Newsletter of the

Society

Inside...

Other Newsletters

Return to home page

On the evening of September 27, 2001, the Katherine Anne Porter Literary Center formally opened with a reading by Pultizer-Prize-Winning novelist, E. Annie Proulx. Proulx began her auspicious career as a fiction writer in her fifties. Her first novel, Postcards (1992), won the coveted PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction in 1993. Her second novel, The Shipping News (1994), garnered her the Chicago Tribune's Heartland Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her latest work, Close Range: Wyoming Stories (1999), is a collection of short stories set entirely in Wyoming, the location of Proulx's primary residence.

The literary center comprises both the 1880 house at 508 Center Street, where Katherine Anne Porter spent the formative years of her childhood, and a newly constructed seminar building. Many citizens, the Austin Community Foundation, the Lower Colorado River Authority, the Clayton Fund, and others contributed to the purchase of the property. However, it was Bill Johnson's Burdine Johnson Foundation that funded the historically correct and extensive renovations, new construction and landscape architecture necessary to complete the project. Southwest Texas State University is currently leasing the house for ninety-nine years at the price of one dollar per year. As a part of an important cooperative project between SWTSU and the Hays County Preservation Associates. The "Angel" Foundation, founded by Curt Englehorn, a nephew of Katherine Anne Porter's childhood friend, Erna Schlemmer, donated the generous gift necessary to fund SWTSU's Writer in Residence appointment at the Katherine Anne Porter Literary Center.

The six-room historic house serves both as a museum and home for a writer in residence. Currently, the curator of the museum, Melissa Falcon, is the Writer-in-Residence. Falcon, a graduate of the SWTSU MFA program, is currently working on her first novel. Aside from giving tours of the two-room museum which is open to visitors the first Sunday of every month from 2 to 5 pm, Falcon teaches in local schools, community centers, libraries, and at SWTSU. Although none of the furniture or other objects in the museum rooms belonged to Katherine Anne Porter or her family, they are representative of middle-class domestic interiors of Kyle between 1880-1900.

The separate seminar building houses, the Porter House archives, a library donated by individuals and Barnes and Noble, a catering kitchen, and handicap accessible restrooms. Its walls adorned with photographs of Katherine Anne Porter, the seminar house functions as a venue for classes, readings, lectures, book signings, and other public events. The first of these, the inaugural reading by Annie Proulx, was a resounding success. There was standing room only at the event as all the chairs in the seminar room, the screened in back porch of the house museum-residence, and the fenced back garden of the complex were filled with an audience of administrators, faculty, students, and staff of SWTSU, invited dignitaries, donors to the project, high teachers and students, and the general public. In addition to Proulx=s reading, festivities for the open house included a fiction panel discussion beginning at 2:30 p.m. on Sept. 29 at the Porter House. Participants included faculty of SWTSU's Master of Fine Arts in creative writing program: Leslie Marmon Silko, that year's holder of the Roy F. and Joann Cole Mitte Chair in Creative Writing; National Book Award winner Tim O'Brien; Debra Monroe, recipient of the Flannery O'Connor Award for short fiction; Dagoberto Gilb, Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award winner; and SWTSU's Tom Grimes, who earned the New York Times Notable Book Award.

Among the other events that took place at the house in its inaugural season, of most interest to society members was Janis Stout's talk entitled "Katherine Anne Porter and the Restless Life," which took place on October 9. As part of SWTSU's Lindsey Literary Series, the following public readings, book signings, and workshops were held throughout the semester:

Mei Mei Berssenbruge, reading & book signing, October 3 Don J. Snyder, reading & book signing, October 23 & 25; fiction/memoir Q&A, October 27

Jim Daniels, reading & book signing, November 13 & 15; poetry workshop, November 17

Phillip Levine, reading & book signing, February 12 & 14; poetry workshop, February 16

Tessa Rumsey, reading & book signing, March 26 & 28; poetry workshop, March 30

James Galvin, reading & book signing, April 5; poetry workshop, April 8

The coming year will bring recent U. S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass, National Book Critics Circle Award winner Mark Doty, PEN/Faulkner finalist Kate Wheeler, Granta Best Young Novelist Chris Offutt, and multiple award winning poet Jean Valentine. For more information about the MFA program or the literary series, please contact Renee Le Blanc, MFA in Creative Writing program administrator, at (512) 245 7681 or visit the Lindsey Literary Series Web site at http://www.English.swt.edu/TKL. The Web site for the Katherine Anne Porter Literary Center is http://www.english.swt.edu/kap/historypage2.html. The e-mail address for the center is porterhouse@swt.edu; Melissa Falcon=s e-mail address is MARLYSPRUCE@yahoo.com.