While working as a graduate intern at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History last year, I began a particular assignment centered on Eudora Welty. The goal of my project was to find a way to mesh social media with Miss Welty’s connection to MDAH, possibly through the use of Twitter or Facebook. The catch? I knew very little about Eudora Welty’s life.

As a Millsaps English major, I’d dabbled in Welty’s fiction. Dr. Suzanne Marrs impressed upon the English 3350 Welty Short Fiction class the poignancy of Welty’s fiction writing, taking us on a tour of the Welty house as a “bonus.” I’d been warned that a student should not over-connect the work of an author with the life of an author, because fiction is fiction and thus stands alone. However, years later as an intern at MDAH, I found myself finally reading my former professor’s biography Eudora Welty, and looking back I notice that I’ve highlighted the following passage, taken from one of Miss Welty’s essays:

“Southerners do write – probably they must write. It is that way they are: born readers and reciters, great document holders, diary keepers, letter exchangers and savers, history tracers – and, outstaying the rest, great talkers. Emphasis in talk is on the narrative form and the verbatim conversation, for which time is needed.”

It is a quote from an essay published in the Times Literary Supplement. I’ve scribbled the word “critical” in the margin next to the passage, decorating the paragraph with stars for added emphasis. This concept – that Southerners are perhaps inherently destined to document our conversations in written form – made perfect sense. Think of all the correspondence Miss Welty wrote, all the notes she must have jotted while eavesdropping, and all the recipes and gardening tips she recorded in writing. She was nothing if not prolific, so it must be interesting to write a book about Miss Welty, because really, it seems that she was always writing a book about everybody else.

As Miss Welty said, Southerners are talkers, driven to communicate, retell, relive, and relate. We have new ways of communicating, it’s true: our culture has come to depend on social media as a way to document our lives and stay in touch. We are E-mailers, bloggers, Tweeters, Facebook-status updaters. But while we have modified our methods of communicating, we are still communicating the same things. We still storytellers, narrators and gossipers, readers and letter-writers. More than ever, we value our conversations, and we want others to share in our chatter.

As I studied Miss Welty last year, I began to wonder what she would think about the way we experience her legacy. I can’t imagine what Miss Welty would say if she knew that her old house now has a Facebook page, or that Lemuria was running blogs about her. Would she have liked Facebook, blogs, and Twitter? She seems too regal for social media, but then again…perhaps she would have loved it. After all, what is social media if not a way to retell stories, share ideas and communicate with others?

I think Miss Welty would approve.

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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

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