Field Notes

An ongoing collection of literary-nonfiction essays — pieces written across years rather than within them, organized less by chronology than by what eventually started rhyming with what.

Status

The collection is open. Some pieces have been published in their own venues; others are in revision; a handful are paused while I figure out what they actually want to be. The unifying problem of the moment is the running order — the order in which the pieces were written turns out to be the wrong one, and I am trying to learn what the right one is.

What holds them together

I keep arriving at “attention” as the unifying word but it is the wrong word — too monastic, too earnest. The closer thing might be correction — the way a long enough look at a thing eventually rearranges your initial sense of it. Most of these pieces start with a misreading and walk it back to whatever the actual thing is. The best ones earn the correction; the weakest ones perform it.

What’s likely to appear here

Pieces that have cleared the line — published in outside venues or finished here — appear under Essays tagged field-notes. Process notes about the revision and assembly of the collection itself live on this page, where they don’t have to pretend to be finished.