Users' Guide: A Word from the Editor

We dedicate this number of the Eudora Welty Review to Danièle Pitavy-Souques, recipient of the 2001–2002 Eudora Welty Society Phoenix Award, organizer and co-organizer of Welty conferences in France, tremendously important fellow scholar, and a dear and thoughtful friend to many. Please find much more about Danièle and her contributions in the tribute in this issue. Included in the notes to the tribute is the citation for a checklist of her Welty publications, 1977–2000. Novelist and short story writer Elizabeth Spencer and broadcast journalist and author Jim Lehrer also died since our previous Review, and tributes to these good friends of Welty are found here also.

I am especially grateful to Sarah Gilbreath Ford and Adrienne Akins Warfield who co-edited the essays for this number of the Eudora Welty Review. They drew from presentations given at the Eudora Welty conference organized by Harriet Pollack and Julia Eichelberger for the Eudora Welty Society in Charleston, South Carolina, in February 2019, and contribute "'The Continuous Thread of Revelation': Eudora Welty Reconsidered," an introduction that will guide you through the essays that follow.

An interview with Hunter McKelva Cole, former Associate Director of Marketing for the University Press of Mississippi and a close friend of Eudora Welty, follows the Welty conference essays. Elizabeth Sweeney, Research Associate for the Center for Population Studies of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Mississippi, conducted the interview to assist Annette Trefzer with the research for her monograph on Welty's photography. Cole's long friendship and professional association with Welty provide an otherwise inaccessible understanding of Welty's life and work. The Hunter Cole Eudora Welty Collection is available for research at Mississippi State University library in Starkville, Mississippi.

Included in this number of EWR you will also find our regular features: a review by Michael Kreyling of the first volume of the "Critical Perspectives on Eudora Welty" series edited by Harriet Pollack; a review by Annette Trefzer of Christin Marie Taylor's Labor Pains: New Deal Fictions of Race, Work, and Sex in the South; reports from the Eudora Welty Foundation, House and Garden, and Society, and the Welty Collection at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History; the Eudora Welty Fellowship research report by Kaitlyn Smith, all found in "Practical Matters"; a note by Welty biographer Suzanne Marrs; and Cathy Chengges's invaluable "Checklist of Welty Scholarship 2019."

I missed the opportunity to draw attention to Conversations with Ron Rash when it was first available in 2017, but reading the paperback edition that was issued December 30, 2019, I was more attentive, partially because I have now met the author and also because Mae Miller Claxton (Western Carolina University), who has made many significant contributions to Eudora Welty studies, and Rain Newcomb (Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College, Cloquet, Minnesota, and children's and young adult author) edited the collection. In more than a dozen references to Welty, Rash specifically references a quotation from "Place in Fiction." Asked about the centrality of Appalachia in his fiction, Rash says, "Eudora Welty says it better than I can. She says that one place understood helps us understand all other places better.¹ That's been a credo for me. I think that if you go deep enough into one place, you hit the universal" ("Ron Rash" 146). After citing Welty again in another interview, Rash explains, "I truly believe that the more we know of one place, the more we're going to make that place universal, because if you go far enough and deep enough into it, you're going to realize what its essence is, and this essence is going to be human, to involve what it means to be a human being, what defines us" ("The Power" 35).

While many may have noted the seismic geographic shift for Welty scholar Rebecca Mark, I highlight here this change. Beginning in January 2020, Mark became the Director of the Institute for Women's Leadership and Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. The Institute is "dedicated...