Envying Eudora Welty in the age of AI
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I was 35 before I read Eudora Welty. On a summer evening in 2025, I devoured Welty’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work The Optimist’s Daughter, staying up far too late on a weeknight to do so.
I’d chosen the book after noticing its popularity among the students I worked with around that time. While I was on staff there, it was easily the most checked-out classic in my hometown’s high school library. Initially, I assumed the students chose The Optimist’s Daughter for its relative brevity. After reading the work myself, however, I have to assume at least some of those students appreciated The Optimist’s Daughter for more than its approachable page count. Welty’s description of a balmy New Orleans night gives as much as her description of a frigid West Virginia night haunts.
Since that evening in 2025, I’ve felt a growing kinship with — and at times, an envy of — Eudora Welty. As a nearly lifelong resident of the Lower Mississippi Delta Region with deep roots in the American South and the Lower Midwest, I also find myself regularly writing about place. Having traveled abroad, and having lived briefly in the Northeastern United States and the American West before returning to my home region, I also know: “One place understood helps us understand all places better.”
It isn’t terribly surprising to me that I didn’t read Eudora Welty in high school. Back then, if I wasn’t reading Edgar Allen Poe or Charlotte Brontë, I was, regrettably, reading Twilight. Why I wasn’t tasked with reading or analyzing any of Welty’s award-winning work in my four years of undergraduate English classes, including one class devoted entirely to Southern Literature, however, baffles me.
In my debut chapbook, I write that I wish I’d learned about Josephine Baker when I was learning about Mark Twain. Since “discovering” Welty, I also wish I’d learned about her when I was learning about Twain.
Welty never married or had children at a time when that was even more atypical of women than it is now, and I’m confident I would have benefited from carrying that knowledge with me as a girl and as a young woman. I’ve managed to avoid getting married and giving birth, but rejecting the roles of wife and biological mother wasn’t presented to me as an option — much less an acceptable scenario — in childhood or beyond until I found feminism. Growing up, all the women I knew were married, and most of them had biological children. I wish I’d had Welty as an example for happiness and success outside of “traditional” womanhood when I was figuring out what I wanted my own womanhood to look like.
Lately — and this is where my Welty envy rears its curly head — part of me also wishes I could enjoy the clarity and certainty I can only assume came with writing life when print consistently ruled. Welty was born in 1909 and died in 2001; I don’t doubt she witnessed changes in publishing that must have felt monumental to her — and to other writers at the time — but as a millennial writer, it feels like the proverbial floor is forever shifting under my feet.
When I was deciding what I wanted to be when I grew up, magazines and newspapers were everywhere. I’d spend hours in the magazine aisle of my local Walmart, soaking up all the worldly information I couldn’t access at home. As a teenager, I worked in a bookstore that’s now a 24-hour gym. When I declared my college major in the mid-2000s, print was still prominent. I fantasized about writing for the same magazines and newspapers I’d read in Walmart as a kid — the same magazines and newspapers I’d sold to customers at my bookstore job. By the time I graduated college in the early 2010s, some of the best writing was being published online. I worked hard to land hundreds of bylines at popular websites of the era, some of which are now defunct. In the 2020s, the lasting economic devastation of Covid-19, the growing preference for video content over text-based content, and the release of products like ChatGPT, seem to have irrevocably changed the world for writers.
I occasionally picture writing full-time for pay again, but I’m content to be a writer with a day job. I’m proud of my debut chapbook, and I’m forever thankful to Etchings Press for choosing to publish it. I’m thrilled when my work finds a home in a literary journal, even when that literary journal pays in publication and gratitude only. I enjoy publishing my writing on my website and sharing it with my friends and family. Although I certainly wouldn’t turn one down, I don’t need a Pulitzer Prize. I appreciate the writing successes I’ve achieved.
I just wish the future of writing, the future of writers, didn’t feel so murky to me. I wish I had the clarity, the certainty, I can only imagine Welty and her peers might have enjoyed. I wish I knew what was coming — if I should focus my energy on getting published in print, getting published online, publishing with an agent or a press, self-publishing, or continuing to pursue all forms of publication possible.
Welty once said: “The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.” It’s a sentiment I intend to carry with me, whatever the future holds for this craft I love and for those who practice it.
