I met Eudora Welty when I was 18, a struggling college student and budding bookseller (with maybe just an inkling of having found my true calling) and frankly didn’t know what to expect. When she immediately turned her warmth, the beautiful genuine clarity and lucidity of her gaze upon me and spoke to me in her comfortable, homey voice, her attentiveness charmed me for life and charmed me into wanting to be part of this world of authors and books forever. Even though I was a lowly clerk, she saw my passion for books and literature, and she treated me as an equal and never forgot my name or where we met in the years after.
Eudora Welty was the first writer I had ever met. I think meeting her validated my choice of what I hoped would be my profession – books and publishing.
There are many happy memories of times spent with Eudora in those years when I lived in Jackson and worked at Lemuria. But always the day to day, unexpected visits remain the dearest – picking up the phone and hearing her voice, seeing her coming into the door of the bookstore – in the wintertime always in her brown camel haired trench coat with a cream colored fluffy beret jauntily set upon her head….
As a bookseller, it was also my privilege to meet many other writers in the making. I’ll never forget the ones that came to the bookstore as if making a pilgrimage to Eudora. With tears in their eyes, many spoke of her as THE writer that had inspired them and made them want to become writers themselves. No one ever stood in the Hemingway section or for that matter any other section and said that to me.
In 2001, when Eudora died, I received a call from my mentor and dear friend John Evans. He asked me to consider coming home for her funeral. Recently, he had experienced the deaths of several beloved customers and also of Willie Morris. I called the airline and was on my way within a couple of hours.
I took along with me the Modern Library collection of those stories that I had purchased thirty years ago. For me it began a celebration and appreciation of her life and work that I think will be with me for the rest of my life.
Appreciating her work has been an ongoing obsession – for its immense strangeness, her genius and delight in the absurd, her intense powers of observation and being able to relate them so powerfully to the essence of a story or novel.
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