’s tarmac, she’d been scooped into an avalanche by a front-loading plow, smothered, crushed, and lifted as it surged; then dumped into a drift against the chain-link fence. That’s my guess. I walked plowed streets to the mall’s gym; took a side street between apartment buildings.
Foundlings - Gazebo Books
The ingenious and uncanny borrowings in Foundlings: Found Poems from Prose remix and redub the literary canon with dazzling insight and wit. So much of the magic of the “found” poem resides in the acuity of the finder. In its textured approach to classic works, Foundlings is a powerfully inventive bricolage showcasing, quizzing and subverting literary debates about authorship and canonicity.
From the Archive: An Interview with Richard Yates
Reprinted from Issue 3 of Ploughshares, Winter 1972. (guest edited by James Randall) Richard Yates was born in Yonkers, New York, in 1926. He graduated from the Avon School in 1944, served in the last years of World War II, and until 1952 worked at a variety of jobs, ranging from newspaper rewrite man to freelance ghost writer to publicity writer.
About James Alan McPherson
James Alan McPherson mocks the Horatio Alger aspect of his background via the young writer-narrator of his first published story, "Gold Coast" (an Atlantic Monthly First in 1968), in a passage where Robert dreams that "there would be capsule biographies of my life on dust jackets of many books, all proclaiming: ?...He knew life on many levels.
Boston
My father found himself in Boston once, ten thousand myths away from Oklahoma. I think of him standing on the rim of the Atlantic, the horizon vertical as it describes the Upperworld and the Underworld. It was the water that attracted him, as if he were some kin to the Watermonster, as if he'd heard the stories and the monster was the only one who could approximate the turmoil of knowledge. And there was a woman involved.
Remembering Henry Bromell
I met the screenwriter and novelist Henry Bromell, born on this date in 1947, through Tillie Olsen in 1973. He was already publishing stories in the New Yorker at the time, and had been her student at Amherst College in 1970 (Tillie was now in residence at MIT). I had written her from Ploughshares, praising her debut collection, Tell Me A Riddle (1961), and asking her for new work. Tillie responded and alerted to me to Bromell, and also to Scott Turow and Fred Pfeil, also from Amherst.
Jennifer Acker and DeWitt Henry
Harvard Book Store welcomes acclaimed writers JENNIFER ACKER, the founding editor of The Common magazine, and DeWITT HENRY, the founding editor of Ploughshares, for a discussion of their new books, The Limits of the World: A Novel and Sweet Marjoram: Notes and Essays. About The Limits of the World The Chandaria family—emigrants from the Indian-enclave of Nairobi—have managed to flourish in America.
Homeplace (Emerging Writer's Contest Winner: NONFICTION)
In nonfiction, our winner is Emily Strasser for her essay “Homeplace.” The nonfiction judge, Jabari Asim, writes: “In ‘Homeplace,’ Emily Strasser investigates family history and the remnants of a community transformed by our government’s covert development of nuclear weaponry. With careful scrutiny she sifts through long-simmering secrets, exposing the large and small costs of a dubious progress achieved in the name of patriotism and conquest.
Apples | Ploughshares
Lyle was diabetic and the doctors had already lopped off two of his toes. He moved sometimes unsteadily, but he was a strong man with big hands and most people paid attention to his wide chest and knotty arms. He owned a big smile and rubbed his hands together when he was happy and this made other people happy too, and in church on Sundays one might observe the people he greeted almost mimicking his movements with oversized grins on their shining faces.
DeWitt Henry's SWEET MARJORAM
The founder of Ploughshares, DeWitt Henry recently published Sweet Marjoram, a book of essays following a series of nonfiction books and memoirs, as well as essays.
I Looked For You, I Called Your Name
His parents placed him on a Greyhound with twenty dollars, a plastic bag full of asparagus from the small garden out back, a satchel containing his meager summer clothes, and a letter. The asparagus he tossed in a trashcan when the bus made its first stop in Pennsylvania. The letter he opened before they’d even left the station, and in Ohio he paid the driver five dollars to write a new one.
Remembering James Alan McPherson
I first met Jim McPherson when he was twenty-five to my twenty-six and finishing his law degree at Harvard. A mutual friend introduced us because I had just returned to my Harvard PhD program from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Jim was considering taking an MFA there. I’d read none of Jim’s work and had no idea that he’d published in the Atlantic, had studied with Alan Lebowitz, had been mentored by Edward Weeks, and was finishing his first collection, Hue and Cry.
Evan S. Connell: A Profile
"My own experience [as a writer] indicates that it is mostly a career of rejection and lost illusions," Evan Connell wrote in a letter to me three years ago. Considering the critical acclaim he's enjoyed over the past forty years (nominations for the National Book Award in both fiction and poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a nomination for the National Book Critics' Circle Award for non-fiction, among other honors), it's an oddly melancholy statement.
Characters - Ploughshares
Flo knew the best way to kill a chicken and it was this. Hang it head downwards, hold on to it, and go in with your knife. Slit the roof of the mouth and the upper part of the beak. Go for the veins that cross each other at the back of the throat. If you do this right, your knife will strike a groove. That's when you hit the brain. The chicken gives a big squawk that once you've heard it you can never forget or mistake and it shivers all over and gives itself up.
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