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Author writes his way back from a nightmare

By Loren Keller

Almost anyone who has written on a computer probably knows the frustration of losing at least a few paragraphs of work due to an errant keystroke, an inexplicable hard drive crash or the failure to hit the “save” button often enough.

But imagine the nightmare of losing nearly a lifetime’s worth of literary effort.

That’s what happened to Andrew Porter the year after he left the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1998.

At the time Porter was living in Houston on a James Michener-Paul Engle Fellowship, a stipend designed to give him a full year of uninterrupted time to finish his first short story collection. About a month before his fellowship money ran out, he came home late one night to discover that his apartment had been burglarized.

“I’d been completely cleaned out,” Porter writes in an e-mail in response to questions from CorridorBUZZ.com. “Virtually everything I owned was gone, including my computer and printer, my backup disks and even the leather briefcase where I kept all the hard copies of my stories. In other words, basically everything I’d written that year, almost everything I’d ever written, was gone.”

Porter grew depressed and says it took several years to recover from the loss, which included stories he had written while living in Iowa. He ended up moving to California and teaching part-time at various universities in both the Bay area and Southern California but struggled to keep writing.

“I went through a long period of time in which I didn’t write at all, in which I essentially gave up on the idea of being a writer and in which I also tried to distance myself from almost anything writing-related,” he says.

A major turning point for Porter came when he was offered a one-year visiting writer position at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, which he says was a “major confidence booster.” In Baltimore he began to write again for the first time in three years and “managed to actually finish an entire short story, a major accomplishment at the time. Gradually, I wrote another story, and another one after that, and as these stories began to appear in print, I started to feel like I was getting back on track.”

The end result was The Theory of Light & Matter, a 2008 collection of short stories that won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Porter will read from his work at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 10 at Prairie Lights books, 15 S. Dubuque St.

Most narrators of the ten short stories in The Theory of Light and Matter find themselves struggling with a traumatic incident in their pasts while trying to move forward with their lives in American suburbia.

“I guess this is a theme that could be applied to my own life for many years, at least in terms of my writing,” Porter says. “That said, this connection is only something I’ve noticed in retrospect, not something I was ever thinking about consciously as I was writing the stories.”

In the collection’s titular story, a comfortably married woman ruminates on the affair she had with her physics professor while dating her husband-to-be in college and the distance that long-ago relationship continues to create between them. The book’s shortest piece, a two-page story titled “Skin,” flashes forward to an early marital conflict between a young couple who for now can sleep “believing in our thick dreams that we are capable of nothing cruel.”

The stories that ended up in his book bear little resemblance to what was taken from Porter’s apartment in Houston.

Porter says he initially tried to reconstruct what he’d lost from memory — and was able to recall basic plotlines, scraps of dialogue and the occasional sentence that went missing — though he found it impossible to “get the language just right or to recapture the exact mood and tone.”

He says he ultimately decided it would be best to put those stories behind him and move on.

Porter’s return to the literary spotlight was helped along by a friend of his from the workshop, Holiday Reinhorn. The author of the short story collection Big Cats, Reinhorn is married to “The Office” actor Rainn Wilson and offered to set up a reading of Porter’s work with Wilson and some of their other actor friends. Among them were Justine Bateman and Eric Stoltz; the reading even got a mention in People magazine.

“For someone like me, this was a completely surreal experience, hearing professional actors read my work out loud, and certainly among the best nights of my life,” says Porter, who now teaches creative writing at Trinity University in San Antonio.

Reinhorn was just one of the good friends Porter made during his time at the Writers’ Workshop; he also mentions instructors Marilynne Robinson and Barry Hannah as individuals who have influenced his work.

“I went through an enormous transformation during that time, though I think this transformation had less to do with what I learned in class (though I did learn a lot in class) and more to do with the time I spent outside of class with other writers,” Porter says. “The people I met while I was there are to this day among the smartest and most talented people I have ever met in my life, and I feel grateful still for the fact that I was able to spend two years of my life with them.”

When not attending classes in the workshop, Porter says he lived in a farmhouse outside of town with several other writers and spent a lot of time there, especially when the winter weather made for a treacherous drive into town. When he did make it into town, he spent his time much as you might expect a writer would: hanging out at the Java House, browsing literary magazines at Prairie Lights and “wasting a lot of hours in used book stores and record shops.”

“I remember eating a lot of meals at Mickey’s and spending a lot of nights at bars like the Deadwood and the Foxhead, and I still think fondly of that old movie theater in the middle of town where I used to like to go with friends just after I’d turned in a story for workshop,” he says.

Porter is now working on a novel set in Houston, which he says “involves a family going through a crisis,” and hopes to have a final draft completed within the next year.

And there’s little chance his work will go missing again: Porter says he now backs up everything “compulsively” on external hard disks and also sends drafts of his work to his own Gmail account to permanently protect his work in cyberspace.

“I may have become a bit neurotic about backing stuff up,” he says, “but I can tell you, I sleep a lot better at night.”