The Writer's Voice: The Sound Recordings of Katherine Anne Porter

Abstract

The Texan-born American writer Katherine Anne Porter made sound recordings of her readings, conference speeches, classroom lectures, interviews, public ceremonies, and personal telephone conversations. Paul Porter, Jr., the writer’s nephew, captured many of the conversational recordings in the 1970s, when Porter was in her eighties, just a few years before her death. Beth Alvarez, a Porter scholar and the Curator of Literary Manuscripts Emerita at the University of Maryland Libraries, selected the recordings from the Katherine Anne Porter papers for in-house digitization in 2014. The Digital Conversion and Media Reformatting staff transferred the open reel audiotapes and Alvarez listened to the digital audio files in their entirety, making copious notes as she did so. Her notes became part of the metadata records linked to the streaming files in Digital Collections, and they provide robust descriptive summaries of the content of each recording. This is a valuable set of audio recordings for literary scholars, because it provides listeners with unedited selections of the great American short story writer talking about her craft, her personal history, and her family. Porter’s reading of one of her most famous stories (Noon Wine) is a treat for admirers of her work, too. This presentation provides an opportunity to consider the voice of an artist known almost entirely to 21st century readers as a voice fixed in print. Porter's readings, her interactions with the public, press, teachers, and students, and the intimate conversations she and her nephew recorded add rich new dimensions to appreciating Porter's archives and published textual work on the shelf.