I have two stories to share about Miss Welty’s Delta Wedding. Marion Barnwell, a Delta native, shares her experience of reading Delta Wedding as a teenager. The other story is from Karl Marlantes who many of you might have met when he came to the bookstore on two separate occasions for Matterhorn and What It Is Like to Go to War. Both of these stories are unique testaments to the power of Miss Welty’s writing. -Lisa
It was a hot summer day in Indianola, deep in the Mississippi Delta. I was fourteen. Some plan or other had fallen through to get together with a friend, and I was bored. Bored! Only one thing to do—pester my mother. More effectively than Chinese water torture, I repeated “I’m bored” a few hundred times to get her to stop what she was doing to entertain me. Instead, she went over to a shelf, selected a book, and handed it to me. “Read this,” she said. “It’s about the Delta.”
“Our Delta?” I asked in disbelief. “This boring place?”
“Our Delta,” she repeated. “Our very Delta.”
The book she handed me was Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding. By making that particular choice, she handed me so much more. No other book on earth could better have expanded my sense of self. I was—we were important. We must be. Someone had written a book about us.
That gift was the spark for a continuing passion for reading, which led to my pursuing a career as an English teacher and as a writer. I still marvel at my mother’s choice. For who better than Welty could use all the senses to make a particular place come alive? Who better to teach me that if I was bored, then I just wasn’t looking?
–Marion Barnwell
The following is from Publisher’s Weekly – The title is “Why I Write” but it could just as well be titled “Why I read” – a truly great piece. You might have read this story before on our blog but I love it so much and feel it is worth sharing again. -Lisa
by Karl Marlantes — Publishers Weekly, 1/25/2010
Having read a galley of my novel, Matterhorn, about Marines in Vietnam, a somewhat embarrassed woman came up to me and said, “I didn’t even know you guys slept outside.” She was college educated and had been an active protester against the war. I felt that my novel had built a small bridge.
The chasm that small bridge crossed is still wide and deep in this country. I remember being in uniform in early 1970, delivering a document to the White House, when I was accosted by a group of students waving Vietcong and North Vietnamese flags. They shouted obscenities and jeered at me. I could only stand there stunned, thinking of my dead and maimed friends, wanting desperately to tell these students that my friends and I were just like them: their age, even younger, with the same feelings, yearnings, and passions. Later, I quite fell for a girl who was doing her master’s thesis on D. H. Lawrence. Late one night we were sitting on the stairs to her apartment and I told her that I’d been a Marine in Vietnam. “They’re the worst,” she cried, and ran up the stairs, leaving me standing there in bewilderment.
After the war, I worked as a business consultant to international energy companies to support a family, eventually being blessed with five children. I began writing Matterhorn in 1975 and for more than 30 years, I kept working on my novel in my spare time, unable to get an agent or publisher to even read the manuscript. Certainly, writing the novel was a way of dealing with the wounds of combat, but why would I subject myself to the further wounds all writers receive trying to get published? I think it’s because I’ve wanted to reach out to those people on the other side of the chasm who delivered the wound of misunderstanding. I wanted to be understood.
Ultimately, the only way we’re ever going to bridge the chasms that divide us is by transcending our limited viewpoints. My realization of this came many years ago reading Eudora Welty’s great novel Delta Wedding. I experienced what it would be like to be a married woman on a Mississippi Delta plantation who was responsible for orchestrating one of the great symbols of community and love. I entered her world and expanded beyond my own skin and became a bigger person.
I was given the ability to create stories and characters. That’s my part of the long chain of writers, publishers, agents, booksellers, librarians, and a host of others who eventually deliver literature to the world. I want to do for others what Eudora Welty did for me.
———
If you have story about Miss Welty that you would like to share on our blog, please e-mail them to lisa[at]lemuriabooks[dot]com.
Click here to learn about Carolyn Brown’s A Daring Life: A Biography of Eudora Welty
Click here to see all blogs in our Miss Welty series
wwwwww
Comments are closed.