Willie Morris used to giggle and snort when he told the story of the first time he saw Miss Welty. He would always preface the telling with the set up.

THE SET UP: Willies’ maternal grandparents, Percy and Marion Weaks, lived at 1017 North Jefferson Street, just behind the Jitney 14 (now McDade’s) and when he would visit from Yazoo City, he would accompany his beloved Mamie on errands and journey into the wideness of the big city named for General Andrew “Ole Hickory” Jackson. Though Willie was born in Jackson, his family moved the 50 miles to the, “half hills, half delta” town of Yazoo when he was an infant. One day, he and his Grandmother Weaks were in the Jitney shopping and they spotted Eudora combing through the vegetable stall.

“Look Willie”, his grandmother said, “yonder’s Eudora Welty!”

“Mamie”, young Willie respectfully whispered, “is she that woman who makes up them stories in her mind?”

“Yep Willie, one and the same”.

“Well”, the wide-eyed Willie Weaks Morris promptly responded, “I intend to be a writer myself someday”.

And so he did.

Written by Malcolm White

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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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Lemuria’s celebration of Eudora Welty this fall has been nothing short of staggering: after the fantastic book signing/party held in celebration of the publication of my young adult biography, A Daring Life: A Biography of Eudora Welty, back in August, Joe, John, Lisa, Emily, Maggie, and all the great booksellers at Lemuria have continued to keep Eudora front and center with a series of wonderful new ads, posters and bookmarks that feature her image as well as her words. And every time I visit Lemuria, which is often, I see a fresh new arrangement of Welty titles and photographs, as well as my book, prominently displayed in the store.

Lemuria is taking this focus on Welty one step further, and announcing a new, monthly Eudora Welty Book Club. It will be called the “The Cereus Readers” in honor of Eudora and her friends who gathered for the annual blooming of the night-blooming cereus flower and called themselves “The Night-Blooming Cereus Club.” In this same spirit of friendship and fellowship, this new book club is launched.

As we all know, Eudora was a great reader. At the time of her death there were over 5,000 books in her house! And Lemuria was her bookstore. As we celebrate the publication of My Bookstore this week, a book that collects essays, stories, odes, and words of gratitude and praise for stores like Lemuria that offer pleasure, guidance, and support for writers like myself, we want to celebrate Eudora as well–in the store where she shopped and had so many memorable readings and signings–by reading her works as well as authors she loved and admired.

The first meeting of “The Cereus Readers” will be Thursday, January 24, 2013, at noon in Lemuria’s Dot.Com events building. I will facilitate the first book club, but will be sharing the responsibility of leading discussions with Lee Anne Bryan, Carla Wall, Jan Taylor, and Freda Spell–all extremely knowledgeable on Eudora Welty and her works.

I invite you to be part of “The Cereus Readers.” If you would like to be added to our e-mail list, please send a message to Lisa Newman at Lemuria Books: lisa[at]lemuriabooks[dot]com. She will send out an e-mail update as January nears with details of meeting dates and a reading list.

Carolyn Brown
A Daring Life: A Biography of Eudora Welty

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.

Junot Diaz, author of Drown, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, & This Is How You Lose Her

“I started acquiring books as soon as I started earning my own money. I was twelve, I guess. Had a couple of paper routes.”

“I cannot exaggerate how poor my family was in my childhood, and there were days when it was a toss-up between food and books–and like Erasmus I tended to buy books first.”

“Books for me are many things: they are friends, they are companions, they are mentors, they are warnings, they clown, they entertain, they hearten, and they make me stronger. But most of all books (I say again and again) are like the Thirty-Mile Woman from Toni Morrison’s Beloved: ‘She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order’.

How long have you worked at Lemuria?

4 years.

Is there a book you wish that you had bought, but didn’t?

Generally if I want to buy a book, I do. It’s a kind of sickness.

What do you look for in a good book?

I really like a book that seems like all of its parts work together, not just the plot or the characterization or the style, but all of it going towards the same goal. I definitely gravitate towards writers that use a lot of words but use them well. Hemingway’s super terse books are very precise, but I think you can do that and use a lot of words, like John Irving. It is effortless to read that kind of book; all the parts are working together.

How long have you been seriously reading?

It probably isn’t true, but I want to say since I was first reading chapter books. My dad used to take me to the library once a week and I remember when he graduated me from the books with lots of pictures to a middle grade mystery. I was probably in first grade. There is a long period of time during which I don’t really remember if I read.

 How do you organize your books?

I’ve done different things depending on where I’ve lived. I’ve lived a lot of places since I’ve been a book collector. At one point I had read 75% of the books I owned, which is not the case anymore, but I had the poetry in one place, and my fiction alphabetized by author.

Right now, this is how they are organized: I have a bookcase of books currently in circulation, like ARCs I need to read, it’s also the catchall for books I don’t have a place for yet.  That one is the active bookcase. I have a paperback bookcase that is doubled up. I have a bookcase for my short hardbacks and a regular sized hardback bookcase too. I have another bookcase of hodgepodge. They are organized only in odd organization.

 What book have you liked most that came out this year?

One Last Good Time by Michael Kardos. I was just really impressed with his stories and writing. I’m really excited for Mr. Michael. I love stories. I’ve read a lot of short story collections this year. Battleborn was really good too.

 What do you want in a short story?

Harold Bloom once said that short stories are either Chekhovian or Borgesian and by that he meant the Chekhov stories are rooted in reality but a bit fantastical and the Borges are fantastical, but told in a mundane way. I like them both, but if it’s done well, I  like the Borgesian side better. Like Karen Russell. I really like that dichotomy and tension.

 What are you reading right now?

I’m reading the Name of the Wind by Rothfuss. I have 200 pages left. It’s a big book. I’m hoping it will be the book to break me out of the reading funk I’ve been in since I quit smoking.

 When do you read?

Any time. All the time. Especially in the morning. I prefer the morning. I like coffee and reading. Beer and reading is good too though.

 Are you a one-at-a-time reader, or are you reading many books at once?

Both. If I start to read too many books at once, something, or more than one something will drop off. They will fight each other, and there will be one reigning champion who gets finished. I sometimes can read a variety of things at once; a novel and short stories, essays. But it’s hard for me to read more than one thing, so I try not to. Though the temptation is always there when I’m surrounded by so many books.

 What do you look for in a good bookstore?

I really like for a bookstore to have a good backlist. Not just the newest book by the author, but also their 3^rd book. A good depth of material. I really like used bookstores for that reason.

Top 5 favorite books in your library right now (in no particular order):

1. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

2. The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

3. The Phantom Tollbooth, Juster Norton

4. Cider House Rules, John Irving

5. Basic 8, Daniel Handler. (He’s Lemony Snicket)