Users' Guide: A Word from the Editors

In an essay titled " 'The Fictional Eye': Eudora Welty's Retranslation of the South," Danile Pitavy-Souques speaks about Eudora Welty as a curious traveler whose desires to venture away from her home in Jackson, "invariably allowed her to return with an enlarged experience of otherness" (58).This otherness, Pitavy-Souques contends, imbued Welty's "visionary power" as she "stored forms and patterns perceived in a constantly renewed and enlarged human, literary, and artistic experience" that manifested as "epiphanies" in her writing (58).It is rather apropos to have come across this quote upon our own recent returns from a collective sojourn to Welty's hometown of Jackson, MS, having attended the April 2025 International Eudora Welty Conference together.We know Welty's work and the critical opus that surrounds it well.However, as two scholars who never had the privilege of meeting Welty ourselves, becoming the travelers into her hometown, her beloved Millsaps, and even into her home and garden at 1119 Pinehurst Street where we toasted her 116th birthday enlarged our own experience of the otherness, of the many Eudoras beyond the page.She was a beloved daughter, sister, and aunt, a gracious host, a generous teacher, a cherished member of many diverse communities, and a loyal companion who always toasted her absent friends.The unique convergence of coming to know Eudora more fully while contemplating the import of her work in twenty-first century contexts gave more clarity to the road ahead: of reconsidering and retranslating Welty's visionary work for generations of readers to come.That road crystalized when we became the wanderers, playing the roles of Cassie Morrison and Virgie Advocate, as we inhabited the literal and metaphorical stage of Welty's imaginary in a scholars' tribute to "The Wanderers," the culminating story of The Golden Apples.Imbibing Welty's words, but in an adaptation that envisioned the story anew for conference ---.