ONE WRITER’S BEGINNINGS by Eudora Welty: Turning the Mundane Into Magic
A New York Times Bestseller and an American Book Award Nominee, One Writer’s Beginnings by Eudora Welty is a lyrical composition highlighting the every day experiences Welty witnessed as a child which later helped shape her uniquely detailed writing style. Part memoir, part creative writing manual, One Writer’s Beginnings breaks down the foundational tools of writing through three separate sections: “Listening,” “Learning to See,” and “Finding a Voice.” Initially presented as Harvard lectures in 1983, the story told through these sections is woven together like a finely crafted tapestry. It is Welty’s effortless transition from illuminating prose to practical writing tips that makes One Writer’s Beginnings one of the best instructional writing books of all time.
During the span of Welty’s forty-year writing career, she created an array of short story collections, non-fiction pieces, poems, and novels including The Golden Apples, Death of a Traveling Salesman, Delta Wedding, The Bride of the Innisfallen, “A Flock of Guinea Hens Seen From a Car,” and The Wide Net. Throughout these works, Welty expertly wields her writing tools by capturing those who inhabit the Deep South. One Writer’s Beginnings is no different. Through her resplendent descriptions and riveting voice, readers feel they have embarked on another voyage into Welty’s creative world rather than hitching a ride into an author’s own past.
The first section of One Writer’s Beginnings, “Listening,” opens with the simple description of her childhood home in Jackson, Mississippi and how the sound of clocks chiming always resounded inside of it. With this simple introduction, Welty’s childhood world springs to life like a pop-up book being opened for the first time. Welty’s father, Christian, is depicted as a responsible, dedicated husband and father who works as an insurance salesman. Despite the apparent normalcy of Christian’s character and career, Welty infuses his life with facets of color through the explanation that “he loved all instruments that would instruct and fascinate.”
Even though Christian was also amazed by the weather, whenever a storm swept through their town, Welty’s father would draw Welty and her brother away from the windows to prevent them from begin struck by lightening. In juxtaposition, Welty’s mother, Chestina, scoffed at her husband’s fear: “Why, I always loved a storm! [….] I’d go out on the mountain and spread my arms wide and run in a good big storm!”
As Welty listened to her parents bicker while outside the storm raged, she learned how to hone her “meterological sensibilities.” Later, during the creation of her stories, Welty tried to evoke a sense of atmosphere around her characters to provide an outward picture of what was going on within.
While Welty’s father remained fascinated by clocks, telescopes, cameras, kaleidoscopes and puzzles, Welty’s mother was fascinated by books. From the earliest moments of her childhood, Welty knew every room in their home was to be used for reading. As Welty’s mother, Chestina, performed her daily domestic duties, she continually read. Welty states, “My mother read secondarily for information; she sank as a hedonist into novels.”
Once Welty learned how to read, she too sought to read everything she could get her hands on. Despite Welty’s passionate pursuit for reading, what she read could not quench her insatiable thirst for stories. The more stories she read in books, the more stories she perceived in the every day occurrences around her: “Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them.”
In the second section of One Writer’s Beginnings, “Learning to See,” Welty delves even deeper into the dynamics which created her loved for language by revealing the unique contrasts between her father’s and mother’s personalities. In one particularly mesmerizing passage, Welty recounts how her mother had hobbled on crutches into their burning home to retrieve 24 volumes of Charles Dickens. Afterward, whenever the Welty family went on vacation, her father brought with them an ax, a coil of rope, and a chain in case a fire broke out in their hotel room.
As Welty grew older, she obtained a unique balance of her father’s quiet caution and her mother’s flamboyant bravery. But, as Welty recalls in “Learning to See,” Chestina was not excited about her daughter’s inheritance: “While she knew that independent spirit so well, it was what she so agonizingly tried to protect me from, in effect to warn me against. It was what we shared, it made the strongest bond between us and the strongest tension.”
“Finding a Voice,” the final section of the book, highlights the independent spirit Welty’s mother reluctantly bestowed upon her daughter. But without this same bold confidence and strong will, Welty wouldn’t have been able to thrive as a woman writer in a time when writing was classified a man’s job. Unlike his idealistic wife and daughter, Christian Welty feared that Welty “wouldn’t achieve financial success” by becoming a writer. To nullify her father’s qualms, Welty completed her degree at Columbia University Graduate School of Business in New York City, then went on to work for the Works Progress Administration in Mississippi as a journalist and photographer. But even though Welty completed her tasks with precision and ease, “the direction [her] mind took was a writer’s from the start, not a photographer’s, or a recorder’s.”
After Welty embraced her calling as a creative writer, she learned to allow the stories to lead her instead of leading the direction of the stories. As the stories developed, Welty found she did not write about what was unfamiliar to her. Instead, Welty sought to capture the places and the people who had been a part of her every day life in Mississippi. For even though Welty had grown up in a sheltered existence, through her unique eye for the details pervading her world, she was able to turn the mundane into magic.
Both a practical writing manual and a riveting memoir recounting a writer’s life, One Writer’s Beginnings is the perfect book for those who are reading in order to learn how to write or for those who are reading because they love Welty’s lyrical use of language. Through One Writer’s Beginnings, Welty offers hope to all readers that you do not have to live an adventurous existence to create a world through words. For it was through Welty’s ability to listen that she was able to see the beauty composing her world. Because of this perception, her stories were able to be created and her voice found. This simple yet transforming concept is displayed in One Writer’s Beginnings as Welty concludes, “A sheltered life can be a daring life…for all serious daring starts from within.”