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What would have been Katherine Anne Porter's 108th birthday was celebrated with a day-long symposium at The Center For The Study Of The Southwest at Southwest Texas State University on May 15, 1998, in the Aquarena Center, San Marcos, Texas. This symposium celebrated both the birthday of Katherine Anne Porter and the acquisition of Porter's childhood home in nearby Kyle by the Hays Country Preservation Associates and Southwest Texas State University. Additionally Porter was the featured writer for Texas Writers Month, May 1998. As Center Director Mark Busby noted in his welcoming remarks, it was a day that probably would have reflected Porter's long-term attitude toward Texas, because the skies were darkened by smoke from forest fires in Mexico.

Symposium participants included Texas literature and Porter scholars. The papers were published in a special Fall 1998 issue of the journal Southwestern American Literature, published biannually by the Center. Janis Stout, from Texas A&M University-College Station, noted Porter scholar and author of the critical biography, Katherine Anne Porter: A Sense of the Times, began the symposium with "Writing Home: Katherine Anne Porter, Coming and Going," in which she discussed the significance of Porter's numerous letters home. Next, Darlene Unrue, from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and author-editor of numerous critical works on Porter, concentrated on a small part of her forthcoming biography and a subject especially appropriate for the day of the symposium, "Katherine Anne Porter's Birthdays." And Larry Herold, from Southwest Texas State University, in a lively presentation looked wryly at "Katherine Anne Porter and Marital Bliss."

Like these papers that dealt with specific aspects of Porter's life, several others focused upon some of the main elements of Porter's relationship with her home state, which has become increasingly important to discussions of Porter's life and work. The house, of course, is pivotal to Porter's formative period in Texas, but there are three other major points at which Porter connected with Texas--in 1939 when Porter expected to receive the Texas Institute of Letters Award for best Texas book only to be insulted when the award went to folklorist J. Frank Dobie. James Ward Lee, founder and longtime director of the Center for Texas Studies at the University of North Texas, focused on this event, as well as the important points of comparison and contrast between the two Texas contemporaries in "Romance v. Decadence: KAP and the Dobie Years."

The second major event in the tumultuous relationship between Porter and Texas occurred in the 1950s when Porter was first invited to teach for a semester at the University of Texas at Austin. Porter eventually declined the full semester assignment, but she accepted an invitation to present a lecture. It was during that time that Porter began to believe that UT would build a library and name it after her, Texas's most famous literary daughter. But somehow she and UT President Harry Ransom miscommunicated, and Porter, as we all know, left her materials to the University of Maryland Libraries. In "The Lady and the Library: KAP and UT," Dick Holland, the founding curator of the Southwestern Writers Collection at Southwest Texas State University, examined this event and her relationship with the University of Texas using original materials from the University collections. Holland found an excoriatory letter to Porter from Frank Wardlaw, the founder of the University of Texas Press, after she withdrew her contribution to Three Men in Texas, which Wardlaw had already had set in print. Holland's research fleshed out the details of Porter's dealings with the University of Texas.

Porter's third major Texas event was Lou Rodenberger's subject in "The Prodigal Daughter Comes Home." Rodenberger, coeditor of last year's acclaimed book, Texas Women Writers, detailed Porter's experiences when she returned to Texas in 1976 to receive recognition from Howard Payne University in Brownwood. It was on that trip that Porter visited her mother's grave in the little cemetery in Indian Creek and decided that her remains on her death belonged beside her mother. Rodenberger interviewed many of the Howard Payne faculty involved in that visit to examine the details of that penultimate Texas trip. Porter was invited by Howard Payne President Roger Brooks, whose letters, inscribed books, and audio tapes associated with Porter's visit have recently been secured by the Southwestern Writers Collection at SWT.

Mark Busby's presentation, "Katherine Anne Porter and the Southwest: Ambivalence Deep as the Bone," was also concerned with Porter's relationship with Texas, but it covered her ambivalence toward her home area in both her life and her work. Bert Almon, from the University of Alberta, took the discussion into another area related to Texas in his "Katherine Anne Porter and William Humphrey: Mentorship Reconsidered." Almon previewed his work on Humphrey, now available in his new book William Humphrey: Destroyer of Myths. Rob Johnson, (University of Texas, Pan-Am) in "Among, But Not Of: Revolutionary Mexico and the Short Stories Of Katherine Anne Porter And Marķa Cristina Mena," discussed the possible relationship between Porter's stories about Mexico and the work of Marķa Cristina Mena, who published stories about Mexico in Century Magazine during the same time. Jeri R. Kraver, then of Texas A&M International University, examined another aspect of Porter's south-of-the-border experiences, tracing her changing attitudes toward revolution in "Troubled Innocent Abroad: Katherine Anne Porter's Colonial Adventure."

Several presenters explored specific works. Don Graham, the J. Frank Dobie Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, looked carefully at "What's Buried in 'The Grave'?" And Christine Hait from Columbia College in South Carolina, looked at "The Princess," an unfinished story recently published in Uncollected Early Prose of Katherine Anne Porter, for evidence of Porter's interest in the relationship between gender and creativity in "KAP and Creativity." Terrell Dixon, from the University of Houston, applied his expertise in environmental literature to "Knowing Nature in Katherine Anne Porter's The Leaning Tower And Other Stories."

Sylvia Grider, from Texas A&M University-College Station and coeditor with Rodenberger of Texas Women Writers, anchored the day's presentations and prepared the group for the trip to the house in "Katherine Anne Porter and Folklore." Using her training in material culture, Grider discussed the significance of Porter's growing up in the small house in Kyle.

After the presentation, the group adjourned to Kyle, five miles north of San Marcos, to the Katherine Anne Porter House, and some participants also visited the grave of Porter's grandmother, Aunt Cat, in the Kyle Cemetery. The Porter house serves as a museum and modest monument to a writer whose achievements are among the most impressive in American literature. The house had just recently been purchased by the Hays County Preservation Associates and had not yet begun the planned renovations. After the house is renovated, Southwest Texas State University will lease it to use for a writer-in-residence program and for literary events sponsored by University's English department, its MFA program, and the Center for the Study of the Southwest.

We know that Porter's relationship to her childhood home was intense after she moved with her father, two sisters, and brother to live with her grandmother in Kyle after her mother's death in 1892. And this house and the nine years living in Central Texas became the source of Porter's most enduring stories. Its continuing presence will inspire future Porter scholars as they, like the participants in this symposium, attempt to understand her life and work.

For information about the special Porter issue of Southwestern American Literature, e-mail either Mark Busby or Dick Heaberlin (mb13@swt.edu or dh12@swt.edu), the coeditors, or write to Editors, Southwestern American Literature, Southwest Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas 78666.