One Writer's Beginnings

Welty’s second section, “Learning to See,” turns from the auditory world of childhood to the visual education she gained through travel, landscape, and family. Where Part 1 emphasized the centrality of listening, Part 2 reveals that writing depends just as much on looking, on developing a sharp eye for detail, and on distinguishing what matters in a scene. Welty frames this process through a family trip across the United States to visit her parents’ families in West Virginia and Ohio. In recounting her journey, she draws attention to the way sight forms boundaries, sparks memory, and builds the observational habits that would shape her craft as a writer.

The trip itself becomes a kind of training ground for Attention as Ethical Practice. Each member of the family inhabits the journey differently: Her father focuses intently on driving, her mother studies the surroundings, her brother Edward entertains himself with a harmonica, and the baby sleeps. Eudora, however, describes herself as transfixed by the passing landscape, staring out the window as the world slipped by at 25 miles per hour. This portrait of the young Welty reveals the ethical dimension of attention. Welty notices the boundaries between towns and countryside, the differences in terrain as they travel from the South to the North, and the peculiarities of each place. For her, looking is an act of respect, a way of granting reality to what might otherwise be blurred or ignored.

Her parents modeled complementary versions of attention. Her father’s absorption in driving speaks to a disciplined focus, while her mother’s cheerful scrutiny of the landscape shows that observation can be both joyful and purposeful. These examples emphasize that attentiveness takes many forms and that its value lies in consistency, not uniformity. Welty frames the road trip as an allegory for how a writer must learn to see: not only with their own eyes but with sensitivity to the perspectives of others.

These childhood trips underscore the importance of Memory and Childhood as Creative Resources. Welty makes clear that the impressions gathered on the trip did not fade but continued to shape her long after the journey ended. She recalls how the experience of moving across state lines gave her a sense of boundaries—of beginnings and endings. She writes that “Crossing a river, crossing a country line, crossing a state line—especially crossing the line you couldn’t see but knew was there, between the South and the North” (59) gave her the ability to distinguish one place from another, to sense difference and change—a central function of memory. Her careful noticing of details—the polished spoons at her grandparents’ house, the smell of bread baking—demonstrates how sensory impressions become fixed in memory. These memories, in turn, provide the material a writer later transforms into narrative. By describing the family trip in such vivid terms, Welty demonstrates her conviction that childhood observations persist as a creative reservoir, available to the artist who remembers them with care.

Her visits to her parents’ families highlight how memory intertwines with history and inheritance. At her mother’s family home, Welty was surrounded by noise, laughter, and eccentricity. She learned about the struggles of her maternal grandfather, a lawyer whose life was clouded by alcoholism, and she heard stories of relatives struck down by mysterious or sudden deaths, such as a family member killed by lightning. These family stories blend fact, myth, and memory, giving her a sense of the strange contingencies of life. At the same time, she discovered her mother’s determination to break from limitation. In a family that did not encourage girls to read, her mother struck bargains to secure books, even exchanging a haircut for a set of Dickens volumes. Such memories, preserved in Welty’s mind, reveal how resourcefulness and independence were modeled for her, teaching her that reading and learning were acts of defiance as well as growth.

By contrast, the trip to her father’s family in Ohio exposed her to a household defined by silence and restraint. His parents focused almost entirely on agricultural work, leaving little room for storytelling or play. Yet, Welty does not present this as deprivation. Instead, she recalls how she observed the smallest details of the environment—the polished silverware, the bread in the oven—precisely because conversation was sparse. This memory demonstrates how seeing can compensate for the absence of sound. In a place where voices were quiet, objects and textures became eloquent. Such recollections confirm Welty’s belief that every environment offers material for the imagination, if one pays attention.

This dual exposure—to her mother’s lively, story-filled family and to her father’s silent, work-centered household—also contributes to Welty’s thematic interest in The Development of an Author’s Voice. Voice, in Welty’s account, arises not only from what one hears but from how one interprets and integrates different influences. Her mother’s family gave her a sense of exuberance, of how stories circulate in community, and of the colorful possibilities of human character. Her father’s family, by contrast, showed her the quiet dignity of work and the eloquence of detail. In reliving her memories of both households, Welty demonstrates that voice is not a single inheritance but a synthesis of contrasts. It emerges when the writer recognizes the distinct textures of different environments and learns to articulate them.

 “Learning to See” provides both a record of a childhood trip and a meditation on how perception becomes art that reinforces Welty’s key themes. Welty’s insistence on noticing each boundary and distinction, treating every scene as worthy of recognition, underscores her commitment to attention as ethical practice. The sensory details she recalls decades later, proof that the impressions of youth endure as the raw material of storytelling, reinforce memory and childhood as creative resources. The development of an author’s voice takes shape in the interplay between noisy and silent households, between the exuberance of one set of grandparents and the restraint of the other. Together, these experiences formed the foundation of Welty’s style, a voice capable of honoring both liveliness and quiet, both myth and detail.

In tracing her childhood journey, Welty demonstrates that learning to see is not a passive activity but a disciplined practice, one that requires respect for what is observed, trust in the durability of memory, and the patience to allow voice to emerge. The landscapes and households of her early years may have seemed ordinary at the time, but in recollection, they become the beginnings of art. From her perspective, seeing is not simply perceiving—it is the act of granting the world its due, of transforming observation into memory and memory into voice.