Maude Schuyler Clay, a photographer and native of the Mississippi Delta, shares her feelings about Miss Welty.

Eudora Welty with  Annie Leibovitz

Eudora Welty represents a little bit of everything I have ever aspired to. She was a wonderful photographer, capturing the Mississippi of 1930 WPA days, giving us as complete an image of our culture and our state as anyone ever has; in her writing she was probably the one person who best encapsulated, through her impeccable ear for the vernacular and her vast understanding of the human condition,  in equal measure the tragedies and comedies of our Southern and universal existence. Throughout her long life she had an association with, as well as the hard-earned respect of,  just about every writer in the last half century or more:

As for clear, honest intent of purpose, that of setting a scene and unfolding a great story, there is no better person than Miss Welty to describe what she was up to:

“I had to grow up and learn to listen for the unspoken as well as the spoken – and to know a truth, and I also had to recognize a lie.”

Though as a child I had had a Kodak Brownie camera and then later graduated to a Kodak Instamatic camera, I have to say that I did not began seriously taking photographs until I was about 19 years old.  My parents invested in a Pentax SLR 35mm when I left Ole Miss after one year and enrolled  at the alluring and exotic Instituto Allende in San Miguel De Allende, Mexico. I really don’t know why my mother and father agreed not  only to let me go that far away from home, but to actually leave college. Perhaps they were so tired of arguing with me about what I perceived as the parochial nature of life in Oxford, Miss., that they officially sanctioned – by paying the travel and tuition expenses — my “running away”, as I regularly threatened to do, to an art school in Mexico. There, along with my classes in welding, pottery and the art of lost wax jewelry making, I took a photography class that pretty much changed my life. There was something magical about going out onto the streets of San Miguel in the blinding light of day and then returning to the  (literally) “dark room” to process and print the pictures. I simply fell in love with photography. As our Miss Welty said of her character, the one she has said she most identified with, Miss Eckhart in “June Recital” from The Golden Apples:

“She derived from what I already knew for myself . . . passion for my own life work, my own art. Exposing yourself to a risk . . . the love of your art and the love of giving it, the desire to give it until there is no more left.”

Lofty ideals, but I would have to say that I decided in Mexico that I had a mission and that was to somehow keep a record of my world and hope that perhaps this work would someday ring true to others.

After a couple of years at the Memphis Academy of Arts where I was also lucky enough to be able to moonlight as “apprentice” to my cousin William Eggleston  (“apprentice” loosely translated as occasional darkroom lackey,  but the position mostly consisted of driving round in a 1962 Bonneville in the late afternoon light of Memphis and environs, taking pictures with Bill while listening to Bach on a reel to reel tape recorder he somehow hooked up through the car radio), I moved to New York City.

For a lot of years I was mostly working on the color portraits that Patti Carr Black, then director of the Old Capitol Museum,  put in my first one-person show, “The Mississippians”.  However, I don’t think I found a subject that really rang true to others until about twenty years later, after I had moved back to Mississippi, and taken a look at the world right in front of my eyes — the one I had grown up in, spent countless hours driving around in, the place I had read about and had heard so many stories which devolved around – the Mississippi Delta landscape. This black and white landscape work  became the book, Delta Land, published by the University Press of Mississippi in 1999.

It is a place that continues to inspire me. Being a resident of the Delta, this last time since 1987, has given me the great advantage of being an insider, and I try hard not to let the stark beauty become so familiar that it no longer fascinates and captivates me enough to be compelled to photograph it. I believe this quote from Miss Welty could have been written for me:

“A better and less ignorant photographer would certainly have come up with better pictures, but not these pictures; for he could hardly have been as well positioned as I was, moving through the scene openly and yet invisibly because I was a part of it , born into it, taken for granted.”

She photographed like she wrote: straight from the heart and her truest mind, and she combined these with a very strong sense of place. She has been and continues to be an inspiration for me. -Maude Schuyler Clay

Eudora Welty with photographer Bruce Weber

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All photos of Miss Welty are by Maude Schuyler Clay. You can view more of her work here: www.maudeclay.com & The Fifty States Project.

