How can a writer who spent all but six years of her life in the same house, living what she herself describes as a “sheltered life,” create such astonishing fiction? In her memoir, One Writer’s Beginnings, Eudora Welty answers this question by arguing that a quiet life “can be a daring life” if it is infused with imagination and memories. For her, memory is a living thing in which “all that is remembered joins, and lives – the old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead.” For Welty, “all serious daring starts from within” (104).
Welty, Eudora. One Writer’s Beginnings. Harvard University Press, 1984, p. 102.