After meeting a friend for lunch last weekend, I visited Second Story Books. It’s a used and rare bookstore in Dupont Circle
that I like to check out when I’m in the area.
About two years ago, I decided to collect books written by or about
James Baldwin. I had
a few already and thought I could build a collection. While at Second Story Books, I was able to
pick up my 11th Baldwin book, Notes
of a Native Son.
While perusing the aisles, I discovered a lovely little book by Eudora
Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings. Published in 1983, the memoir was developed
from lectures Welty gave at Harvard University. Welty won the Pulitzer Prize
for the Optimist’s Daughter. After I purchased the $3 book,
it occurred to me that I was also building a collection of books about writing
and publishing.
I love the style of the book and decided to include an
excerpt from the book from the chapter on Listening. I read this passage over many times, as it
resonated with my experience as a reader and as a writer.
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.
Eudora Welty
One Writer's Beginnings
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| Goodbye Summer Miami 2009 |
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