Anyone looking to be a great engineer looks to MIT. Those hoping to be great performers go to Julliard. If people want to be great writers, often Iowa City is their destination.

The Iowa Writers’ Workshop has spewed out authors who have gone on to receive Pulitzers, National Book Awards, and many other honors. As graduate Andrew Porter receives a Flannery O’Connor award for his short-story collection, the Writers’ Workshop can share in yet another honor.

He will read and discuss excerpts from his award-winning work, *The Theory of Light and Matter*, today at 7 p.m. at Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St.

The Theory of Light and Matter is something Porter has been working on since graduation, but it’s only been in the past few years that he decided to turn it into a book.

“I started writing stories long before I had thought of a book,” he said. “And after I had written a certain number, I realized I wanted to put them together.”

After graduating from the Workshop, he received a fellowship that enabled him to focus solely on writing for a year. He almost immediately relocated to Houston, and he now teaches fiction writing at Trinity University in San Antonio.

Although The Theory of Light and Matter is an accumulation of short stories, they all contain common links – most notably setting. The stories all lodge themselves in suburban neighborhoods throughout the United States.

“They are about the types of conflict that arise in that setting,” Porter said. “They’re also largely about memory, and the way that we reconstruct memory, and the way we remember events of our past.”

He got the idea for the title The Theory of Light and Matter from reading a book about physics. He found that the words worked well with the concepts that he was trying to convey within his stories.

It’s been 10 years since he has been in Iowa City, and he is thrilled at the prospect of returning to a place that houses the program he poured so much of himself into. He notes that he attended numerous readings at Prairie Lights while he was a student at the Workshop, and that it is a remarkable thing to be able to come back as the featured author.

“I’ve been looking forward to this reading perhaps more than any other simply because Iowa is such an important place for me in terms of my development as a writer,” Porter said.

He looks back on his time at the Workshop fondly, with high regard to the education he received there.

“I think my experience in the workshop really was a very transformative experience for me,” Porter said. “It was during those two years that I went from being somebody who liked to write short stories to someone who thought of himself as a writer.”

His advice to Workshop participants is to persevere through whatever hurdles that come their way.

“It’s a matter of whether or not they can keep going when they face obstacles in the outside world and life after the workshop.”

Excerpt From Theory of Light and Matter, by Andrew Porter

“It’s na’ve to assume that another person can fulfill you, or save you, if the two things are, in fact, different, and I have never felt that way with Colin. I simply believe that he fulfills a part of me, an important part of me, and that Robert fulfilled another equally important part of me. The part of me Robert fulfilled is a part which I imagine Colin, even now, doesn’t know exists. It is the part of me that can destroy as easily as it loves. It is the part of me that feels safest and most at home behind closed doors, in a dark bedroom, that believes that the only truth lies in the secrets we keep from each other. Robert is the secret that I have kept from Colin for almost ten years. I have imagined telling him sometimes. It has been ten years, and in that time we have lasted through a miscarriage, near bankruptcy, and both of his parents dying, and I feel at this point that there is almost nothing we can’t weather together. But it’s not that I’m afraid of how he will react. I know him well enough to know that he will internalize it. He may hate me for it, but he would never show me. His whole life, it seems, he has gone out of his way to spare me pain and I know that even as I told him of my feelings for Robert, he would be thinking how not to hurt me. Guilt is the reason we tell our lovers these secrets, these truths. It is a selfish act, after all, and implicit in it is the assumption that we are doing the right thing, that bringing the truth out into the open will somehow alleviate some of the guilt. But it doesn’t. The guilt, like any self-inflicted injury, becomes a permanent thing, as real as the act itself. Bringing it out into the open simply makes it everyone’s injury. And that is why I never told him. I never told him because I knew he would have never told me.”