[In a speech given to a group of University of Maryland students in 1972, Katherine Anne Porter] said that all her fiction is reportage, it really happened, but she arranges it and it becomes fiction.

Her most ambitious attempt to explain her creative process was made at the invitation of Robert Penn Warren and appeared as "'Noon Wine': The Sources" in Yale Review in 1954. In this essay she related the separate anecdotes which formed the basis of "Noon Wine," saying that the story was "true" in the way that a work of fiction should be true, created out of all the scattered particles of life she was able to absorb and shape into a living new being. (p. 217)

A comparison of the epistolary and fictional versions shows omissions which are as significant as the events either reported exactly or transmuted. The letters show that Porter was very interested in...