College of Charleston English Professor Julia Eichelberger got more than she bargained for – way more – in publishing Tell About Night Flowers, Eudora Welty’s letters on gardening. For starters, Eichelberger vastly underestimated how prolific a letter writer Welty was. Then, Eichelberger discovered how much Welty’s letters about gardening revealed about her friendships and her art. And, ultimately, Eichelberger was represented by the same literary agents that represented Welty – Russell & Volkening.
“I had no idea how much I would learn from writing this book,” Eichelberger explains. “It was fascinating to see how the topic of gardening became a kind of coded language for Welty, expressing her affection for her friends and also her hopes and anxieties for the fiction she was creating at the time. Welty believed that a gardener should try to cultivate and cherish her plants, but had to allow them to become whatever they were going to be, and this is how her written works evolved.”
Listen to an interview with Eichelberger on Mississippi Public Radio.
Eichelberger selected and annotated these previously unpublished letters by Eudora Welty at the urging of Welty’s biographer, Suzanne Marrs. The book was published in May 2013 by University Press of Mississippi. Eichelberger has spent the past 12 years developing considerable expertise on Welty, presenting conference papers and publishing articles alongside Marrs and other experts in Southern literature. She says, “This book is special because so much of it is by Welty. That alone has made this an incredible opportunity for me as a Welty scholar.”
“As I studied her letters from the 1940s, each one delightful in itself, I began to see that they formed a story of their own, a story Welty did not write but that I wanted to tell through her letters. It’s a story of how she grew into a more and more daring artist, and a story of how she cultivated her own inner life, often at home in Mississippi, but ending the decade by leaving her Mississippi garden and venturing into the wider world. As she wrote in her memoir, ‘All serious daring starts from within.’ I believe this is borne out in these letters as in the rest of her art.”
It was in college that Eichelberger first became interested in Welty’s work. Ironic, that she now teaches Welty in introductory literature classes, American literature surveys, courses on Southern literature, and even some all-Welty classes.
She was also able to collaborate with five College of Charleston students on this project: two undergraduates (Crystal Frost and Rachel Reinke) and three graduate students (Maggie McMenamin, Will Murray, and Dana Woodcock).
Eichelberger has published nine articles and books on Eudora Welty since 2008 and made 17 conference presentations. Her articles have appeared in the Eudora Welty Newsletter, the Eudora Welty Review, The Southern Quarterly, and Southern Literary Journal, among others. She is also the author of Prophets of Recognition: Ideology and the Individual in Novels by Ellison, Morrison, Bellow, and Welty. LSU Press, 1999.
For more information, contact Eichelberger at eichelbergerj@cofc.edu.
