Cover via Amazonby Jean Purcelleditor@opinebooks.com
Opine eStore and Book Cafe
I have been a Eudora Welty fan for so long I can hardly remember when the admiration started. Yes, I do...it was through her book Delta Wedding. I was a young wife and mother in my 20s, and the way she described the place of the wedding and a character tempted to break a lot of glass struck some indefinable chord that became unforgettable, yet still untraceable.
Eudora Welty was a single, white, female, southern...writer. Mississippi, no less. When Medgar Evers was gunned down in his driveway in Jackson, Mississippi (1963), she wrote an article for the local newspaper describing the killer. When he was caught, not due to her description--"How could she know?"--he fit the profile she had written. I read about that years later, however. I felt that she must have had the sense of anger due that act, yet she kept her senses about her...to write, to profile one real-life, ignorant, and hate-filled murderer. A friend of other writers, whatever their bent or background, she never married and, as far as I know, she lived all her life in the family home, in Jackson.
What she could do with words and imagination! They were like twins of her writing landscape.
One birthday, I received from our friend Sylvia Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings, based on a series of lectures she once gave somewhere. Some ivy league university, I think. After reading the book, I thought and felt that I understood better how and why she wrote.
Another big part of the "how" she wrote lies in a story I once read about her in a newspaper. She would lay the typewritten pages of a chapter all along the dining room table. She would stand over them and read. And read. And examine. And dissect. Word by word by word.
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