Night-blooming Cereus Flower at Eudora Welty's House August 28, 2013Introduction to the Cereus Readers Book Club

We call ourselves the Cereus Readers in honor of Jackson writer Eudora Welty and her friends who gathered for the annual blooming of the night-blooming cereus flower and called themselves “The Night-Blooming Cereus Club.” This book club meets in this same spirit of friendship and fellowship.

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A Night-Blooming Cereus Flower at Eudora Welty’s House on August 28, 2013.

The goal of the Cereus Readers is to introduce readers to the writing of Eudora Welty–her short stories, essays, and novels–and then to read books and authors she enjoyed herself or were influenced by her.

We meet at noon in the Dot.Com building adjacent to Banner Hall. Feel free to bring your lunch. All books are available at Lemuria, and be sure to ask for the “Cereus Reader” 10% discount when making your purchase for the book club. Please e-mail Lisa if you plan on attending or if you have any questions: lisa at lemuriabooks dot com.

This is a reading group open to all level of readers–anyone interested in learning about Jackson’s most important writer. Eudora Welty considered Lemuria her bookstore, and we want to honor her by discussing her books and authors she loved–meeting in the store where she shopped and signed her books.

After reading many works by Welty, we will read authors and works she herself enjoyed: Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Chekhov, and mysteries. Finally, we thought we would read authors who have acknowledged Welty as an influence and inspiration such as Ann Patchett, Anne Tyler, and Clyde Edgerton. It’s a bold undertaking, but we plan to be meeting for a while!

Cereus Readers is led by Carolyn Brown (author of A Daring Life: A Biography of Eudora Welty), Carla Wall, Freda Spell, Lee Anne Bryan, and Jan Taylor.

Fall Schedule

essential welty CDThursday, September 26 at Noon in Lemuria’s Dot.Com Building (adjacent to Banner Hall)

We will be listening to an audio recording of Miss Welty reading “Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden” courtesy of The Welty House and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

(You might be familiar with an audio of Eudora Welty reading that is still for sale. I never knew the history but I recently ran across a neat article on NPR about those Caedmon recordings here.)

photographsThursday, October 31 at Noon in Lemuria’s Dot.Com Building

Hunter Cole, friend and scholar of Eudora Welty, is our guest speaker.

Hunter Cole will read a paper titled “Eudora Welty and Her Bachelor of the Arts.” It details the lengthy friendship of Welty and Frank Hallam Lyell and focuses mainly on their year together as students and chums at Columbia University. Cole presented this paper at an international conference on Welty, held in Denmark in 1995.
Before his retirement, Cole was Associate Director and Marketing Manager at the University Press of Mississippi. In addition to supervising sales and promotions, he acquired or edited a few special titles, including these by Eudora Welty:  Photographs, Country Churchyards, On William Faulkner, and On William Hollingsworth Jr. At the Press he served as a consultant on all manuscripts submitted about Welty and her work. He met Eudora Welty in 1958 while he was a student at Millsaps College.  “Thereafter,” he says, “I pestered her until a she gave up resisting and became a friend. ” Cole is the author of The Legs Murder Scandal. At present he is completing an essay about Welty and her Anglo-Irish friend, the author Elizabeth Bowen.

 

robber bridegroom by eudora welty and barry moserSaturday, November 16 at 2:00 in Lemuria’s Dot.Com Building

This unique event will open with a talk on collecting Eudora Welty’s work. Lemuria will display a special collection of Eudora Welty books—from trade to fine first editions.

As with all of the Cereus Reader events, everyone is welcome.

December

No meeting. We will resume meeting on Thursday, January 23 at Noon. Reading list to be announced.

Please follow this link to see what we’ve been reading since our beginning in January 2013.

Written by Carolyn Brown and Lisa Newman

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