Users' Guide: A Word from the Editor

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Users' Guide:A Word from the Editor Pearl A. McHaney This volume of the Eudora Welty Review evolved to become one celebrating friendships that Eudora Welty enjoyed. Reviewing Eric O. Johannesson's book The World of Isak Dinesen, Welty opined that Johannesson gave no "strong evidence to show that he has been stirred, delighted, touched, bored, maddened, even baffled. Indeed, the sad thing about this study," Welty concluded, "is that its author does not seem to have felt any excitement in her work" (131). Fortunately, delight and excitement are evident in the work published here. Welty biographer Suzanne Marrs offers tributes to friends William F. Winter and Roger Mudd. Marrs befriended both the former Mississippi governor and the renowned journalist as all three participated in securing and growing the appreciation of Welty during her life and after her death. Jacksonians Norma Flora Cox and Jesse L. Yancy plumb personal and public archives to tell us stories of Welty's MSCW college friend Mary Moore Mitchell and of the other Mississippi powerhouse Charlotte Capers, respectively. We are enormously grateful to Capers for her leadership of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History and for suggesting to her friend Eudora Welty that she donate her photographs and papers to the Archives. Among the treasures in the Welty Collection at MDAH are the letters between Welty and her lifelong friend Frank Lyell. In preparing her edition of selected letters between Welty and Lyell, Julia Eichelberger does us a tremendous service in offering EWR the opportunity to publish the Correspondence Calendar documenting Welty and Lyell's epistolary friendship from 1931 to 1977. Reading the "bones" of the correspondence that we see in the calendar, we enter the heretofore private world of Welty and Lyell, not as voyeurs, but as invited friends. Be prepared to laugh, to wonder, to get out your notebooks, to ask questions, to smirk at the gossip, and to marvel at the bonds built through the letters. We are fortunate to have Julia Eichelberger, an astute, empathetic yet objective reader and scholar, to welcome us, and we eagerly look forward to her publication of the selected letters. Two notes give insight into Welty's story "Petrified Man." Hunter McKelva Cole, another of Welty's lifelong friends, sends EWR recollections [End Page ix] of conversations as they drove from Jackson to meetings in New Orleans and Baton Rouge in 1985, providing us with a surprise ending of sorts. Allison Scheidegger, graduate student at Baylor University, finds beneficial comparisons between Charles Dickens's character Sairey Gamp from Martin Chuzzlewit and Welty's verbose beautician Leota. Four peer-reviewed essays comprise the Seminar Round Table. Sarah Gilbreath Ford introduces the essays her students developed in a Baylor University Eudora Welty graduate course, framing their interrogations and arguments to discern the modernist trope of isolation and the human need for connection, both keenly felt in spring 2020 as the world changed in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The essays offer fresh readings of "Clytie," "The Whole World Knows," "A Still Moment," and Delta Wedding. EWR partners with the Eudora Welty Society, the Eudora Welty Foundation, and the Welty Collection at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History to publish the Eudora Welty Fellowship Essay. Margaret Pless Zee first presented her findings from summer 2020 in a Zoom meeting and then revised "'Shelter for Secrets': Eudora Welty and the Craft of Identity in One Writer's Beginnings" for EWR. With the 2020 Scribner reissue of One Writer's Beginnings introduced by former Mississippi and US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey, Pless Zee's essay is of particular interest, and we wish her success in her future scholarship. Lastly, we close out this year's EWR with Practical Matters: news from the Eudora Welty Foundation, House and Garden, MDAH Welty Collection, and the Eudora Welty Society. I am ever grateful for Forrest Galey's clear guidance for accessing the Welty papers and requesting permissions; I reference Practical Matters often. Cathy Chengges once again compiles the annual Checklist of Scholarship. This is especially important as it takes some time for MLA to be updated, and the Checklist drills down to more specifics than can be learned in the...