Ploughshares Fall 1993 Guest-Edited by Sue Miller

by Sue Miller (Editor), Michael Dorris, Mary Mcgarry Morris, Ann Packer, Fred Leebron

Overview

The Fall 1993 issue of Ploughshares, guest edited by Sue Miller. Ploughshares, a journal of new writing, is guest edited serially by prominent writers who explore different and personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles.

This fiction edition of Ploughshares compiles fourteen stories that center on the concept of time. Acclaimed novelist Sue Miller (The Good Mother, While I Was Gone) selects short stories that play with linear structure and transcend the traditional way we perceive time in fiction. In her introduction, Miller writes, "To move beyond this present-tense recital of events--as these stories do--to selectively shape a presentation of events playing out over time; to point to the connections, the results, the meaning, is to deal with consequence. And, I'd argue, to make consequential fiction." Featuring work by Michael Dorris, Robin Hemley, Laura Glen Louis, T.M. McNally, Mary McGarry Morris, Ann Packer, Elizabeth Tallent, and Jonathan Wilson.

INTRODUCTION
Sue Miller

FICTION
"Never, Ever, Always" by Janet Desaulniers
"From Shanghai" by Jonathon Wilson
"Fur" by Laura Glen Louis
"Insomnia" by T.M. McNally
"Other Wars" by Wendy Counsil
"Shining Agate" by Michael Dorris
"A Man of Substance" by Mary McGarry Morris
"Lovelock" by Fred G. Leebron
"Nerves" by Ann Packer
"My Father's Bawdy Song" by Robin Hemley
"The Life of the Mind" by Eileen McGuire
"Crooked Letter" by G. Travis Regier
"Kid Gentle" by Elizabeth Tallent
"Photopia" by Peter Gordon

Product Details

BN ID:	2940016565071
Publisher:	Ploughshares / Emerson College
Publication date:	08/15/1993
Series:	Ploughshares , #1923
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	798,465
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Since her iconic first novel, The Good Mother in 1986, Sue Miller has distinguished herself as one of our most elegant and widely celebrated chroniclers of family life, with a singular gift for laying bare the interior lives of her characters.

While not strictly speaking autobiographical, Miller's fiction is, nonetheless, shaped by her experiences. Born into an academic and ecclesiastical family, she grew up in Chicago's Hyde Park and went to college at Harvard. She was married at 20 and held down a series of odd jobs until her son Ben was born in 1968. She separated from her first husband in 1971, subsequently divorced, and for 13 years was a single parent in Cambridge, Massachusetts, working in day care, taking in roomers, and writing whenever she could.

In these early years, Miller's productivity was directly proportional to her ability to win grants and fellowships. An endowment in 1979 allowed her to enroll in the Creative Writing Program at Boston University. A few of her stories were accepted for publication, and she began teaching in the Boston area. Two additional grants in the 1980s enabled her to concentrate on writing fulltime. Published in 1986, her first novel became an international bestseller.

Since then, success has followed success. Two of Miller's books (The Good Mother and Inventing the Abbots) have been made into feature films; her 1990 novel Family Pictures was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; Oprah Winfrey selected While I Was Gone for her popular Book Club; and in 2004, a first foray into nonfiction -- the poignant, intensely personal memoir The Story of My Father -- was widely praised for its narrative eloquence and character dramatization.

Miller is a distinguished practitioner of "domestic fiction," a time-honored genre stretching back to Jane Austen, Henry James, and Leo Tolstoy and honed to perfection by such modern literary luminaries as John Updike, Flannery O'Connor, and Richard Ford. A careful observer of quotidian detail, she stretches her novels across the canvas of home and hearth, creating extraordinary stories out of the quiet intimacies of marriage, family, and friendship. In an article written for the New York Times "Writers on Writing" series, she explains: "For me everyday life in the hands of a fine writer seems ... charged with meaning. When I write, I want to bring a sense of that charge, that meaning, to what may fairly be called the domestic."

Hometown:

Boston, Massachusetts

Date of Birth:

November 29, 1943

Place of Birth:

Chicago, Illinois

Education:

B.A., Radcliffe College, 1964; M.A.T., Wesleyan U., 1965; Ed.M., Harvard U., 1975; M.A. Boston U., 1980