We are going to a play tonight, so I need to settle for something that meets my 500 word minimum instead of a finished product. So I have decided to write my observations about Katherine Anne Porter's work. I have been reading a book of her collected stories and it feels as though I am reading what I have always wanted to write. I don't think I had ever read any of her writing before. Nothing seems familiar, or at least nothing seems like anything I have read before, except that everything seems familiar in an eerie sort of way.
The first stories were set in Mexico, written in 1922 in New York. All the qualities that I thought I wanted in my writing - a foreign location but written while living in New York.
But later in the collected stories was one about an American poet living in Mexico who fell in love with a woman who joined him in Mexico. And she was from Minnesota. I had a hard time feeling any sympathy for the poet. I was apparently identifying with the Minnesota gal.
Every story, even though they were written around the time my mother was a toddler, every story felt like the words were the ones I had been waiting to write.
And then I got to the short novel Old Mortality. There shouldn't be anything in it that seems familiar. It begins in 1885. It is set in Kentucky on a horse ranch. The main characters so far are two sisters, 8 and 12, whose mother died when they were much younger. But there is something about it that feels like it is my story. Maybe it is because much of the action so far centers around the contents of a trunk that the girls' grandmother goes through twice a year and the girls get to sit nearby and watch, if they are quiet enough. It reminds me a bit of the wooden chest that was in the basement of my parents' first house, the one that had all sorts of mysterious items in it that we were not allowed to open the trunk to look at, but we could watch when Mom or Dad opened it.
In it were the silk kimono and the silk fan from Japan, the silk "grass" skirt from Hawaii, and the real grass skirt from the Phillipines that Dad brought back from his years with the Merchant Marines. And the cewpie doll that Dad won for Mom at some fair. Also there were comic books. Comic books that we couldn't take out to read on our own; we had to wait for Dad to give them to us.
While I am not certain just where Katherine Anne Porter grew up, I choose at this point to believe it was in Kentucky, or at least in the south. If that is true, then Old Mortality has something in common with what I have learned about my own writing from this project: that the subject of one's childhood is a rich source for material, even it if lacks the exotic qualities of a foreign location and the experience of living and writing in New York.
No comments:
Post a Comment