Trust the Voice

The first part of Eudora Welty's wonderful memoir, One Writer's Beginnings (1984), is appropriately titled "Listening." (Subsequent sections are called "Learning to See" and "Finding a Voice.") Revisiting her childhood, Welty recalls the voices of her parents and teachers—and of Mrs. Calloway, the "dragon-eyed" librarian in Jackson, Mississippi. Though "SILENCE in big black letters was on signs tacked up everywhere," Mrs. Calloway's "every word could be heard all over the Library."

The sounds of words—especially words on a page—formed the richest part of what Welty calls her "sensory education":

Ever since I was first read to, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn't hear. As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me. It isn't my mother's voice, or the voice of any person I can identify, certainly not my own. It is human, but inward, and it is inwardly that I listen to it. It is to me the voice of the story or the poem itself. The cadence, whatever it is that asks you to believe, the feeling that resides in the printed word, reaches me through the reader-voice. I have supposed, but never found out, that this is the case with all readers--to read as listeners--and with all writers, to write as listeners. It may be part of the desire to write. The sound of what falls on the page begin the process of testing it for truth, for me. Whether I am right to trust so far I don't know. By now I don't know whether I could do either one, reading or writing, without the other.

My own words, when I am at work on a story, I hear too as they go, in the same voice that I hear when I read in books. When I write and the sound of it comes back to my ears, then I act to make my changes. I have always trusted this voice.

In Reading Aloud, we consider the value of listening to our words when we write: listening as a way of revising our prose until the words "sound right" and listening as a way of discovering a sure and distinctive voice.

A Scrapbook of Styles:

• Eudora Welty's Sketch of Miss Duling
• Descriptive Details in Stegner's "Town Dump"
• Ritual in Maya Angelou's "Caged Bird"

Image: One Writer's Beginnings, by Eudora Welty (1984). Reprinted by Harvard University Press, 1998.