Eudora Welty

Anything Eudora Welty wrote she wrote from her home in Jackson, Mississippi. She didn’t have to raft the Grand Canyon to write ‘Why I Live at the P.O.’ and ‘The Key.’ She didn’t trip shrooms in the desert or amble through Europe or sleep with one-hundred beautiful people before conjuring the lines, ‘Yet in her stillness and pleasure she seemed to be hiding,’ and ‘Rare and wavering, some possibility stood timidly like a stranger between them,’ and your favorite sentence, ‘When she was still, there was a passivity about her, or a deception of passivity, that was not really passive at all. There was something in her that never stopped.’

Maybe she would have if traipsing had been her life, but she knew what her life was and what it was not and she wrote from the place that it was. The creative task wasn’t where she could go in the world, but where she could go within. So she stayed put. Not because she was stuck, but because everything she needed was already there.