Tag: Eudora Welty

“It seemed to me that if I could stir, if I could move to take the next step, I could go out into the poem the way I could go out into that snow.”

Were my reading assignments interesting?  Moving?  Inspiring?  These are the questions I ask myself after teaching literature classes.  I hope my students will experience the sort of engagement that Eudora Welty describes here.  She writes about spending an afternoon in the library reading Yeats and feeling so absorbed by the … Read More

“The sentences would be like bright juggler’s balls, spinning through the air and being deftly caught and thrown up again.”

Or so Rhoda – the aunt in Barbara Pym’s Less Than Angels — thought would happen when “clever” people came to visit the family.  Instead, however, she found that the visitors’ sentences could be compared to “scrubbing-brushes, dish cloths, knives” which sometimes “fell to the ground with resounding thuds.”  … Read More

“As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover.”

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 … Read More