Explore the published and forthcoming works of Maxwell James Bennett

From the Porch

A detective puzzled by a grisly crime.
A lighthouse keeper obsessed with a distant light.
A man who envisioned a royal palace, now standing just outside of it.

From the Porch is a haunting and philosophical collection of stories and poems that invites readers to step onto a metaphorical porch and look outward.

Through 15 works of fiction and poetry, Maxwell James Bennett moves through horrors, histories, and allegories that touch on violence, beauty, faith, society, memory, and the quiet distance between what we love and what we outgrow. Lighthouses, villages, factories, castles, and fractured histories become places of meditation, each one asking the reader to sit with an idea until it becomes strange, vulnerable, and alive.

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Behind the book

From the Porch grew from the image of the porch as a place of witness — a space between the home and the world, memory and change, inheritance and rebirth. The book moves through family, violence, history, love, and self-reflection, asking what we carry, what we repeat, and what it means to finally step inside.

The Evolution of the Illustrations

Originally, I had no intention of including drawings in From the Porch. While researching similar collections, however, I noticed that the books which stayed with me often paired their stories with illustrations or visual elements that gave the reader something else to return to. I began storyboarding scenes to see what images might accompany the stories.

My original ambition was to create a unique illustration for every piece in the collection. As the book unfolded into fifteen stories and poems, I quickly realized I neither had the capacity nor the talent to produce a finished drawing for every page. Instead, I settled on creating illustrations for a handful of pieces and focused on capturing the feeling of the story rather than documenting every scene.

To begin, I bought drawing and painting supplies and spent time watching tutorials and experimenting with different techniques. Most of what I produced was awful. Every style I tried felt muddled and disconnected from what I imagined the book to be. Eventually, I remembered that when I first envisioned many of these stories, they appeared in my mind almost like pen sketches. In my journals, I often pass time tracing the outlines of objects around me, and in doing so I naturally distort them into strange and imperfect versions of themselves. Rather than fight that tendency, I decided to embrace it.

Many of the illustrations began by looking at photographs, places, or objects and allowing my own limitations to reshape them. The result was not realism, but something closer to the way I imagined the stories themselves.

I am not much of a drawer, and truthfully I did not always enjoy the process at the scale this book required. Yet I also did not want to rely on another artist—or on artificial intelligence—to create the images for me. If the book was going to contain illustrations, I wanted them to emerge from the same hand that wrote the stories.

By the time the book was finished, I realized the illustrations added a layer to the collection that I had not anticipated when I began. They became part of the world of the book rather than decorations attached to it. Though they added a considerable headache to the process, I am glad I stuck with them.

No image represents that journey more than the lighthouse. It was the first illustration I created and accompanies the opening story. More than any other drawing in the collection, it captures what I hoped the book would be from the beginning: imperfect, searching, and always looking toward a distant light.