Ploughshares Summer 2020 - Guest-edited by Celeste Ng

I loved reading the introduction to the Summer 2020 edition of Ploughshares and finding out it had been curated during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic when we were in the early stages of lock downs and uncertainty was swirling in the air. Celeste Ng did a fantastic job reaching into those moments and finding stories that echoed the feeling of the time. I always appreciate the diverse voices I hear in Ploughshares and I often feel I've lived so many lives by the time I finish.

In the very first story, Wandering Gliders, we are introduced to Manu and Eve as they sit in the hospital awaiting the arrival of their twins. The story is told from Manu's point of view as he tries and fails to fully capture Eve as a person, as his wife. The story has the feeling of always being on the cusp of connection, until it's gone.

Jamel Brinkley's painful story Comfort is about a woman who has lost her job and is a bit adrift following the death of her brother at the hands of a police officer. Terribly timely, the story is full of grief and the simple comfort another human can bring when our hearts are not quite ready to let new people in.

Go Forth, Miss Trout! tells the story of a group of writing students awaiting the arrival of their teacher only to find out she has died. Having a grandmother that lives in Toronto and having been a visitor to the city for more times than my brain remembers, I loved all the Toronto specific details in this story.

Doers of the Word was an great story of a woman healer who helped escaped slaves on their way to freedom. Told from the point of view of Liberty, the healer's daughter, a man shows up in a coffin and is thought to be dead only to be brought back to life by her mother. Liberty, having grown up free, struggles to understand the anger boiling inside the man.

Code W by Sonya Larson was a great story of a new ranger at Glacier National Park learning the ropes of which Park visitors need rescuing, and which need toughening up. The Code W is a visitor who insists on help but is not actually in danger, but because of their own incompetence has become scared and insists they are likely to die without rescue from a ranger. It is the ranger's job to determine if an attempted rescue would put more people at risk. Chuntao, the new ranger struggles with this idea and thinks at first her fellow rangers are being callous.

Susan Shepherd's Goats about a wildfire and a man living off the land and the generosity of a woman with a hoarding problem was wonderfully complex and I really felt the tension of the fire as it moved closer to the house. This was just a really well drawn story that had a lot of feel to it.

Those were just my favorites that pushed this edition into a five star read. The other stories I don't mention specifically were just as good.

5/5 Stars.