A homegrown talent is being hailed in the world of letters.

Andrew Porter, 36, formerly of 150 N. School Lane, has just produced his first book of fiction, "The Theory of Light and Matter." The short-story collection won a 2008 Flannery O'Connor Award, which publisher University of Georgia Press previously gave to the likes of Ha Jin.

While many of Porter's stories are set in an ubiquitous suburbia, one of the 10 carries the Lancaster County brand. "Departure," which won a Pushcart Prize, is set in local Amish country.

"I used to go to this arcade in a strip mall, and these Amish kids would show up in street clothes and play Pac Man," Porter told a reporter for his new hometown newspaper, The San Antonio (Texas) Express-News. "For years that image of those kids haunted me. There was something sad about it. And I knew behind this image there was something important to me that I didn't understand."

In this story, a man looks back on his teenage romance with an Amish girl who was testing her freedom by frequenting a local diner on Friday nights. The author drops familiar names like Leola, Leisure Lanes, Cedar Crest High School, the old Skinny-Mini movie theater, but it's all slightly skewed.

"People were still scared of the Amish then, they were still a mystery and a threat because of their wealth and the tremendous amount of land they owned — and so naturally they were disliked, treated as outsiders and freaks," Porter writes.

"These days almost all of the Amish have left. Most have sold their land off cheap to real estate agencies and contractors and gone west to Indiana and Iowa. We have new malls and outlet stores where their farms were, and out where Rachel used to live, actors dressed in Amish costumes and fake beards stand along the thruway, chewing on corncob pipes and beckoning carloads of tourists to have their picture taken with them."

Fortunately, the tender yet tentative relationship between the characters reads truer than the description of the Amish or Lancaster County.

Another story, "Hole," is set in Virginia, but longtime Lancaster residents will recall a 1981 tragedy involving a small boy who fell into an old septic tank on his family's School Lane Hills property.

The narrator tells of his friend's rush to finish mowing the grass and dump the clippings in the hole so they can go swimming in the neighbor's pool.

"Tal is hurrying to finish, struggling through the shaggy grass, taking the old rusted mower in long sweeping ovals around the yard. The back of his T-shirt is soaked with sweat, and from time to time a cloud of dust billows behind him as he runs over an anthill or mud wasps' nest. It is the last hour of his life, but he doesn't know that. He is smiling."

As fiction, it's chilling enough. Connecting the dots to reality gives the reader a sense of how events press on the mind of the budding writer and emerge later in factually altered yet emotionally true form.

Porter told the San Antonio Express-News he focuses on characters rather than plotting. "I want to tell a story that resonates with a reader on an emotional level. I want the reader to be engaged in characters' lives and problems."

This reader was.

In these two stories and in "Connecticut," about a boy's discovery of his mother's lesbian affair with a neighbor, the narrators are young men recalling incidents of a decade or more ago. But in the title story, Porter shows he can narrate convincingly from the viewpoint of a married woman remembering an emotional dalliance with her oddly attractive physics professor.

• Porter attended Lancaster Country Day School, where he remembers being encouraged by English teacher Wendy Puff. He went on to received a bachelor's degree from Vassar and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Iowa Writers Workshop.

Marilynne Robinson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Gilead" who was recently short-listed for a National Book Award for "Home," was one of Porter's teachers in Iowa. In a jacket blurb, she calls his work "thoughtful, lucid, and highly controlled" and describes his voice as "honest and grave, with transparency as its adornment."

Porter will read from his book and sign copies 4-6 p.m. Friday, Nov. 7, at DogStar Books, 529 W. Chestnut St. It's not exactly a homecoming, since Porter's parents, William and Jennifer Porter, left Lancaster in 2000 and now reside in Laguna Niguel, Calif. Porter himself is an assistant professor of creative writing at Trinity University in San Antonio.