Field Notes

In our new Porter House Reads series, we hope to exploit even that bit of leisure in order to have more conversations with you, the reader, about which words have most recently animated the fleeting jolt of collective aliveness that only the best writing can gift us.

While [Karen Russell’s] story includes fantastical elements—namely, a chimerical creature manipulating a scared mother to satisfy its addiction to breastmilk—it also powerfully captures the everyday horrors of new motherhood.

In order to find relevance in the world, we must ask what we are seeking from it. Field Notes pursues change inside and out. We do not want to bore the world with articles that appease the sensibilities of other writers. We want to challenge the systems and structures around us. We want to mold the world of writing and make it more democratic.

For many poets, the act of writing is about the loss of control. An author hopes that those interior ticks responsible for their art will be unleashed on the page and past the urge to tame it. Uninterrupted art is a difficult thing to achieve.

MFA so white they say “I love him” when you talk about Toni Morrison. MFA so white they think AAVE is an acronym for an artisan beer. MFA so white they think code switching is a Call of Duty move. MFA so white that you are the only black student in a program of sixty; you think there may be a black faculty member, because someone mentioned it once in passing, but you’ve never actually seen them and are still unsure.

The centuries-long practice of institutional racism in our country means that the vast majority of generational wealth is held by white families, and it is overwhelmingly people from these families that are pursuing degrees in Creative Writing.