A Kernel on Reading One Author Deeply
and what it can teach you about your own writing path
I have always been the type of person who prefers depth over breadth. There are many essential real-world skills I lack, but I can tell you an awful lot about gardening, hen-keeping, art history, and Virginia Woolf. The same is true of my reading. When I discover an author I like, such as Woolf, I’ll often read her entire back catalog—and not just her novels, but her criticism, diaries, and letters, too—some of them multiple times. Even as an undergraduate English major, I often took seminars on individual authors, including Henry James and William Faulkner, and bypassed many of the prescribed literature survey courses.
So it was perhaps no surprise that in my first semester of graduate school I registered for yet another class devoted to a single author, this time Eudora Welty. Welty, who died in 2001, is perhaps a little out of vogue these days, but she won just about every major literary award an author can win (excluding the Nobel) and is considered the grande dame of Mississippi letters. Since I now call Mississippi home, I felt I ought to be familiar with more than the handful of short stories I’d read in high school (“Why I Live at the P.O.” and “A Worn Path”). What surprised me, though, was how much studying her life and work taught me about how to find my own voice and conceptualize my path as a writer.
Apprenticeship
Because the class approached her work chronologically, I was able to see the long arc of a talented and prolific writer’s career. We began by reading her first published short stories, “Death of a Traveling Salesman” and “Magic.” Here’s the lesson: they’re not great. I mean they’re solid pieces of craft. They were published by good, if small, literary magazines, but they are not particularly memorable, much less groundbreaking. “Magic” has never been republished in any Welty anthology.
The same is true of most of the early published stories by another great Mississippi writer, Larry Brown. (If you don’t know Brown: go—run!—and read him now). Last summer I read Brown’s complete collection of short stories, Tiny Love. His earliest stories—“Plant Growin’ Problems” and “Nightmare”—were not great, but they were honest and unique. His next published story “Boy and Dog,” was a quantum leap forward: an impressive formal exercise (293 lines of five-word sentences) and a masterpiece of escalation (the plot tracks the “butterfly effect” that follows after a truck runs over a boy’s dog). As Jonathan Miles wrote of Brown’s apprenticeship in his foreword to Tiny Love, “…at some point therein Larry moved the goalposts for himself.” I love that image. Now, I am clearly not there yet. I’ve not even made that first down (to stick with the football metaphor). But I take inspiration from the fact that if I keep tackling my work I may, one day soon, “move the goalposts” for myself.
Welty quickly “moved the goalposts” for herself as well. In the next two years (1937–1939) she placed ten short stories in prestigious journals such as Prairie Schooner and the new Southern Review, including the much-anthologized “Why I Live at the P.O.” and “The Worn Path.” Some of those other stories, which make up her first collection A Curtain of Green, were surprisingly daring and certainly unexpected for a young, well-brought up Southern lady. “Petrified Man” is told almost entirely in dialogue and hints at an illegal abortion, while “Powerhouse” eavesdrops on a group of Black jazz musicians during their break between acts. Stylistically, “Powerhouse” echoes the rhythm and improvisational nature of jazz music. The takeaway here is to just try things, no matter how unlikely they may seem. Some of them will really pay off.
Of course, Welty was not writing in a vacuum during this apprenticeship period. Even though she lived in Jackson, MS, far from the center of the literary world, she developed important relationships that expanded her writing horizons. During those years she hosted a writers’ salon she named the “Night-blooming Cereus Club” that included the author Hubert Creekmore. She attended Bread Loaf in 1940 and Yaddo in 1941, and struck up friendships with established writers such as Robert Penn Warren and Katherine Anne Porter, who became her mentors and champions and helped her find her first agent and land her first book contract.
If you are in the apprenticeship phase of your career, what are you doing to expand your writing horizons? Maybe you’ve formed your own workshop or are applying to graduate programs and summer fellowships. Or maybe like me, you’re trying all of the above—and have even acquired a night-blooming cereus for good luck.
Middle Career
Welty’s middle career, which I would peg from 1942–1950, was extraordinarily productive. She published two novels as well as two short story collections in just six years. She started writing for the New York Times Book Review and won a Guggenheim fellowship, which allowed her to travel throughout Europe. Her work from this period is formally inventive: the collection, The Golden Apples, was an early example of a linked short story collection; and the novel, Delta Wedding, evokes the high stream-of-consciousness style of contemporaries like Woolf and Joyce.
But what really contributed to the success of this period and the richness of these books, I would argue, was how Welty doubled down on the things that most interested her. Greek mythology, photography, and music; the flora and fauna of her native Mississippi; and complex and compromised Southern families—to list just some of the leitmotifs in her mid-career writing.
