Welcome to Front Porch
Welcome to Our Porch, Find A Chair…We Are Glad You’re Here!
Anything new is always exciting, but it’s especially exciting when you can blend tradition and the things you love most with something new. When I was growing up in the rural American South, the front porch was an important place. Folks sat in everything from old recliners to ladderback chairs, from swings to the floor of the porch with their feet dangling beneath them. The front porch was a focal point, not just for the house itself, but for the heart, the soul and the mind of the inhabitants and their neighbors.
The front porch was a gathering place.
Friends and neighbors, kinfolks and new acquaintances, strangers and salesmen, at some point everyone gathered on the front porch to talk and to share. Sometimes we even ate meals there and not only passed the dishes back and forth but also passed thoughts and ideas.
I have met and engaged in conversation some of the most fascinating people of my life sitting on a front porch. My companions on the porch have included farmers and photographers, loggers and lawyers, road workers and writers, as well as production workers and professors. If I learned one thing about my many conversation partners, it was that almost all of them were philosophers in some fashion or another.
It was this experience that eventually led to where you and I sit today, here at Front Porch. In this first-ever Front Porch blog post, I want to share with you a little about the space you are experiencing at this very moment.
As a writer, I’ve always wanted a place where other writers could come together in one space and tell their stories.
Whether they be a novelist, a poet, a historian or an essayist. What better place than a front porch? And so, our Front Porch was born. Perhaps, you might say, it was built.
Too many good ideas and too many good works are never seen because many talented and gifted writers and wordsmiths can’t break through the subtle and not so subtle barriers that exist between the talent that writes and the structure that publishes. Sometimes those barriers keep amazing stories from the reading public, stories that could have educated, entertained and inspired.
It is for those very reasons that Front Porch was conceived. Here at Front Porch, talent is appreciated for its inspiration, for its power to move others to emotion and action, and for its background, its own heritage.
The world, in its broadest sense, creates an intricately interwoven fabric of ideas, cultures, beliefs, traditions and ways of life, all of which provide something for someone. Front Porch welcomes ideas and stories from all walks of life and all proverbial corners of this round world.
All people have a story to tell and Front Porch exists to help them tell those stories.
Speaking of stories, my own background is that of a storyteller. I love stories and I revel in the abilities of great and talented storytellers. Their world is seldom limited because their world is defined by the bounds of their imagination.
Front Porch is a place where unlimited imagination is welcomed to sit a spell and spin a yarn, tell a tale and allow the others gathered on the porch to hear it. Whether fictional or factual, whether the work is a novel or a serious history thoroughly researched, the story has an audience on Front Porch.
Like a physical front porch, our Front Porch is designed to grow and expand to accommodate more visitors and new and creative ways to tell stories and share ideas.
On Front Porch, we will share many fascinating stories and storytellers, concepts and characters, folklore and fiction, history and heritage, characters and context. In time, it is our goal to grow, but not just grow Front Porch for its own sake but, more importantly, for the sake of its visitors, for the folks sitting in the chair on the porch with a story to tell or a book to read.
Just as a physical front porch has an architect or a builder, our Front Porch does as well.
I’d like to introduce you to our architects, our builders. There are two of us. I’m John Talbott. The concept of this space, this place in the world, as Front Porch was my idea, my concept, my dream. I wanted a place for thinking people to gather.
It would still be just an idea without the second architect of this Front Porch, and that is Ana Philibert. I am indebted to her vision and talent. It has been Ana’s hard work and dedication that has brought this entire concept into reality, into something that works. What you see on your screen before you is due to Ana’s amazing talent for designing and creating something that isn’t even there yet, but which she brings to life.
Even as Ana and I have worked to build Front Porch, that has created its own story of creativity. Collaboration is a story of its own. Talented people coming together to create is a big part of what Front Porch is really about and we hope to demonstrate that very simple concept in time. Stories come from everywhere and from places in our heart and places we’ve never heard of just yet, places waiting to be discovered.