An Interview with Eudora Welty

YATES: What I have come to you for, besides the pleasure of getting to see you, is to talk with you about your Mississippi. I know that is an essential category for you as you work in fiction. Probably as much or more than any other writer working today, the place where you are, the horizon, the location, the land, and the place that you give us fictionally is the same. Is the place that you invent in your mind grounded in Mississippi, nourished by Mississippi? WELTY: Yes, it is. But I feel it really comes from the fact that I am a fiction writer and that wherever I happened to be I would do the same thing. That is, I would take whatever place I was in to inform me where I am writing, to tell me what my stage is. . . . And what is properly, correctly there, which has a reason for being there. And how the surrounding life in the world there shapes and influences the characters. And I make it a sort of interplay. But I think it didn't start out because of Mississippi, but because of my wish to write. I don't want to claim that I am a spokesman for the state . . . itself. It's just that it happened that I was born here. And I love it. And it has taught me a great deal. But it is for the selfish reason that I realize that I needed that to write my stories within to make them reflect life as I saw it

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