Field Notes
Arts & Culture, Field Notes,
Ambiguity and Anxiety: In Which a Queer Poet Reflects on Queer Poetry
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.
Field Notes, Staff Picks,
Porter House Reads: Selections from Recent Literary Magazines
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.
Field Notes, Staff Picks,
Porter House Reads: The Best Writing We’ve Read This Summer
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.
Arts & Culture, Field Notes,
Permanently Scared: A Mother’s “Fictional” Nightmares
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.
Field Notes,
A New Beginning: PHR Field Notes
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.
Field Notes,
On the Poetry of Performance or Poetic Realness
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.
Field Notes,
MFA So White: Racial Bias in the Arts
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.
Field Notes,
We Need to Talk About Money
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.