Welty’s timeless memoir is as lovely and vivid as her other acclaimed works. In her memoir, she reflects on the connections between her memories and her work, describing her stories to be collages of her surroundings and herself, and conveying that she discovered in herself an innate capacity to create long before she desired to write. She illustrates in unerring detail the way the world unfolds for a child as she grows, and the realization that lives - both our own and those around us - are nuanced, complex, and made of stories. To be young, for Welty, is to be constantly discovering. She captures the natural innocence and overwhelming curiosity that take turns shaping each of us. Beyond her life of a writer, Welty recalls in broad strokes how it feels to be young. Welty examines her own becoming, unraveling the journey from her simple origins through the development of her voice and craft to her rise as a celebrated author. Welty describes how she could hear the stories she read, as though the voice of the story itself was echoing from the pages, and how she came to trust this voice to ring true when her own writing found its shape. Many writers will identify with her first love of reading.
She ponders the stepping stones that led her to writing life, and the lessons imparted by each. A companionable guide, Welty reveals herself as she journeys, at much the same cadence as she came to know herself. Welty’s story begins in her native Jackson, Mississippi, and from there, we travel along through remembrances of West Virginia and Ohio. She demonstrates an empowering faith that to write is to read, to watch, and to listen - and that to create is to bear witness in an attempt to better understand those around us. Welty’s legacy as reader and writer comes vibrantly to life in these recollections of her immersion into the realm of stories. “I felt the need to hold transient life in words - there’s so much more of life that only words can convey - strongly enough to last me as long as I live.” This one is one of many examples of the intimacy and immediacy of how renowned Southern storyteller Eudora Welty conveys “things a storywriter needed to know” in One Writer’s Beginnings, essential reading for anyone with writerly ambitions, and a work recently reissued in a new keepsake edition. One Writer’s Beginnings, reviewed by Holland Perryman
What follows is a review written by Pat Conroy Literary Center intern and Beaufort (S.C.) High School junior Holland Perryman, an award-winning young writer born three years after Eudora Welty (1909-2001) passed away and discovering this important volume for the first time through its new edition. While it might have been an easy assignment for a writer already well versed in the merits of this volume to review its new edition, a more interesting avenue presented itself: to invite a review from the perspective of a writer still beginning on her own path of what Welty identifies as Listening, Learning to See, and Finding a Voice. In the fall of 2020, Scribner released a new edition, augmented with an introduction by Natasha Trethewey. Since then, the work has become essential, recommended reading for many a writer. Eudora Welty’s instructive memoir One Writer’s Beginnings began as a trio of public lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1983, subsequently published by Harvard University Press the following year and promptly becoming a New York Times best-seller.