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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I loved Wilderness. It’s a novel about Abel Truman, a man who happened to fight in the Civil War, a man who is certainly trying to sort out his life as an older man. Wilderness makes me think about other exceptional writers like Wallace Stegner. Why do I think of Stegner? Because Stegner’s writing gets at the core of what makes us human and Wilderness gets right to the core as you journey with Abel Truman. I took the time to read the introduction Stegner wrote for the Franklin Library Edition of Crossing to Safety. Below are Stegner’s words and you’ll find Weller’s words in the video.

*     *     *

Beginning a novel, William Styron has said, is like setting out to walk from Vladivostok to Spain on your knees. And, he should have added, blindfolded. For there is more than an apparently endless and agonizing duration involved. There is also, very often, a demoralizing uncertainty of direction.

Some novels go from situation through complication to resolution in a straight, planned line, and discover the answers that their authors previously planted there. Others feel their way from darkness toward light, from confusion toward clarification, trying not to manipulate or stack or artificially organize reality in the process. Crossing to Safety sounds like one that knows where it is going, and by the end, perhaps, it does. But during its direction its had no such certainty. It was a search, not a directed journey; and what is the end, it is no Blackbeard’s treasure of revelation, but something fragile–hardly more than a confirmation of feeling.

Feeling is of the essence. I knew from the beginning that this was to be a novel about friendship, and all the ambiguities implicit in that freest and noblest of human relations.

. . .

If the progress of this novel has been from Vladivostok to Spain, the route has through Rio, Fairbanks, and Adelaide. Actually, it has been more like the progress of a rain drop that falls on the Bearpaw Mountains, say, in Montana, and must find its way to the Gulf of Mexico by any nameless coulee that will lead it to the Milk River, from which it can flow on down into the Missouri and the Mississippi until the world flattens out and the necessity to flow is over.

*     *     *

A conversation with Lance Weller speaking from the shoreline of Washington State where part of Wilderness takes place. Like Stegner explains, Weller explains that he did not have “any particular theme or agenda.” Listen in.

It’s that time of year again-time for SEC football fans to make the pilgrimage to their Alma mater or favorite team’s tailgating locale and pig out! Whether a fair-weather fan or a die-hard fan several generations back, all are sure to find common ground at the tailgating tent. Luckily, Southern Living (a certain lifestyle magazine that understands the seriousness with which SEC fans regard their tailgating dishes) has just published a cookbook, The Official SEC Tailgating Cookbook, which is full of delicious game day recipes.

Wake up ready for a full day of tailgating with “Early Morning Warm-ups.” Then get your drink on with some recipes from the “Cheers” section before breaking out all of those yummy “Crunch Time” chips and dips. But don’t forget about the sweet treats in the “The Sugar Bowl” section. I’ve got my eye on the “Mississippi Mud Cake” recipe, which is featured on the Ole Miss game day menu.

Ole Miss, MSU and Vandy Game Day Menus:

*Photo Credits: A big thank you to Maggie Lowery Stevenson and Austen Jennings for holding the book up so that I could take pictures with my high quality iPhone camera!

The Official SEC Tailgating Cookbook by Southern Living, $19.95

by Anna

If you know me at all, you probably already know of my (slight) obsession with the Llama Llama books. They are so much fun to read aloud and the bright, fun colors are as mesmerizing to adults as they are to children. Seriously. Last year we were ever so lucky to host Ms. Anna Dewdney, author and illustrator of the Llama Llama series, at Lemuria. I spent the day with Anna, and we may have bonded (a lot) over children’s books. It was really just one of those days that makes you glad to be a bookseller.

So, when I got the email that Anna would be coming BACK to Lemuria, you can only imagine the dancing that went on in Oz. (I dance when I’m ecstatic, doesn’t everyone?) I am SO looking forward to Monday, September 24th at 4:00 when Anna Dewdney returns. Aren’t you!? We will be geeking out over children’s books and reading the newest Llama adventure, Llama Llama Time to Share (yay!)

