Table of Contents
Volume 14. (2022)
Users' Guide: A Word from the Editor
Pearl A. McHaney
ESSAYS
Frank Lyell: Eudora Welty's Bachelor of the Arts
Hunter McKelva Cole
Eudora Welty and Frank Lyell, from Jackson, Mississippi, were graduate students at Columbia University in New York City, studying advertising and English literature, respectively, for Fall and Spring terms 1930 to 1931. They took every advantage of being in New York City, going to theater, concerts, movies, clubs, and night court. Cole draws from his lifelong friendship and conversations with Welty and from Lyell's journal of his year in the city, which he called "God's Garden." Lyell traveled to Europe before teaching and completing a dissertation at Princeton, and Welty returned to Jackson when her father died in September 1931, eventually pursing the writing of fiction for which she is renown.
This essay examines the formation of subjectivity of the motherless child in William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding. Arguing that Faulkner and Welty share a vision of the motherless child's subjectivity as one that exists on the boundary between living and dead, between self and (m)other, the essay focuses on the contrasting use of metonymy in Vardaman Bundren's perspective and simile in Laura McRaven's. While the connection and experience of submersion afforded by Laura's language of simile allows her to emerge, in the end, with an experience of her own selfhood and a distinct subjectivity, the displacement and experience of detachment and negation imposed by Vardaman's metonymic thinking does not allow him to ever get off the boundary between self and Other; in the end, he does not emerge with his own subjectivity and lacks an experience of selfhood.
Welty's Digital Future: Some New Directions
Michael Pickard
Michael Pickard's "Welty's Digital Future: Some New Directions" spotlights his work with students in the Digital Welty Lab at Millsaps College, an incubator of undergraduate research, "on projects that leverage web technologies to enhance our understanding of Welty's work." It details how this approach provides spaces to fill in historically specific contextual and cultural information gaps that present barriers to 21st century readers and reveal Welty's intertextual engagement with (and often transformation of) that material. Finally, it argues that by inviting students into Welty's imaginary via more interactive technologies familiar to them that we can foster new generations of Welty readers that will continue to invest in her work.
Introductory Remarks for the Inaugural Eudora Welty Lecture: Washington National Cathedral, October 20, 2016
Natasha Trethewey
Natasha Trethewey introduced the inaugural Eudora Welty Lecture that was delivered by Salman Rushdie, October 20, 2016, at the Washington National Cathedral. The Lecture series created by the Eudora Welty Foundation invites living writers to consider their beginnings in the style of Eudora Welty's 1983 William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University that she revised for her memoir One Writer's Beginnings (1984). Trethewey speaks of the confluence of Welty, Rushdie, herself, and the audience from varied times and places to consider Heraclitus's axiom "Geography is fate."
INTERVIEWS
Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, and Me: An Interview with John Maxwell
Pearl A. McHaney
Mississippian John Maxwell is an actor, playwright, and director best known for his one-man play Oh, Mr. Faulkner, Do You Write? When I encountered a 1980 newspaper photograph of John Maxwell performing a scene from The Robber Bridegroom for a televised program of the Eudora Welty Americana Awards given by Mississippians for Educational Television,1 I thought EWR readers might appreciate learning about Maxwell's experiences presenting Faulkner's story in the U.S. and abroad to a variety of audiences, his insights into how people view the South in general, and his relationship, if any, with Eudora Welty. In January 2022, John shared the following stories.
Adapting Eudora Welty's "Moon Lake": An Interview with Brenda Currin
Laura Wilson
Brenda Currin is no stranger to Eudora Welty, having adapted and performed in several Welty inspired productions, including Sister and Miss Lexie (1980) and A Fire Was in My Head (2005). Currin, who trained under the great actress and teacher Uta Hagen, started her career playing Nancy Clutter in the 1967 film version of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (dir. Richard Brooks). She is also a frequent performer in productions of Tennessee Williams's works. In 1996, she co-founded "What Girls Know," a theater program devoted to supporting adolescent girls in their development and creativity.
Laura Wilson, Council on Library and Information Resources Postdoctoral Fellow at Fisk University, sat down for a virtual conversation with Brenda Currin on December 4, 2021, to discuss Brenda's adaptation of "Moon Lake" first performed at the Eudora Welty Conference on February 22, 2019, at the College of Charleston.
NOTES
Eudora Welty at Camp Nakanawa
Elizabeth Bracken
The Eudora Welty Americana Award
Pearl A. McHaney
Reading "A Still Moment" in Everyman's Stories of Trees, Woods, and the Forest
Andrew Hicks
New Introductions to Welty's Works: A Contemporary Reframing
Sarah Gilbreath Ford
Welty at Home, or How I Learned to Love the Zoom Room: A Note on the Eudora Welty House & Garden's "Welty at Home: Virtual Book Club" (2020–2022)
Jacob Agner
REVIEWS
Haunted Property: Slavery and the Gothic by Sarah Gilbreath Ford (review)
Jill Goad
Exposing Mississippi: Eudora Welty's Photographic Reflections by Annette Trefzer (review)
Keri Watson
PRACTICAL MATTERS
Eudora Welty Foundation 2021 News
Jeanne Luckett
Eudora Welty House & Garden
Lauren Rhoades
Eudora Welty Society
Annette Trefzer
Eudora Welty Collection: Mississippi Department of Archives and History
Forrest Galey
CHECKLIST
Checklist of Welty Scholarship 2021
Catherine H. Chengges