Field Notes

That’s the beauty of fiction! A writer can take every crazy idea that flits through her brain and mash it, smash it, filter it, funnel it, bury it, burn it, or type it fast in all caps. The intent is there but not there. A moment of insight, a stab at the truth, a flash that fades as fast as a closed screen.

In time, I’d recognize that pull as a desire to write myself. Not songs, but stories, which feels fitting because, though the harmonies are lovely on that album, it was really the storytelling above all else that moved me. The brevity, the oddness, the glimpses of worlds existing beyond three-minute tracks.

It was not that long ago that communities supported the idea of the prophet within all, hidden under the blanket of sleep. Similar realms include that of daydreaming and meditation. When we listen to our intuition, heed our dreams, and allow our senses to roam outside of the tangible world, that is when we can access our full creativity.

In the intervening years, I have come back again and again to those old radio country songs because they capture that same fresh liberation they did when I first heard them over a gas station milkshake on a dusty 110-degree day. They express what I never could.

The instructor asked if we chose the stories we wrote, or if the stories chose us.

The editors of Porter House Review recommend some of their favorite books in translation.

This brought me back to the question of ownership, and whether I have any right to claim these stories as my own. Yes, I was born in China, but I’m in my mid-twenties, only just now seeking these stories that supposedly were part of my heritage. Why had I refused to seek out these stories before?

In the deconstructed jaws of burnout, what was mine? The shards of poems, fragmented lines, didn’t feel like mine. They felt like a simulation of words I’d once written, a desperate clawing at images that once drew my eye.