Field Notes

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.

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.

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.

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.

I wanted to get together with my fellow poets on the Porter House Review staff and suggest poetry books for all the music lovers out there so that they too might come to love poetry in the same way that I did.

Works that bend genre and experiment with form find a way to resist the singular story that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speaks of in her powerful TED Talk and response to oppression. As Spahr explains, “They are works that negotiate between the dire worries of homogeneity and loss and the utopian hopes of diversity and invention.”

How do the horrors of the past impart meaning onto our present selves? How do we sift through rotten carcasses in order to find what is growing underneath? How do we explore that which chills us in the way that we read, in the way that we write, in the way that we live?