The wide net eudora welty
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"Oh, you've heard of it? I don't think I've ever met anyone who was familiar with it." She's not positive, but thinks it'll probably be "The Wide Net," maybe abbreviated for public consumption. At the ceremony tonight, she'll read one of her works - in her own words, even. This time it's the PEN/Malamud Award, given for excellence in the short story. The much-honored grande dame of American letters has come to Washington this week to receive another in a long row of prizes. "Don't you like that?" she asks, and repeats: " 'Just tell it in your own words.' It's one of my favorite, favorite remarks." Welty recounts this anecdote slowly, the way she must do most things these days, but as she does, unfettered delight spreads across her face. "Bring us one of your stories," they urged. After reflecting on Eudora Welty’s gift and my love of the Deep South, which she writes about with such reverence, I couldn’t help but feel homesick.The details are lost in the mists of memory, but it seems that the members of an amateur literary group once sent an invitation to Eudora Welty. I have an extreme fondness for the Trace but I decided not to use that path for my character’s epic walk from East Texas to North Georgia, although her Cherokee heritage might have embraced that path if I’d plotted her course differently.Īll in all, it’s funny how much you can get out of rereading one of your favorite stories. Native Americans used this trail for centuries. The Trace is an historical 444-mile path from Natchez to Nashville linking the Cumberland, Tennessee and Mississippi rivers. They sort of sink into our subconscious to be called forth, often when we least expect it.Īlso, the passages about the Natchez Trace reminded me of other parts of my story. This realization made me think about how we synthesize things we encounter, sometimes without even realizing it. Second, as I was working on my current manuscript, I realized there’s a fairly big scene that I’ve also cast in Natchez, with the Mississippi River as one of the main characters. First, it had been so long since I’d read this story that I’d forgotten it was set in Natchez. I reread “First Love” this weekend and two thoughts struck me. The first line seems to say that the writer isn’t exactly sure what happened either, acknowledging with some level of grace that reality can be ambiguous, which makes me feel better about my inability to interpret her meaning. I’m not sure I completely understood this story when I first read it, and maybe not even now. “Whatever happened, it happened in extraordinary times, in a season of dreams, and in Natchez it was the bitterest winter of them all.” The story, “First Love,” is set in Natchez, Mississippi: After recommending one of Welty’s stories from a collection of short stories published in 1943 titled, The Wide Net, I decided I needed to read the story again. Last week we began a discussion about Eudora Welty on my Facebook page, which I carried with me into the weekend. “First Love” is one of my favorite stories from that collection. My first edition copy of Wide Net by Eudora Welty.