dayton is not in ohio

Since school has ended I’ve not generated many art ideas, and this is a sure sign that I need to refuel. Refueling always involves looking at a lot of art and reading great fiction.

About eight years ago I bought an old paperback copy of Eudora Welty’s A Curtain of Green from a church rummage sale in Jackson, Mississippi for 25 cents. I started to read it, then stopped, and it’s been on my book shelf ever since. A native of Jackson, Welty won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Optimists Daughter, but is best known for her short stories, of which A Curtain of Green was her first collection, published in 1941. She also happened to live across the street from Belhaven College, my alma mater. I remember that I could see her house from where I sat in my freshman English class back in the fall of 1993.

So recently I’ve decided that I’ll read Welty this summer. I’ve been away from the south for a long time, and I think it would do me good to reconnect through the words of one of the many great Mississippi authors. This time around, though, I decided to begin the book with care, and peruse each page, which I had never done. This is what I discovered:

I’m not George, but that’s Eudora, and I appreciate him selling me his book for a quarter