Into the Fire

by Susan Neville

Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Since 1971, Ploughshares has discovered and cultivated the freshest voices in contemporary American literature, and now provides readers with thoughtful and entertaining literature in a variety of formats. Find out why the New York Times named Ploughshares “the Triton among minnows.” Available now are nine new Ploughshares Solos, longform stories and essays also collected in our annual fall issue. Edited by Editor-in-chief Ladette Randolph, the Fall 2019 collection of Solos features new longform work by Andrea Barrett, Kiley Reid, Lex Williford, and Tracy Daugherty, as well as Ian Stansel, Nancy Mays, Danielle Spencer, Christopher Peacock, and Susan Neville. The stories and essays in our longform issue are also available for individual purchase as e-books. Read "Into the Fire" by Susan "When my parents died, I inherited all of their photographs and papers as they had inherited their parents’ photographs and papers and so on back a few generations. . . . When an historian looks through archives, it’s often for clues to the things that are not lovers, important friendships, deleted sentences, political alliances, and shameful secrets. If the secrets are shameful enough, there’s been an attempt to hide them, but there are always clues. And so, here’s my Should I throw the three photos I’m looking at right now into the fire? Or should I keep them?"

35 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 14, 2019

About the author

Susan Neville is an American short-story writer and a professor at Butler University. She won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction in 1984.