Eudora Welty Society

Since our last report in EWR, Spring 2019, the Welty Society has run and is planning the next dynamic series of events.

2019 Mississippi Book Festival

The August 2019 MBF hosted the session Eudora Welty and Race which was planned to preview the December publication of New Essays on Eudora Welty, Class, and Race, the first volume in the new University Press of Mississippi series, Critical Perspectives on Eudora Welty. Panelists were Harriet Pollack (moderator), Ebony Lumumba, Donnie McMahand, Kevin Murphy, Christin Taylor, and Rebecca Mark. Christin Taylor also signed copies of her 2019 book, Labor Pains: New Deal Fictions of Race, Work, and Sex in the South, which provocatively considers Welty's The Golden Apples in the contexts of Popular-Front era protest fiction by African-American writers.

EWS at the Society for the Study of the American Short Story Symposium

The September 2019 SSASS symposium, held in New Orleans, featured Eudora Welty's "Moon Lake" Revisited on the 70th Anniversary of Publication. A result of having had 17 Welty scholars perform a staged reading of Welty's "Moon Lake" at our 2019 Charleston Welty Society Conference was that all of us in Welty studies began thinking again, at the same time, about this central story in Welty's masterwork The Golden Apples. Society member and OBIE Award-winning actress Brenda Currin's adaptation put lines of the story in our mouths and ears in a different way from meeting them on the page—giving us a chance to hear what we'd missed or never wondered about before. This SSASS panel gave a few of us a chance to work again on the story that we had all thought hard about before while offering an opportunity to talk to each other about our new perceptions. There, the following papers were presented:

1. 1. "On Class and Comedy in 'Moon Lake' Modernism," Harriet Pollack, College of Charleston

2. 2. "The Vibrant Matter of Eudora Welty's 'Moon Lake,'" Sarah Gilbreath Ford, Baylor University

3. 3. "'Moon Lake' Revisited 25 Years After Publishing The Dragon's Blood: Feminist Intertextuality in Welty's The Golden Apples," Rebecca Mark, Tulane University

Plans for EWS Panels and a Staged Reading at the Society for the Study of Southern Literature 2020 Conference, April 2–4, 2020, were canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We look forward to seeing some of this research in future issues of EWR and have included the planned panel information below.

In spring 2020, we had planned to bring a panel, a roundtable, and a staged reading to the biannual SSSL meeting, to be held in Fayetteville, Arkansas. The panel Welty and the New Southern Renaissance was to feature four papers:

1. 1. "Eudora Welty and the New Mississippi Renaissance," Harriet Pollack, College of Charleston

2. 2. "The Post Office and the Displaced Pedestal: Fictions by Eudora Welty and Alice Walker," Donnie McMahand and Kevin Murphy, Towson University

3. 3. "Nick White and Eudora Welty: Doubleness, Queerness, and the Small Southern Town," Caroline Brandon, Mississippi State University

4. 4. "'Memory as a 'living thing': Specters in Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing and Eudora Welty's The Optimist's Daughter," Sarah Gilbreath Ford, Baylor University

The roundtable Radical Welty was to introduce nine short presentations:

1. 1. "On Radical Welty: Intersectionality," Rebecca Mark, Director of the Institute for Women's Leadership, Rutgers University

2. 2. "Radical Reflections on Welty, Whiteness, and Race," Harriet Pollack, College of Charleston

3. 3. "Welty and Popular Front-era Black Radicalism," Christin Taylor, Shenandoah University

4. 4. "On Welty's Radical Photography of Black Women," Alex Werrell, Hopkins School

5. 5. "Welty's Radical Assault: Masculine Discourse in The Bride of the Innisfallen," Carol Ann Johnston, Dickinson College

6. 6. "'Change Me': Radical Sexuality in Welty's Fiction," David McWhirter, Texas A&M

7. 7. "Welty's Radical Reimagining of Beauty Culture," Katherine Howell, University of Mississippi

8. 8. "Welty's Radical Feminism: Personal and Global Violence in "At the Landing,'" Allison M. Nick, University of Mississippi

9. 9. "Welty's Radical Scopic Regimes," Annette Trefzer, University of Mississippi

In addition, EWS had planned, for the general SSSL audience, to reprise our staged reading of Welty's "Moon...