I was also surprised to discover that, like me, Welty had wanted to be a documentary photographer when she was in her early 20s, and although that career didn’t pan out for either of us, Welty made use of her formative experiences behind the camera. For one thing, she writes like a photographer: many of her short stories cover a single snapshot of time. In “A Curtain of Green” and “A Memory,” the reader sees what a photographer might see gazing for a moment through her viewfinder—and nothing more. And many, many of her stories make narrative use of images from her early photographs, including “Asphodel,” “Shower of Gold,” and “Music from Spain.”
Interestingly, later in her life, Welty published two monographs of that early photographic work: One Time, One Place (1971) and Eudora Welty Photographs (1989)—and they are remarkably good! While I don’t expect my early photographs to get a second life, Welty’s example has given me license to really lean into some of my own off-beat interests, and I expect my future stories will include even more of the things I am most passionate about: art, the natural world, family dynamics, and the raising of chickens and children and butterflies.
Late Career
Beginning in her forties, Welty has produced work of increasing complexity that delved deep into personal experience and memory, and her masterwork from this period, The Optimist’s Daughter, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. But during this time she also wrote some wildly experimental short stories that broke character with much of her previous work—and even broke some of her own rules.
In 1951, she published “The Burning” in Harper’s Bazaar, about a pair of Civil War-era sisters who commit suicide rather than live in a world without slavery. Welty reportedly hated this story and hoped never to write anything about the Civil War given its persistent veneration in the South. But this story is actually one of my favorites of hers and in a class by itself. It is so dark and satirical and perverse.
Then, in 1963, when the Civil Rights activist Medgar Evers was murdered just a few miles from her home, Welty broke her long-standing aversion to political writing and, in a flush of inspiration, wrote the most overtly political stories of her career in a matter of days. “Where Is This Voice Coming From?” was published in The New Yorker just a few weeks after Evers’ assassination and is told from the point-of-view of his murderer. Remarkably, the character Welty created bears a striking resemblance to Evers’ actual assailant: Byron De La Beckwith, Jr., who wouldn’t be convicted for the murder for more than 30 years.
The lesson I drew from these two extraordinary stories was the importance of listening to the gong-strike of inspiration, even when it creates a dissonance with your standard tune—perhaps especially when it does. I found these stories to be Welty’s most electric—and certainly two of her most memorable—and they expanded my understanding for how far a writer can stretch herself into another’s perspective, even when the author and the subject have opposing worldviews.
In the End
One of the lingering questions I have—even after studying Welty intently for an entire semester—is why she stopped writing fiction? She lived to be a healthy 92, but The Optimist’s Daughter, published when she was 63, was her last novel. Had the well run dry? Had she said all she wanted to say? Here, the path obscures for me.
I came late to fiction and did not begin publishing short stories in my twenties, as Welty did. But I do aspire to have a career like hers, and I certainly hope I am still writing well into old age. For that source of inspiration, I suppose I will need to search out other models. Still, reading her work chronologically has given me a great deal of perspective on an artist’s trajectory: seeing how work builds upon work, a small success leads to another small success, which leads to a giant leap forward. So I won’t let myself get discouraged that my early-career writing is not measuring up to the mid- or late-career work of the writers I love. Instead I will trust that if I keep following this well-worn path (pardon the pun), I may eventually arrive at the same destination: publishing works of sparkling style, deep humanity, and great complexity.
My kernel of advice: Find an author whose work deeply resonates with you and read their full catalog for what it can show you about forging your own writing path.
Inspiration, Information, & Insight
Sarah only made it through one of her required texts for this week: Jamaica Kincaid’s My Garden (Book). But she spent the rest of her Spring Break digging in her own garden and (metaphorically) tilling ground on a new short story. As she writes, Sarah has been studying closely the Lauren Groff short story, “Dogs Go Wolf,” for how to portray children in a believable and compelling close-third point of view while still maintaining sharp insight and lush prose.
Shelby’s book club was last week. They read and discussed Come & Get It by Kiley Reid. The story takes place at University of Arkansas and follows a super senior RA, a visiting professor, and a transfer student, tackling themes of social dynamics, identity, power, and class. Shelby was really impressed with Reid's grasp on her characters—from the dialogue to characterizations to development. One of the secondary characters has a strong southern accent, which Shelby heard in her head as she read their dialogue.
Natalia has been reading slowly through the many books she’s referenced in past weeks, but mostly her life has been turned upside down with an unexpected opportunity, and she’s completely focused on that. If it works out, she’ll share details. Stay tuned!
Neidy is still reading Abandon Me by Melissa Febos, We Are a Haunting by Tyriek White, and Tannery Bay by Steven Dunn and Katie Jean Shinkle. She also started the short story collection Company by Shannon Sanders. She’s received several rejections this week, from literary journals and workshops, but she is taking that as a good thing, a reminder that she is getting her writing out there.