Field Notes

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?

In these times, I turn to the writers whose words hold the force of an army—the revolutionaries who have the power to change minds and elicit action with their written work.

In my dark corner, I lived a story that held a stigma, a story few people can hear without cringing at the thought of such a low. But it was just one of many possible manifestations of alienation and one of many stories people are reluctant to hear.