“We’ve even had people calling in suggesting that it’s radiation from outer space.” “About the only thing that hasn’t been tested for is second-hand cigarette smoke,” an official told The New York Times in 1998. It didn’t seem to be anything known to man. Scientists around the country were detailed to the case, but they kept coming up empty: It wasn’t botulism. But as the toll rose, to more than 70 eagles in total, the mass die-off of America’s national bird in the president’s home state took on outsize symbolic importance. “We weren’t in the political limelight that often,” says Carol Meteyer, who was then a pathologist for the National Wildlife Health Center, a usually obscure federal agency that investigates animal deaths. Even on solid ground, they stumbled around as if drunk. The stately birds were suddenly flying straight into cliff faces. But what really puzzled scientists was how the eagles acted before they died. Twenty-nine were found dead at a man-made reservoir called DeGray Lake, before deaths spread to two other lakes. It was 1996, Bill Clinton was president, and endangered bald eagles were dying in his home state of Arkansas. It’s a short story about an elderly African-American woman who travels down a country road to retrieve medicine for her grandson. To quote Welty again: “Sometimes spontaneity is the most sparkling kind of beauty.” She put those ideas into practice in more than a dozen stories for The Atlantic, but because of copyright, only one of them is digitized thus far: “ A Worn Path,” from our February 1941 issue.
It often comes from carefulness, lack of confusion, elimination of waste-and yes, those are the rules.”īut don’t follow the rules too closely. “Beauty comes from form, from development of idea, from after-effect.“The great stories of the world are the ones that seem new to their readers on and on, always new because they keep their power of revealing something.”.“Every good story has mystery-not the puzzle kind, but the mystery of allurement.”.
The complete essay hasn’t been digitized, but you can read an excerpt here. I haven’t read much of Welty’s writing yet, but based on her essay “The Reading and Writing of Short Stories”-published in the February and March 1949 issues of The Atlantic-I have a feeling I should. True engagement requires a durable sympathy with the world. … What Welty seems to say, without quite saying so, is that the best pictures and stories cannot simply reduce the creatures within their spell to specimens. … She appears to see the people in her pictures as objects of affection, not abstract political points. Her three avocations-gardening, current events, and photography-were, like her writing, deeply informed by a desire to secure fragile moments as objects of art. Humanities magazine has a compelling sketch of her work: AP Welty was the author of nearly 20 books, a skilled photographer, and an avid gardener. The Pulitzer-winning Southern writer, a master of the short story, would have been 107 years old today.