Users' Guide: A Word from the Editor

Abstract

Users' Guide:A Word from the Editor Pearl A. McHaney As my co-editors and I prepared this issue of the Eudora Welty Review, I thought about the ways in which some things change while others remain the same. Last year, EWR changed its publication venue from Georgia State University to the University of Pennsylvania Press, a change with excellent results, and Sarah Ford and Rebecca Harrison began sharing in the development and editing of the Review. This issue includes our first cluster of themed essays, curated and introduced by Ford. In her introduction, "On Welty and Ecology," Ford guides readers toward what can be discovered with concentrated analyses of various texts when four scholars use one lens, albeit wide, for focusing their view. These Welty and Ecology essays exemplify the collegiality and comradery of Welty studies as they are authored by a range of known and new Welty scholars. Readers should take note of the 2024 EWR Call for Papers encouraging essays examining a new topic, Welty and Material Culture. Two essays that precede the cluster on Welty and Ecology illustrate change as an agent of learning. Pam Merryman, the 2022 Eudora Welty Graduate Research Fellow, studied the drafts and publication of The Shoe Bird in confluence with Welty's personal and professional life. EWR is proud to partner with the Mississippi Department of Archives and History and the Eudora Welty Foundation to publish the results of the Fellow's research. Merryman elected to revise her report into a scholarly essay, to have peer reviewers submit suggestions for changes, and to accept numerous editing requests, all to better her understanding of Welty's writing process and her children's book. The Eudora Welty Society awarded the Ruth Vande Kieft Prize to Merryman for her essay, "Words Are for the Birds: The Transformative Role of Word Study in Eudora Welty's The Shoe Bird," a congratulatory sign of its excellence. The story of Katie Berry Frye's essay illustrates a different variety of change. Already having published numerous essays on Welty and other authors, Frye first shared her ideas at the 2022 American [End Page 1] Literature Association meeting. Expanding an eight-page oral presentation with illustrative power point slides into a twenty-five-page scholarly essay demands more research, reading, and multiple layers of change, including addressing peer-review and editorial suggestions. Frye's essay, "'That's me': Ruby Fisher from "A Piece of News" as Eudora Welty's Selfie," changes the way we think of Ruby Fisher. When the Review was the Eudora Welty Newsletter (beginning in 1977), one of the recurring features was "Works by Welty," a checklist of the author's new, reprinted, or "discovered" work. We continued the checklist in EWR when new editions of One Time, One Place and Photographs, for example, were published. In this issue of EWR, we publish an adapted transcript of Welty's interviews with Dick Cavett that aired on Cavett's television show in 1979. What has not changed in more than fifty years, as evident in the interviews, is Welty's wit, wisdom, and understanding of people and writing, and we think readers will find some revelatory comments among Welty's replies to Cavett's prompts. New scholarship changes our view of Welty's work, and book reviews, another feature of EWR that has not changed, serve as our guides. Jay Watson's review of the most recent volume in UP of Mississippi's Critical Perspectives on Eudora Welty series, Eudora Welty and Mystery, edited by Jacob Agner and Harriet Pollack, is as wide-ranging, instructive, and delightful as the collection of ten essays. The Eye That Is Language: A Transatlantic View of Eudora Welty, a collection of essays by Danièle Pitavy-Souques, also in the Critical Perspectives series, is reviewed by three scholars: Jacques Pothier of France, Stephen Fuller of the U.S., and Laura Wilson of the U.K. Rebecca Harrison guides readers' approach to this roundtable of reviews. What does change, radically, in regard to these two books and four reviews, is our appreciation and understanding of the breadth, power, and complexity of Eudora Welty, her life, and her work. With Harrison and Ford...