The Porthole

World-renowned art-house film director Helena Désir may (or may not!) be responsible for the on-set death of Corey, her latest muse, leading man of the moment, and frequent bedmate. Haunted by the accident, a long trail of ex-lovers, and the corporate film studio who desperately wants to keep her, their cash cow, at work, Helena unravels and is swiftly delivered to a luxury retreat known as Jaquith House, where fellow sufferers of psychic exhaustion--an agèd sound artist, an international entrepreneur, a tennis pro, a woodsman, twin Finnish massage therapists, and a sex-addicted chef--ferry her from meal, to rest activity, to spa experience, to canoe ride, and back to dinner again, with unmatched hilarity and wit. Told with a captivating quick clip of a gait, Porthole is a portrait of an auteur at the peak of her powers and in the midst of an extravagant, albeit well-dressed, meltdown. Hallucinatory and imagistic, filled to the brim with champagne toasts, boathouse romps, brothels, yoga pants, Parisian hotels, dressing room hookups, and red carpet faux pas, Porthole gifts us the world through the eye of the camera lens, as if through a sea of glass, and asks: If we’ve sinned in the service of art, can we be forgiven?

Joanna Howard is a writer and translator from Miami, Oklahoma. Her work has appeared in Conjunctions, Verse, McSweeney’s, BOMB, Chicago Review, Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. She is the author of the memoir Rerun Era; the novel Foreign Correspondent; the story collections On the Winding Stair and In the Colorless Round; and Field Glass, a collaborative novel written with Joanna Ruocco. She also co-translated Walls by Marcel Cohen and Cows by Frederic Boyer. She taught in the Literary Arts program at Brown University for 15 years before moving to University of Denver’s PhD program in Literary Arts, where she teaches prose writing and prose and poetry hybrids, narrative theory, and contemporary literature.