A Nugget from One Writer’s Beginnings - Barbara Jean Hicks

from the bookshelf of
Barbara Jean Hicks

The marvelous writing memoir of southern novelist and short story author Eudora Welty (1909-2001), published in 1984 by Harvard University Press, is a treasure trove for a working writer.

One Writer’s Beginnings is based on a set of lectures Welty delivered at Harvard in 1983, ten years after winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel The Optimist’s Daughter. Here’s one passage I especially resonated with:

“Ever since I was first read to, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn’t hear. As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me. It isn’t my mother’s voice, or the voice of any person I can identify, certainly not my own. It is human, but inward, and it is inwardly that I listen to it. It is to me the voice of the story or the poem itself. The cadence, whatever it is that asks you to believe, the feeling that resides in the printed word, reaches me through the reader-voice. I have supposed, but never found out, that this is the case with all readers—to read as listeners—and with all writers, to write as listeners. It may be part of the desire to write. The sound of what falls on the page begins the process of testing it for truth, for me. Whether I am right to trust so far I don’t know. By now I don’t know whether I could do either one, reading or writing, without the other.

“My own words, when I am at work on a story, I hear too as they go, in the same voice that I hear when I read in books. When I write and the sound of it comes back to my ears, then I act to make my changes. I have always trusted this voice.”

TO THINK ABOUT:

1) Choose two poems or two passages from different stories by the same author. Read them silently and then aloud. Do you read them differently in response to the distinct voice of each piece? Does Welty’s experience as a reader make sense to you?

2) Choose two of your own poems or two passages from different stories you have written. Read them silently and then aloud. How are they alike (aspects of your author’s voice) and how are they different (aspects of the distinct voice of the piece itself)?

3) Is there a particular book you've had this experience with--hearing it aloud even as you read silently, as if someone is narrating the story in your head? Share with us!