Welty Symposium Recap

It is always nice to get past the Eudora Welty Writers’ Symposium at Mississippi University for Women and be able to look back at the fond memories of the weekend. We had lovely weather, as usual for this time of year (though the rain set in Saturday night once everyone was gone), and we had even better company.

The readings were fabulous, starting with Ashley M. Jones, who took us through her four collections. Ashley is always a delight to host, and she focused on poems about family and heritage in connection with our theme, Secrets and Revelations: A Dark Thread Running Through My Story. In her family’s case, that dark thread has more to do with the history they were part of than any personal dark secrets. Here you see Ashley and me at the book signing table after her keynote. Thanks go my former student Magnolia (Jane) Dill, for offering to take the photograph.

Friday morning, we heard from Dr. drea brown, the Welty Prize Winner, whose book Conjuring the Haint looks at haunting in the poetics of Black women, a fitting topic after the previous evening’s reading. Ashley Jones isn’t considered in brown’s book, but who knows, after the symposium maybe they will become better acquainted and brown will consider Jone’s work in another context.

I won’t go through the whole list of writers, but you can watch any of the sessions you missed on our playlist at YouTube. We had a good crowd for each session, and there were some great conversations in the Q&A. Here you see one of our MFA students asking a question of Robert Busby, author of Bodock. It was great to hear fellow poets Kathleen Driskell and Olivia Clare Friedman on Friday, along with Carrie R. Moore, Rickey Fayne, and Addie E. Citchens.

My session was Saturday morning, and I kicked it off at 9:30 reading poems from Tree Fall with Birdsong. I had a good time reading, and I hope the audience enjoyed it as well. I also loved getting to know debut nonfication writer Jordan LaHaye Fontenot through her work, Home of the Happy, as well as being introduced to fellow poet (who is now at Mississippi State) Samyak Shertok through No Rhododendoron and hearing Lauren Rhoades read from her memoir Split the Baby.

Now that the symposium is over, I’m continuing my work on the second edition of A Writer’s Craft. This week’s chapter is the one on poetry, and though that is fun and familiar ground to tread on, I also have so much I want to say and I want it to be just right, so I have plenty of work to do!

And I’m not done with readings yet, either. Coming up next month, I’ll be visiting the Brandon Public Library on Nov. 4 and The Author Shoppe in Hattiesburg on Nov. 15. More on both of those readings soon.

For more about the Welty Weekend, read my follow-up post on Substack.