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An aged African American woman walks miles through woods, over hills, and across log bridges to obtain medicine for her grandson. A small-town postmistress proclaims that she is not "one-sided. Bigger on one side than the other." A tenant-farming husband and wife burn their few bits of furniture in an effort to stay warm. A Civil Rights leader is assassinated as he comes home on a hot summer night. A transplanted Mississippi woman, returning home to face the loss of her father, is greeted by her bridesmaids, still an intact group after twenty years. These are some of the characters and events that come alive in Eudora Welty's fiction. What prompted Welty to create them? Did they emerge from her experiences in Jackson, Mississippi, or from her imagination or from both? How does our knowledge of a writer's sources affect our interpretation of stories? These are questions that students might well ask, that teachers would love to address in their classrooms, and that we will make the focus of our weeklong workshop, which will be offered twice.
At the Welty House, a National Historic Landmark and Eudora Welty's home for more than seventy-five years, we will have the opportunity to see the furniture, the art work, the books, the photographs which surrounded Welty as she wrote, and we will have the opportunity to linger in the garden she so often described in her fiction. At the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, we will study key items in an extensive collection of Welty manuscripts and correspondence, a collection which illuminates her imaginative process. And in the city of Jackson, we will see museums devoted to Mississippi's past from the Depression-era to the Civil Rights Movement and as a result will be better able to place Welty stories in their historical contexts. Indeed, throughout the workshop, we will examine the ways Welty transformed actual places and events into a fiction that enriches understanding of both history and creativity.
Suzanne Marrs, Welty's biographer and Welty Foundation Scholar-in-Residence at Millsaps College, will direct the workshops. Historians and other literary critics will join her for the workshop sessions. They include Peggy Prenshaw, Minrose Gwin, Alferdteen Harrison, Michael Kreyling, Leslie McLemore, Rebecca Mark, Pearl McHaney, Noel Polk, Harriet Pollack, and Charles Sallis. Four experienced high school teachers are also on staff and will lead discussions of relevant classroom strategies.
The eligibility requirements and application instructions are explained in the NEH Guidelines . Applicants must use the online cover sheet as part of a complete application. The complete applications must be mailed in triplicate to:
Wanda Manor
Office of Continuing Education
Millsaps College 1701 N. State Street
Jackson, MS 39210
Applications must be postmarked by March 17, 2008. Announcements of awards will be made on April 16, 2008.
For answers to questions or more more information, contact Wanda Manor manorwl@millsaps.edu. |
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