SOURCE: Warren, Robert Penn. “‘Blackberry Winter’: A Recollection.” In Robert Penn Warren: A Study of the Short Fiction, edited by Joseph R. Millichap, pp. 90-5. New York: Twayne, 1992.

In the following essay, originally published in Cleanth Brooks's and Warren's Understanding Fiction in 1979, Warren views the process of writing the story “Blackberry Winter” as a blend of biographical memories and imaginative fiction.

I remember with peculiar distinctness the writing of this story, especially the balance, tension, interplay—or what you will—between a sense of compulsion, a sense that the story was writing itself, and the flashes of self-consciousness and self-criticism. I suppose that in all attempts at writing there is some such balance, or oscillation, but here the distinction between the two aspects of the process was peculiarly marked, between the ease and the difficulty, between the elation and, I am tempted to say, the pain. But the...