“The future story writer in the child I was must have taken unconscious note and stored it away then; one secret is liable to be revealed in the place of another that is harder to tell, and the substitute secret when nakedly exposed is often the more appalling.”
Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings is part autobiography and part “how to be a writer.” It’s also a charming story of Welty’s upbringing in Jackson, Mississippi. Welty’s three chapters titled Listening, Learning to See and Finding a Voice, describe how important it is that any writer be a keen observer. In this sentence she tells that as a girl she frequently asked her mother where babies come from but, one day, instead was told the story of how her mother’s first baby died. Welty lived her long life in Jackson, dying in 2001 at the age of 92.
You can visit her home and garden in Jackson which is preserved by the Eudora Welty Foundation.
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