Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty was a Pulitzer-winning fiction author born in 1909, from Mississippi. She hesitantly wrote her autobigraphy “One Writer’s Beginnings” where she explains her journey in learning to see, learning to hear, then finding a voice. In fact, it was her delving into photography that she found gave her writing a keenness to gesture and enhanced her writing (last quote). She died in 2001. I’m thankful for she has left behind for us, and hope you are too.

I suppose I was exercising as early as then the turn, of mind, the nature of temperament, of a privileged observer… A conscious act grew out of this by the time I began to write stories: getting my distance, a prerequisite of my understanding of human events, is the way I begin work. Just as, of course, it was an initial step when, in my first journalism job, I stumbled into making pictures with a camera. Frame, proportion, perspective, the values of light and shade, all are determined by the distance of the observing eye.

I have always been shy physically. This, in part, tended to keep me from rushing into things, including relationships, headlong. Not rushing headlong, though I may have wanted to, but beginning to write stories about people, I drew near slowly; noting and guessing, apprehending, hoping, drawing my eventual conclusions out of my own heart, I did venture closer to where I wanted to go. As time and my imagination led me on, I did plunge.

It is always vaunting, of course, to imagine yourself inside a person, but it is what a story writer does in every piece of work; it is his first step and his last too, I suppose… But I think [mother] was relieved when I chose to be a writer of stories, for she thought writing was safe.

I painlessly came to realize that the reverence that I felt for the holiness of life is not ever likely to be entirely at home in organized religion. It was later, when I was able to travel farther that the presence of holiness and mystery seemed, as far as my vision was able to see, to descend into the windows of Chartres, the stone peasant figures in the capital of Autun, the tall sheets of gold on the walls of Torcello that reflected the light of the sea; in the frescoes of Piero, of Giotto; in the shell of a church wall in Ireland still standing in a floor of sheep-cropped grass with no ceiling other than the changing sky. I’m grateful that, from my mother’s example, I had found the base for this worship – that I had found a love of sitting and reading the Bible for myself and looking up things in it.

Another quote I identify with:

I do not know even now what it was that I was waiting to see; but in those days I was convinced that I almost saw it at every turn. To watch everything about me I regarded grimly and possessively as a need. All through this summer I had lain on the sand beside the small lake, with my hands squared over my eyes, finger tips touching, looking out by this device to see everything: which appeared as a kind of projection. It did not matter to me what I looked at; from any observation I would conclude that a secret of life had been revealed to me–for I was obsessed with notions about concealment, and from the smallest gesture of a stranger I would wrest what was to me a communication or a presentiment.

And one more:

It had more than information and accuracy to teach me. I learned in the doing how ready I had to be. Life doesn’t hold still. A good snapshot stopped a moment from running away. Photography taught me that to be able to capture transience, by being ready to click the shutter at the crucial moment, was the greatest need I had. Making pictures of people in all sorts of situations, I learned that every feeling waits upon it’s gesture; and I had to be prepared to recognize this moment when I saw it. These were things a story writer needed to know. And I felt the need to hold transient life in words–there’s so much more of life that only words can convey–strongly enough to last me as long as I lived. The direction my mind took was a writer’s direction from the start, not a photographer’s, or a recorder’s.