Field Notes

I often find myself reading female characters written by men and wondering if they have ever met a woman before. I find this even more disheartening when these men are my colleagues and I know they have met women before (because I am one of those women), but their female characters are flat or over-sexualized or they don’t speak the same language.

Do you need to write with playlists thematically curated to your current work in progress, or do you consider even being aware of the existence of song lyrics while writing to be sacrilegious?

Why is [otherness] so hard to portray joy without fear, without anxiety? How can we write about it without it becoming defiant, resistant, or political? There are times when I don’t think we can. Or, at least, I don’t think I can. But that’s more my own personal tragedy, really.

These are the pieces that guide our editorial sightlines—the writing that drives us to cultivate a unified publication seasoned with all the disparate flavors of writing we have sought out as readers ourselves. We hope you enjoy reading some of the language that has most recently nourished us.

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.