Llama has a special place not only in my heart, but also in Lemuria’s. Llama was chosen last year for our OZ First Editions Club and the new book, which is already receiving starred review, will be our September OZ FEC pick. Now is a great time to sign up for this growing club. You never know what perks you might get, even if it is just the joy on your child’s face (see one such experience here). Please email me if you have any questions about the club or to sign up: emily@lemuriabooks.com.

I have never really been attracted to biographies.  I feel like I read an author’s work to read an author’s work.  If the author comes out in the work at all, I can speculate.  I just don’t usually see the need to delve into someone’s life, especially when they weren’t intending for the public to be privy to that information.  I recently made two objections to my otherwise specified rule.  I took an evening to read Carolyn Brown’s Eudora Welty young adult biography A Daring Life.  There was a certain obligation with that book, considering how much we love celebrating Miss Welty.

The second objection is a new biography of David Foster Wallace by D.T. Max called Every Love Story is a Ghost Story.   I can’t really explain why I decided to break my rule for biographies other than, “because I felt like it,” or “because he seemed interesting.”  The obvious response being, “well Simon.  Isn’t that why people read biographies in the first place and maybe you’re just a snobby little hypocrite?”  You’d be kinda right, but whatever. 

The first thing I realized when I opened this book is how smooth it reads.  Max is a sympathetic voice who chugs through Wallace’s life of addiction, depression, and brilliance with a level of composure that is appreciated by the reader.  Wallace was a literary giant who found his first novel spit out of his senior thesis at Amherst.  His life was stuffed with relationships that can be considered of great importance to the literary community, including friendships with Jonathan Franzen, Don DeLillo, and Mary Karr.  Apart from his friendships of note, Wallace relied on the people close to him to keep his depression at bay.  He frequently wrote letters, which made Max’s recount of his life and times feel intimate.  

As far as literary biographies go, Max finds a way to be quite readable.  It is actually quite difficult to put down.

At twenty-five  Wallace returned to his alma mater Amherst to teach a writing seminar.

 “His syllabus was conventional, meant to teach basic tools of writing: character, dialogue, and plot.  He gave his students Eudora Welty’s ‘Why I Live at the P.O.’ to illustrate the unreliable narrator and Lee K. Abbott’s ‘Living Alone in Iota’ to showcase voice.”

On the next page, Wallace “went to New York to receive a Whiting Award, and afterward told his class he had met Eudora Welty.”

In this same section detailing his small time teaching at Amherst houses one of my favorite little anecdotes:

One day he put the words “pulchritudinous,” “miniscule,” “big,” and “misspelled” on the blackboard.  He asked his students what the four words had in common, and, when no one knew, happily pointed out that the appearance of each was the opposite of its meaning: “pulchritudinous” was ugly, “miniscule” was big, “big” was small, and “misspelled” was spelled correctly.  The students had rarely seen him so happy.

Another thing that I found particularly enjoyable about this book, like the little quip about Welty, Max makes a point to illustrate which writers Wallace was primarily influenced by.  His immense love for Pynchon (duh) and Kafka (obviously) give me a bigger window into what his intentions were from his writing.  It seems it was his discovery of Derrida that merged his interests in philosophy and literature.  These little pieces of information open up a whole new world for Infinite Jest that I hadn’t considered the first time I read it.  The problem, of course, is that now I have to reread it.

This book is about a man’s life, but it is about more.  It is about a person dealing with depression.  A person who has the mental capabilities to master anything conceptual, but is still limited by his cognitive disease.  Max opens up Wallace’s life to show the dirty juxtaposition between his brilliance and his disease.  One of the greatest writers and thinkers of his time couldn’t be considered reliable.  At any point he could have a breakdown.

I’d like to leave all you nice people with a little poem Wallace wrote his friend after healing from a breakdown.

Roses are red.

Violets are Blue;

I am well

And hope you are too.

Wittgenstein,

Was a raving fairy;

I’ll be in Amherst

In January

by Simon