Monday's Entertainments
I haven’t done an entertainments in a long time. I’ve seen a bunch of cool stuff around the web but I haven’t taken time to note locations. Perhaps it’s time to get back in the habit.
She was forty years old.
&
Katherine Anne Porter said, "My life has been incredible, I don't believe a word of it."
It's the birthday of short-story writer and novelist Katherine Anne Porter, (books by this author), born Callie Russell Porter in Indian Creek, Texas (1890). She was a descendant of Daniel Boone, but she actually grew up in poverty, in a small log house on the edge of a dirt farm. Her mother died when she was two years old, and her father was so stricken by grief that he couldn't provide for the family. They had to move in with Porter's grandmother.
Her grandmother died when she was eleven, and Porter had to move in with her cousins. She spent two years in a drama school, the only real education she ever received, and then briefly started a small school of her own devoted to singing and dramatic arts. Just after her sixteenth birthday, she married a twenty-one-year-old railway clerk. But she wasn't happy in her marriage and in 1914 she ran away to Chicago where she hoped to make it as a movie actress. When she arrived in the city, she changed her name, Callie Russell, to her grandmother's name, Katherine Anne.
She got a job in a song-and-dance show, but then she caught tuberculosis. Once the disease was diagnosed, she was sent to a sick house for the poor where there was almost no food for the patients and women were dying all around her. She might have died there herself, but her brother paid for her to switch to a high-class sanatorium in Texas.
Porter spent two years recovering at the sanatorium, surrounded by a group of intelligent young women, including some journalists and writers. Inspired by their example, she got a job as a journalist, and began to write for a variety of newspapers, first in Denver and then in New York City, covering entertainment news and social events.
In 1919, she met a group of Mexican activists, and they persuaded her to go to Mexico to write about the coming revolution there. She used her experience in Mexico to write the story "Flowering Judas," about a young American woman living in Mexico just before the revolution. The story made her literary reputation when it was published, and it became the title story of her first collection, Flowering Judas and Other Stories (1930). She was forty years old.
Her books of stories got excellent reviews, and critics compared her to some of the greatest writers in American history, but she didn't make much money from her fiction and had to support herself with journalism for most of her life. She once said, "I think I've only spent about ten percent of my energies on writing. The other ninety percent went to keeping my head above water."
She worked for more than twenty years trying to write a big novel called Ship of Fools. When it was finally published in 1962, it made her rich, but it got mixed reviews. Most critics consider her best work to be her short stories. Her Collected Stories came out in 1964 and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Katherine Anne Porter said, "My life has been incredible, I don't believe a word of it."
From: The Writer’s Almanac
She was forty years old.
&
Katherine Anne Porter said, "My life has been incredible, I don't believe a word of it."
It's the birthday of short-story writer and novelist Katherine Anne Porter, (books by this author), born Callie Russell Porter in Indian Creek, Texas (1890). She was a descendant of Daniel Boone, but she actually grew up in poverty, in a small log house on the edge of a dirt farm. Her mother died when she was two years old, and her father was so stricken by grief that he couldn't provide for the family. They had to move in with Porter's grandmother.
Her grandmother died when she was eleven, and Porter had to move in with her cousins. She spent two years in a drama school, the only real education she ever received, and then briefly started a small school of her own devoted to singing and dramatic arts. Just after her sixteenth birthday, she married a twenty-one-year-old railway clerk. But she wasn't happy in her marriage and in 1914 she ran away to Chicago where she hoped to make it as a movie actress. When she arrived in the city, she changed her name, Callie Russell, to her grandmother's name, Katherine Anne.
She got a job in a song-and-dance show, but then she caught tuberculosis. Once the disease was diagnosed, she was sent to a sick house for the poor where there was almost no food for the patients and women were dying all around her. She might have died there herself, but her brother paid for her to switch to a high-class sanatorium in Texas.
Porter spent two years recovering at the sanatorium, surrounded by a group of intelligent young women, including some journalists and writers. Inspired by their example, she got a job as a journalist, and began to write for a variety of newspapers, first in Denver and then in New York City, covering entertainment news and social events.
In 1919, she met a group of Mexican activists, and they persuaded her to go to Mexico to write about the coming revolution there. She used her experience in Mexico to write the story "Flowering Judas," about a young American woman living in Mexico just before the revolution. The story made her literary reputation when it was published, and it became the title story of her first collection, Flowering Judas and Other Stories (1930). She was forty years old.
Her books of stories got excellent reviews, and critics compared her to some of the greatest writers in American history, but she didn't make much money from her fiction and had to support herself with journalism for most of her life. She once said, "I think I've only spent about ten percent of my energies on writing. The other ninety percent went to keeping my head above water."
She worked for more than twenty years trying to write a big novel called Ship of Fools. When it was finally published in 1962, it made her rich, but it got mixed reviews. Most critics consider her best work to be her short stories. Her Collected Stories came out in 1964 and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Katherine Anne Porter said, "My life has been incredible, I don't believe a word of it."
From: The Writer’s Almanac