Eudora Welty House and Garden

Greetings from the Welty House staff; we are pleased to share the good news of some of the activities of the past year.

The writing component of the Scholastic Art and Writing program administered by the Welty House expanded from the tri-county area to ten more counties throughout the state. Thanks to a generous grant from Cellular South Foundation to the Eudora Welty Foundation, more students were able to compete on the regional level in Mississippi. Thirteen Gold Key and five American Voices applications were submitted for national adjudication, resulting in two silver medals and an American Voices award.

Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor: The Art of the Short Story was the focus of this year's annual Welty Teacher Continuing Education Unit (CEU) program held at Millsaps College. Welty's "A Worn Path" and "A Still Moment" and O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" and "Revelation" were read to explore the similarities and differences in the writing of these preeminent twentieth-century writers. Welty's stories take their start in the world she observed, and the stories' themes emerge as those observations are translated into fiction, while O'Connor's stories, which take their start in a religious ideology, transcend that ideology as she develops character and plot. Beverly Fartheree, an instructor at Hinds Community College and an O'Connor scholar, joined Suzanne Marrs in leading the discussion with teachers from across the state and six of our docents.

The national convention of the American Daffodil Society (ADS) was held in Jackson on March 10-13, 2011. Seventy-one daffodil enthusiasts from eighteen states and two foreign countries toured the garden and the Welty House. The Welty garden, designated an American Daffodil Society Display Garden by ADS, features over twenty-eight varieties of the flowers. A new jonquil named "Eudora Welty" has been registered with the Royal Horticulture Society by Elise Havens of Mitch Daffodils and is planted in front of the Education and Visitors Center. It is classified as 7 W-w and is expected to bloom in April.

In preparation for the ADS meeting, the Welty House hosted an AmeriCorps National Civilian Conservation Corps team in January. Braving cold, rain, and mud, nine young people from seven states across the country worked tirelessly to construct a compost bin, haul debris to be shredded for composting, clear nuisance vegetation, clean trellises and the clubhouse, repair the cold storage frame, and construct a limestone driveway to provide much-needed access for debris removal and delivery of plants and mulch.

We are eagerly awaiting the publication of Suzanne Marrs's book, What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell. Charles Baxter, Jim Lehrer, Roger Mudd, Ann Patchett, Lee Smith, Richard Wilbur, and Alec Wilkinson equally acclaim the depth and richness of the book.

One Writer's Garden: Eudora Welty's Home Place, the much anticipated book by Susan Haltom and Jane Roy Brown, will be published in fall 2011. The authors illustrate the Welty garden's history—and the broader story of how American gardens evolved in the early twentieth century—with images from contemporary garden literature, seed catalogues, and advertisements, as well as photographs of the Welty garden.