The Lee legacy

By Jan Gardner  |  May 27, 2007

After 19 years as editor of Ploughshares, Don Lee is leaving town, but not without fond reminiscences of the literary careers he helped launch.

Former intern Heidi Pitlor had her first novel ("The Birthdays") published last year and is now the series editor for "The Best American Short Stories."

Lee recalls a "particularly spectacular" story in 1996 by Maxine Swann, who went on to win the literary triple crown: the O. Henry and Pushcart prizes and publication in "The Best American Short Stories." Swann's second novel , "Flower Children," is out this month (see review in "Short Takes," Page D7) .

The journal also was instrumental in the careers of Rick Bass, Jennifer Egan, and Lauren Groff , whose first novel is being published next year. Among Lee's favorite issues of Ploughshares are those guest-edited by Charles Baxter, Gish Jen, Margot Livesey, and Lorrie Moore.

Next month Lee is leaving Ploughshares to join the faculty at Macalester College, in St. Paul, Minn. His editing job left little time for writing, but he has a novel, "Wrack and Ruin," coming out next April. Lee calls it a "farcical comedy" about two brothers -- a brussels sprouts farmer and a slippery movie producer.

Khaled Hosseini, author of "The Kite Runner," returns to Afghanistan in his second novel, "A Thousand Splendid Suns." When it was released last Tuesday , it ranked No. 2 in sales on Amazon.com. This Tuesday Hosseini will speak at the Boston Public Library at 6 p.m.

A century after the glass flowers at Harvard were created by a father-and-son team in Germany, they are still studied as models of craft and scientific accuracy. Now a new book reproduces drawings Rudolf Blaschka made in Jamaica and the United States in the 1890s and later referred to in creating the glass versions . In California, poppies were "so common and grow so thickly that the mountains glow orange," Blaschka wrote to his father, Leopold.

Blaschka was a fastidious researcher , according to an essay in "Drawing Upon Nature: Studies for the Blaschkas' Glass Models," published by the Corning Museum of Glass. In one letter home, he wrote, "I wish the illustrating and studying would go much faster, but often I find totally strange species of plants in my hands that require a thorough study."

Susan M. Rossi-Wilcox, a curator of the Ware Collection of Glass Models at Harvard, will discuss Blaschka's journeys and drawings at 2 p.m. next Sunday at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, 24 Oxford St., Cambridge. The lecture is free with museum admission.

"The Gravedigger's Daughter," by Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco)

"Divisadero," by Michael Ondaatje (Knopf)

"The Good Guy," by Dean Koontz (Bantam)

Michael Patrick MacDonald, author of "All Souls" and "Easter Rising," recommends Harry Bernstein's "The Invisible Wall: A Love Story That Broke Barriers" (Ballantine): "This memoir takes you to the English mill town of Bernstein's childhood, where Christians and Jews lived on opposite sides of the street, and where the young Harry has to navigate the treacherous, secret relationship between his older sister and a Christian from across the road."

Jan Gardner can be reached at JanLGardner@yahoo.com.