Porter House Review | Online Literary Journal

FEATURED

Fiction,

We Are the Only Animals in the House

Nonfiction,

Blue Space

Interviews,

Texas State Has an Evening with Poet Forrest Gander

"The tiger girl is Savannah pulled inside out, her sunset gaze crisscrossed in my room, her slow growls barnacled on my mind. At night, she follows me to the grimy corners of the city where alcohol and loneliness never end. She steps from behind the pillars of an old fort or a warehouse and chases me home."

- from "We Are the Only Animals in the House" by Tara Zembrano

FIELD NOTES

Field Notes,

WoC and Me

BY Ryan Shane Lopez

Why is it then that the first time I heard the term “writer of color” (WoC), I didn’t automatically apply this category to myself? Is it because my mother’s side of the family, while possessing their own treasure trove of stories, are as white as Wonder Bread? Or because the un poquito Spanish I can stammer my way through is what I remember from college rather than my childhood home?

Field Notes,

You Run Away: Musings on a Song

BY Wendy BooydeGraaff

You run away. You could turn and stay.
I choose to stay. I can’t give up and won’t because I hear this song and the sounds crash over me like the words did when I first wrote them.

Field Notes,

Porter House Reads: Halloween Edition

BY Field Notes Editor

Rituals & Words to Honor the Dead

“I love the solitude of reading. I love the deep dive into someone else's story, the delicious ache of a last page.”

—Naomi Shihab Nye, PHR Advising Editor

FEATURED

Nonfiction,

Thousand-Mile Drive

BY Ginny MacDonald

1. Start out going west toward N Academy St. You do not have a GPS or a smartphone. You do have these printed Rand-McNally directions and a compass shining red on the rear-view mirror: E, S, W, N. You know you are going north. Follow the N on the mirror and you’ll be fine. 2. […]

Fiction,

妈妈

BY Natalie Yap

“I tell you, ah girl,” said Auntie Mel, “once you give birth your entire world will change. All the things you thought were important—career, money, even your husband lah—become secondary. Motherhood will become you. Listen to ah yi.”

My mother couldn’t help but chime in. “Yeah yeah. Once I had you everything else melted away.”

Reviews,

Escaping Through the Cracks and Crackles: On Cynthia Cruz’s Melancholia of Class

BY Joshua Bridgwater Hamilton

Cruz makes clear the dire need to claim one’s place in class struggle and to work towards a communal negation that counteracts the assimilation to a culture that attempts to sweep so many under the rug of its system.

Reviews,

The Last Cuentista: The Lifesaving Art of Storytelling

BY Abra Gist

Some cuentos are downright terrifying, but by the end of this cuento, Higuera will have her readers believing in the mystifying and healing powers of storytelling.