Field Notes
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Field Notes,
Your Draft Needs More Country Music
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.
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Field Notes,
The Chase
The instructor asked if we chose the stories we wrote, or if the stories chose us.
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Field Notes,
Porter House Reads: Literature in Translation
The editors of Porter House Review recommend some of their favorite books in translation.
![A hand reaching for some flowers in a wall of greenery.](https://porterhousereview.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/thumbnail_94-Carratello-Adoption-scaled-e1693785924621-300x214.jpg)
Field Notes,
Adoption vs. Appropriation: Writing as an Asian Adoptee
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?
![A picture of a flower blooming from a white space.](https://porterhousereview.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/thumbnail_processed-5FB9EE8E-9F96-4404-A22E-7EDA20F7295F-F3FE8C85-2778-49DB-873B-23B0E2115847.jpeg-300x200.jpg)
Field Notes,
Surviving Winter: Writing Through Creative Burnout
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.
![A photo of a table near a window.](https://porterhousereview.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/lawrence-chismorie-t0TMPTQKsCg-unsplash-scaled-1-300x201.jpg)
Field Notes,
Only Bones and No Poetry: On Being an Artist with Anxiety
I sometimes close my eyes and picture a different, gentler version of myself. This me wears confidence like a dress, willowy and soft against my skin. This me holds my pen between smooth, undamaged fingers and writes stories by hand that look good in every possible light.
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Field Notes,
The Notebook
The notebook is quite a mess. Stories that were never sent are marked through or “whited out.” My system, drawn from a reporter’s habit of putting a star beside a juicy quote, was to list the date of submission and add a star to indicate it was active.
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Field Notes,
“Work Is Its Own Cure”: Poetry and the Comfort of Commitment
It felt revolutionary that the act of writing could also solve some of the problems it creates. This idea checked out with all those analogies people make between writing and meditation or running or healing—we write through discomfort and find some wholeness on the other side. The challenges tend to be worth it.