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I could go on and on about the details of her life and her tips for storytelling.
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From this Welty tells us this: 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 appealing. And after pestering her mother to reveal the secret of where babies come from, her mother instead reveals to Eudora that she wasn’t the first-born, but had an older brother that died at birth.
Eudora welty listening full#
For example, when recounting how she spied on the one-sided conversations of her mother’s phone calls, Welty lets us know what these early conversations taught her: The scene was full of hints, pointers, suggestions, and promises of things to find out and know about human beings. One Writer’s Beginnings is full of gems like this. When I write and the sound of it comes back to my ears, then I act to make my changes. The sound of what falls on the page begins the process of testing it for truth, for me. I have supposed, but never found out, that this is the case with all readers - to read as listeners - and with all writers, to write as listeners. The cadence, whatever it is that asks you to believe. It is to me the voice of the story or the poem itself. It isn’t my mother’s voice, or the voice of any person I can identify, certainly not my own. As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me. In one scene that I particularly like, she tells us about the moment she discovered that voice you hear when reading:Įver since I was first read to, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn’t hear.
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Not surprisingly, Welty describes herself as a shy girl who loved to read. In the section Listening, Welty describes scenes from her childhood in almost photographic detail. It is an engrossing book, short and powerful, a great read for anyone interested in writing or life in the early 20th century. In three sections - Listening, Learning To See, and Finding A Voice - Welty describes different periods of her early life, from childhood to adolescents to adulthood, and explains what these years taught her about writing.
Eudora welty listening series#
The book is a memoir that grew out of a series of lectures Welty gave in 1983 to the History of American Civilization graduate program at Harvard University. Last Sunday I finished reading One Writer’s Beginnings, by Mississippi author Eudora Welty.