October/November 1998 
Laurels from the Laureate?
Marjorie Perloff
In his foreword to The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982), Ted Hughes admitted that he destroyed the notebook that covers the last months of Plath's life "because I did not want her children to have to read it (in those days I regarded forgetfulness as an essential part of survival)."1 As I detailed in my essay "The Two Ariels: The (Re)Making of the Sylvia Plath Canon,"2 Hughes also tampered with the Ariel manuscript itself.
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An Interview with Ernest Gaines
Carol Allen
Ernest J. Gaines is the award-winning author of eight books, including A Lesson Before Dying, for which he won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1994, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, a novel in the form of a recorded memoir that was adapted to film and produced by CBS in 1974, and A Gathering of Old Men, which was also produced by CBS in 1987. His short stories have been widely anthologized, and one, "The Sky is Gray," was produced by PBS as part of its American Short Stories Series in 1980.
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The Vision Thing
Stephen Haven
During a summer residency at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, I met another fellow, a painter, who said that her friends in New York had begun to talk again—usually with a degree of embarrassment—about "the vision thing." The discomfort on the part of my friend and her peers was largely based on the fact that American painting in the 1950s had been so fully dominated by Abstract Expressionism that it became difficult—aesthetically incorrect—to talk, except in purely formal terms, about the vision behind an artist's work.
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Thinking or Not Thinking About "The Reader"
Judith Grossman
The conventional wisdom, in places where fiction-writing is taught, warns the writer against indulging in thoughts about potential readers of the work-in-progress. The writer's duty is to keep mind and imaginative eye focused wholly within the scene of the story-or how else will that scene achieve the desired intensity, and the integrated mesh of detail?
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The Assault on Faculty Speech (Part 1 of 2)
Alan Charles Kors & Harvey A. Silverglate
For all members of a campus community, the persecution of faculty speech is the most awesome display of oppressive power. If universities and colleges can silence and punish professors, overturning protections hard-won over generations, it sends a signal that students have no protection at all. Some of that persecution of faculty occurs in decisions about hiring, tenure, and promotion, where the exclusion of politically incorrect views may be hidden from public scrutiny.
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The Imagination Has Its Orders: Cross-Genre Writing with Carol Muske & Molly Peacock
Bonnie Riedinger
Three years ago, I began writing a dual thesis in poetry and fiction as part of my MFA graduate work. Although I participated in workshops in both genres and my work was encouraged by most of the faculty, I quickly realized how much I needed contact with another cross-genre writer. But academia, with its passion for specialization, offered little opportunity to make these connections.
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