One Emotional Ride

The first thing you’re likely to notice upon picking up any issue of Ploughshares – if you’re not already aware, that is – is that every issue is guest-edited by a writer currently of note. That’s how it’s been for years past, and will be for years to come, no doubt, as the practice serves to not only keep the journal fresh and interesting over spans of time, but also to allow both the editorial staff and their faithful readers long glimpses into ideas, themes, styles, and sometimes even specific literary circles that, unprompted, they may never have experienced at all.

The first Ploughshares issue of the year (and a brand new decade, come to think of it), Spring 2010, is guest edited by 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner Elizabeth Strout. Strout’s input on Ploughshares is first evident, sensibly, in her introduction, where she tells briefly of her discovery of literary journals as an unsure-of-herself freshman in college, and the “hungry happiness,” with which she threw herself into them, and learned and grew with their help. Strout tells us how those journals she discovered showed her love, heartbreak, death and perhaps most importantly the “abundance of life: the tiny and the huge – all there. Waiting.”

Naturally, that realization invigorated and strengthened her, and set her on the literary path that she still walks along today.

Strout wastes no time giving us a taste of some of the emotions she experienced in those first journals she found, giving us Richard Bausch’s, "We Belong Together," as the first piece in her very own Ploughshares. Filled to the brim with awkwardness, compromises, and finally complete loss, the story follows Frank, a serial adulterer, for what amounts to a mere 10 (or so) minutes of his life. That’s all the time he needs, however, to lose his wife, to experience a “sudden lifting inside…almost elation,” and to then lose his mistress as well, who left him with the age old, yet ultimately empty explanation (excuse? Promise?): “I think maybe we both need some time…I’ll call you.” Startling, yet very true to life, in its abruptness.

Jynne Dilling Martin’s poem, "Always Throw the First Fish Back Into the Sea", serves to further the idea set forth in Bausch’s story – or rather, precedes it, for how can you experience loss without first having something to lose? Martin opens the poem practically hurling that sentiment at the reader: "The world resembles a phantom vessel destined/ to sail but never reach a port. The kidnapping victim/ bound to a sawmill tries to loosen the ropes in vain/ as electric sparks shower down, unsure if help is on the way."

With that, Martin illuminates the sense of complete listlessness and hopeless that most every human will feel at some point in their lives. Martin gives us the tiniest glimpse of hope, writing that “If you can learn to not see all nets as snares, you can stroll / freely about the ship deck,” but she is quick to snatch it back, pointing out to us that “these are the rats who will flee if they sense we are sinking.”

Strout explores, and invites us to join her in her explorations of, two other forms of loss in her selections; the loss of hope, and the loss of oneself. Scott Nadelson, in "Dolph Schayes’s Broken Arm", shows us the loss of hope experienced in conjunction with the loss of love. Nadelson’s story takes place through the first person point of view of a man remembering the story of the loss of his first love, a girl who had “moved something inside [him], as if her touch had rearranged [his] organs.”

It was the summer after the man’s junior year of college: the girl who had rearranged his organs is taking long to return his call, delaying a trip to visit him, and rejecting his offers to visit her. His anxiety over this physically manifests itself in the form of debilitating stomach cramps. Over the summer he befriends coworker and unlikely companion Stanley, the two bonding over the New York Knicks, each finding hope in each other and the team. When the Knicks finally lost the finals, the man’s “noose around [his] guts had loosened the slightest bit, and [he] knew [he] no longer had hope for anything.”