Katherine Anne Porter

This weekend, Billy and I traveled to Dayton, Ohio to attend the wedding of one of his college roommates. Ashley and Todd seemed happy and excited in the midst of all the wedding excitement, and Billy and I were happy to have been able to make it.

It was a lot of driving. It took us about 10 hours to get there on Friday. On Saturday, we spent 3 hours at the GM dealership while they repaired our air conditioning (if we had waited until we drove home, the warranty would have run out). On Sunday, it took us about 8 hours to get back. This definitely took its toll on Billy, who does all the driving and was exhausted after the weekend... but I escaped into the world of Katherine Anne Porter.

I used to teach "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall," which I loved/hated; I love the story, I hated that it was impossible to get 16 year olds to understand what was going on. Last semester, I was assigned "Pale Horse, Pale Rider," and it was one of my favorite things I've read. I told myself at the beginning of the summer that I would read the rest of her collected stories, but it is not really related to the research project I'm trying to turn into my PhD application, so I let her fall by the wayside.

Definite mistake. Her intro to the book tells you that after she showed her mentor her first story ("Maria Concepcion"), he told her "I believe you are a writer." I wondered, how could anyone make this assessment after just one story? And then I read "Maria Concepcion." Porter has an almost unsettling ability to document human emotions, thought processes, and behaviors. In almost every story, I find myself experiencing the sensation that I know exactly what feeling she is describing, and she has described it perfectly.

I'm a very analytical reader. I can't read for "pleasure" without underlining and marking up the book. I don't usually enjoy poetry because I never "feel" what the poems are trying to express. It's not often that I get so absorbed in a story that I am able to enjoy it as a story rather than as a "text," but that is how I feel about KAP. If you're looking for something to read, pick up The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter. If you read Maria Concepcion and are not hooked, I will be surprised.

KAP gave her whole library of books and collection of personal papers to the University of Maryland. (She had previously done this with the University of Texas, and then she took everything back, but she is dead now, so her stuff is safe with us.) Her library is reconstructed on campus, and her papers are available for research. I'm meeting with the curator of the collection tomorrow to talk about research possibilities, and I can't wait!

(In other news for the weekend, I was glad to see Andy Roddick successfully building toward the US Open at the Montreal Masters tournament. I'm hoping for a Roddick/Federer quarterfinal showdown in Cincinnati this week.)